Scientology strategy makes L. Ron Hubbard books available everywhere

By Noelle Skodzinski

Insights at a Glance

… from Blake Silber, President, Bridge Publications

What is your best management tactic? “As Bridge Publications is the publisher of L. Ron Hubbard’s non-fiction works, Bridge uses Mr. Hubbard’s administrative technology extensively. This covers many subjects, and one that he stresses is the training and establishing of personnel. Caring for and constantly building up and increasing the effectiveness and skill of one’s personnel is key.”

What is your biggest challenge as president? “Expanding fast enough to keep up with the constantly increasing demand for Mr. Hubbard’s works.”

What are you most focused on right now? “Distributing books into areas where they have never been available before—countries like Malaysia and Korea, where prior to 2009, most of L. Ron Hubbard’s books were not yet translated into the native tongue.”

In what are you investing most heavily? “We recently completed a project to automate every one of our labor-intensive manufacturing processes. Doing this made us more efficient and allowed our personnel to move to higher-skilled processes, with custom machines now doing these repetitive processes.”

What is Bridge Publications’ biggest strength? “Two things: the ever-increasing interest in L. Ron Hubbard’s books, and the drive and passion of the employees to produce and promote these books as far and wide as possible to help others as [they] have been helped.”

Scientology—for many, it may conjure up thoughts of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, Kirstie Alley or Lisa Marie Presley, the Church of Scientology, some controversial discussions and media headlines, or the man behind the religion,  L. Ron Hubbard. But for very few does it elicit images of state-of-the-art digital printing machines, conveyer belts that criss-cross a 276,000-square-foot building, a stash of 35,000 miles of paper, or an inventory of millions of L. Ron Hubbard books awaiting shipping to any of a number of countries around the world. Perhaps now it will.

The publishing arm of L. Ron Hubbard's collection of writings and lectures, Bridge Publications, is, according to the company, the world's largest, all-digital print-on-demand publishing house. The Los Angeles-based company has the capacity to bind some 6,000 books every hour, totaling more than 1 million per week. It can manufacture approximately 250,000 transcripts each day, and CDs of the Scientology founder's lectures at a rate of 1 million each week. And all this from inside its headquarters, spanning one city block on Olympic Boulevard.

The company has focused on building custom solutions that maximize automation with state-of-the art digital printing and binding machines. It controls production from printing to binding to order fulfillment and distribution—and virtually every component of the line, according to the company, is "all digital" and automated, right down to a computer that tracks inventory. As orders are filled, reprints are automatically triggered so Hubbard's book titles, transcripts and audio CDs are never out of stock.

Here, Blake Silber, Bridge Publications' president—who took the helm in 2009—shares his insights into the company's history, revenue picture, marketing strategies and much more.

Book Business: How much of your revenue is from print books?

Blake Silber: … Income from books has averaged 33 percent of our total income, while Audio Visual products (including CDs and DVDs) constitute 67 percent.

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