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<\/center><\/p>\nRamesvara das: In 1974 we were faced with a great dilemma. Our most important single book for distribution was the Bhagavad-gita As It Is. The rights had been given to Macmillan in 1969 and 1970 before Prabhupada even dreamed of his own Society distributing books in large quantities. It had appeared in those days that the only method or avenue for book distribution was through commercial channels, the stores and so on. And therefore Prabhupada signed the rights away to a commercial publisher, the Macmillan Company. By 1974 the BBT was projecting a doubling of book distribution from the previous year. We wanted badly to distribute the Bhagavad-gitas but due to the inflation in the society, the Macmillan Company raised their price accordingly. Now as an active publisher we could under\u00adstand that we were being cheated. We knew the price of paper, we knew the price of printing. Macmillan was charging two or three times as much for each copy as we could have paid if we were ordering the book directly ourselves. How to break the contract? We were bewildered. We could no longer afford to dis\u00adtribute the Bhagavad-gita. We presented the matter to Prabhupada in 1974 and as usual Prabhupada had the answer. He always had the answer, he always appeared to have an answer to everything. He was to us a transcendental genius who knew everything about everything. So Prabhupada looked back into his transcendental memory and remembered a clause in the contract which allowed for the rights to be withdrawn from Macmillan and the contract to be terminated if the book had gone out of print. We did not have the sophistication at that time to read a legal contract and draw out the secret how to terminate the agreement with Macmillan. Neither did we think of taking the contract to a lawyer. At that time we were just beginning to have relationships with professional legal counsel for opening up the airports. It had just begun in 1974, March. So we were very innocent when it came to matters of law. But Prabhupada remembered the contract which was written 4, 5 or even 6 years ago. I believe that first contract was dated 1968. And he remembered that if the book goes out of print, then the publisher has to immediately reprint it. But if he doesn\u2019t then the author or his agents can demand that the rights be turned over. Then the publisher would have the option to reprint it or not reprint it.<\/p>\n
If they chose not to reprint it, that would mean they could not find enough orders, enough market, and then the rights would go back to the author after a period of one or two months. So Prabhupada remembered this clause and he told us personally that \u201cYou should write letters from different centers and order all the books in their warehouse. Then after all of the books that they have in their stock are shipped, that would mean that they are out of print. Then you place a new order challenging them to reprint it. If they say they can\u2019t fill the order, then you send the copy of their letter addressed to one of your centers to BBT office and then let the BBT as the agent for the author write them a letter demanding that they either reprint the book or they release the rights.\u201d So Prabhupada developed this scheme. We carried it out, we found out that Macmillan had no longer any of the abridged editions of Bhagavad-gita in print, as we had been distributing for the last several years the unabridged. So Prabhupada said, \u201cStart with the abridged. Check them, place orders from one or two centers to see if they\u2019re out of print or not. And if they are, use their reply letters to force them to either print it again or turn the rights over to you.\u201d So we followed Prabhupada\u2019s instructions and it worked like a charm. Macmillan had no conception that ISKCON was going to be able to publish the book themselves, they didn\u2019t think that there was a market, they didn\u2019t think of forcing ISKCON to buy from them, they just released the rights. Within a matter of months we had the Bhagavad-gita back, even though it was the abridged edition. In our enthusiasm and in our expectation of the biggest book distribu\u00adtion ever we approached the Dai Nippon Company in 1974 for one last printing job which we could not yet afford in America. Dai Nippon was still willing to give very attractive credit terms. We asked Dai Nippon to print 350,000 hardbound copies of one title. It was a milestone in the history of religious publishing or the publishing of any great philosophical text in the world. Probably one of the largest orders that had ever been commissioned. Needless to say, Prabhupada when he heard about it was very very happy. The books were printed and on the basis of those books being printed on such easy credit terms the book distribution in America got another great push. Our system had been set up by Prabhupada to mark up the book 100% and distribute to the temples, let them then mark up the same book 100% and distribute to the public. If the book cost the BBT $1, we would sell it for $2. The temples would then be able to sell it for $4. Everyone would make enough profit for their overhead to be met and the balance would be used to keep the books in print. And on the BBT side the excess profit would be used by Prabhupada in purchasing land, acquiring buildings and constructing temples. That was Prabhupada\u2019s design. And he insisted on it. So by printing one title in such large quantity we were able to negotiate wonderful credit terms. And because the credit was negotiated we were able to print. And because the print was in such large quantity, the unit price became very low. And because the unit price was very low we were able to distribute it to the temples at a very low price. And so by this introduction in 1974 of mass printings, the temples were now getting a hardbound book at a ridiculously low price. And so this was another cause of the book distribution to begin to mushroom. The temples were now getting hardbound books which anyone would give a five or ten dollar donation for, 64 color plates, beautiful dust jacket, beautiful imitation leather binding and cloth, for the ridiculous price of $2. So the temples were happy and the books were going out faster than ever. The books going out faster than ever meant turn around, the BBT\u2019s coffers were being filled. So this was the pattern that was set up throughout 1974.<\/p>\n
That was an important scene. We considered that it was so far over our heads at that point to come up with a sophisticated legal solution to the Macmillan problem, so the impression we had of when Prabhupada was able to remember from something 6 years ago, the strategy how to break the contract, again it increased our faith in Prabhupada, it left us in awe of Prabhupada\u2019s genius and his perfect knowledge of all topics. Let me see if I can find a reference to. Baladeva Vidyabhusana: It seems like that\u2019s such an amazing corporate move. Ramesvara: It is. Defeating Macmillan. Macmillan was such a bureaucracy that when we wrote the letters to their sales department and then one month later we wrote the letter to their trade rights and copyrights division, they didn\u2019t actually connect, they didn\u2019t discuss even with their sales people what was going on, whether there were any orders. Macmillan was going through a change at that time. They were losing a lot of people. America was in a flux. The inflation due to the rising oil prices was creating a whole new economic flux. And Macmillan was caught up in it. And they were just too large a bureaucracy to catch our trick. If their trade rights people had understood that there were still orders for this book coming from the individual ISKCON temples, they would never have released the rights to the central BBT. They would have negotiated with the individual temples, \u201cO. K., you placed firm orders, we\u2019re ready to print.\u201d But it was by Krsna\u2019s grace that one arm of Macmillan was not in coordination with the other arm. And Prabhupada suspected that would happen when he made that plan. It was ingenious.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ramesvara das: In 1974 we were faced with a great dilemma. Our most important single book for distribution was the Bhagavad-gita As It Is. The rights had been given to Macmillan in 1969 and 1970 before Prabhupada even dreamed of his own Society distributing books in large quantities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[118],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-66044","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-recent-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66044","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=66044"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66044\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":66048,"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66044\/revisions\/66048"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=66044"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=66044"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dandavats.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=66044"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}