Thomas Nelson (publisher)

Thomas Nelson (publisher)

Parent company	HarperCollins
Founded	1798 1854 (US)
Founder	Thomas Nelson
Country of origin	United States
Headquarters location	Nashville, Tennessee
Key people	Mark Schoenwald, President & CEO Stuart Bitting, EVP & CFO Carol Nygren, EVP & Managing Director, Live Event Management, Inc. Tom Knight, Senior Vice President, Sales
Publication types	Bibles, books, curriculum, digital content
Revenue	$237,8 million (2005)
Number of employees	Approximately 450
Official website	www.thomasnelson.com

Thomas Nelson is a publishing firm that began in Scotland in 1798 as the namesake of its founder. Its former United States division is currently the sixth largest American trade publisher and the world's largest Christian publisher. It is a subsidiary of HarperCollins, the publishing unit of News Corporation.

Their most successful title to date is Heaven Is for Real, which became their first title to sell more than one million ebooks.

In Canada, the Nelson imprint is used for educational publishing by Cengage Learning. In the United Kingdom, it was a mainstream publisher until the late 20th Century and is now part of another educational imprint, Nelson Thornes.

British history

Thomas Nelson founded the company that bears his name in Edinburgh in 1798, originally as a second-hand religious bookshop but soon diversifying into publishing reprints of Puritan writers. The firm went on to become a publisher of new books, and as the nineteenth century progressed it produced an increasingly wide range of non-religious materials; by 1881 religion accounted for less than 6% of the firm's output.

Their Hope Park Works in Edinburgh burned down in 1878 and the city helped them greatly in the rebuilding project. They funded the stone pillars on the Meadows for the Edinburgh International Exhibition in 1886 in appreciation (designed by Sir James Gowans).

By the early twentieth century, Thomas Nelson had become a secular concern in the United Kingdom. Until 1968, according to the curators of a Senate House Library exhibition, it "specialised in producing popular literature, children's books, Bibles, religious works and educational texts." It was the first publisher for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Thomson owned the company from 1960 until 2000. That year it was acquired by Wolters Kluwer, who merged Nelson with its existing publishing arm, Stanley Thornes, to form Nelson Thornes.

Original American history

The American branch of Thomas Nelson was set up in 1854 in New York, and by the 1870s it was one of the city's most important firms.^{[citation needed]} It held the copyright for the American Standard Version of the Bible from 1901 until 1928, when it transferred the copyright to the International Council of Religious Education. In the 1930s, the company made a deal with this Council (which later became part of the National Council of Churches) to publish the Revised Standard Version. Following an ownership change in 1960, which the firm was sold to The Thomson Organization, changes happened, and in 1962 the company's failure to meet demand for this Bible translation led to the National Council of Churches granting other publishers licenses for the work, leading to a dramatic fall in revenue.

Current United States company

In 1950, 19-year old Sam Moore came to Columbia, South Carolina, with an intent to pursue medical training. To pay his way through college at the University of South Carolina, and later Columbia Bible College, Moore began to sell Bibles door-to-door. The Lebanese immigrant had a strong sense of American patriotism and free enterprise and used it to establish the National Book Company in 1958, and in 1961, established Royal Publishers, and sold stock in the firm a year later, with notable shareholders including Morrow Coffey Graham, mother of noted evangelist Billy Graham.

Royal Publishers' success for five years, more than doubling sales every year, and resulted in the Thomson Organization asking if he would take control of Nelson's North American operations. Instead, Moore surprised the firm by offering to purchase the company, and Moore took over on March 7, 1969, preferring to keep the company's name and logo. In Canada, the brand continues as Thomson Nelson, an educational imprint. In the 1960s, Thomas Nelson moved its headquarters from New York to Camden, New Jersey. It moved again to Nashville, Tennessee in the 1970s. From 1979 to 1982, Nelson developed the New King James Bible (also known as the Revised Authorized Version) and under Moore began diversifying the company with a gift division.

In 1992, Thomas Nelson Inc. began its modern advancement. Nelson purchased the Word music and books brand from Capital Cities/ABC. In 1997, the company split the two, spinning off the record label and printed music division, one of the largest church music companies, to Gaylord Entertainment. That led to a lawsuit by Gaylord in 2001 over the Word name, and was settled when Nelson renamed their book division the W Publishing Group. That year also led to a corporate expansion by the purchase of the Cool Springs and Rutledge Hill Press labels.

In 2003, World Bible Publishers was acquired by Nelson, and also the fiction label WestBow Press made its debut (all books were later consolidated under the Nelson brand and WestBow Press was resurrected in 2009 to offer self-publishing services to aspiring authors). Also, an imprint for internet news source WorldNetDaily made its debut that year. The agreement dissolved, however, after 2004, and the former WND brand is now under the Nelson Current brand, including its authors.

Thomas Nelson, now based in Nashville, publishes leading Christian authors, including Billy Graham, Max Lucado, John Eldredge, John Maxwell, Charles Stanley, Michael A. O'Donnell, Ted Dekker, John Townsend, and Dave Stone. Thomas Nelson Inc. in 2000 began marketing the Women of Faith conference, a concept devised by author Stephen Arterburn in 1995, after attending a church conference in Atlanta. Today, the Women of Faith conference is one of the best-known women's events around North America, attracting over 400,000 women annually. In 2005, Thomas Nelson launched the Revolve teen conferences, built on the Women of Faith model. Michael S. Hyatt, a twenty-five year veteran of the publishing industry, became President and CEO of the company on August 18, 2005, succeeding Sam Moore who served as the company's CEO for nearly 47 years.

In February 2006 it was announced that private equity firm InterMedia Partners, in conjunction with some other investors, had agreed to buy Thomas Nelson for $473 million. The transaction closed on June 12, 2006. The company operated as a private company. In 2010, a group led by Kohlberg & Company bought a majority share of the company. In 2011, News Corporation subsidiary HarperCollins announced they had acquired Thomas Nelson. The acquisition closed in July 2012.

Canadian history

When Thomson sold Thomas Nelson UK, it kept the Canadian operations of the publisher as part of the company's education division. Thomson Education was spun off as Cengage Learning in the United States and Canada in 2007. The Nelson name lives on through the Canadian company Nelson Education Ltd., an educational publisher.

See also

• The Lost Squire of Inglewood
• Zondervan

Bibliography

• Cumberland snaps up conservative-leaning series from Nelson in The Tennessean, 2004-10-19
• Private equity firm buying Thomas Nelson in Nashville Business Journal, 2006-02-21
• Dempster, John A. H., "Thomas Nelson and Sons in the Late Nineteenth Century: A Study in Motivation, Part One", in Publishing History, 13, 1983, pp. 41–87; "Part Two" in Publishing History, 14, 1983, pp. 5–63.
• Moore, Sam, American By Choice: The Remarkable Fulfilment of an Immigrant’s Dreams, Nashville: Nelson, 1998.
• Tebbel, John, A History of Book Publishing in the United States, New York and London: Bowker, four volumes, 1972–1981.

External links

• www.thomasnelson.com — Thomas Nelson (USA)
• www.westbowpress.com — WestBow Press (self-publishing services)
• www.michaelhyatt.com — Michael Hyatt's Blog
• www.nelson.com — Nelson Education (Canada)
• www.nelsonthornes.com — Nelson Thornes (UK)