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| Richard Cohn | |
An out-of-the-blue phone call from a stranger was what originally set Richard Cohn, Beyond Words' publisher, and Cynthia Black, the company's president and editor-in-chief, on the path to publishing.
While on a meditative walk, photographer Richard Cooke heard a voice instructing him to contact Cohn, whom he had never met or even heard of, to publish his book. He told his sister, who did know Cohn, about the epiphany, and she put the two in touch. Cohn's initial offer to provide Cooke with business advice instead led to him and Black joining forces with a third partner to produce the photographer's tome.
"We sort of dove into the deep end, and we didn't really know how to swim," Black said. "We didn't know what we shouldn't do, and we made these really beautiful books."
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| Cynthia Black | |
From there, Beyond Words, founded while Cohn and Black were living in her native Hawaii, expanded to include other types of books, including personal growth titles. With The Hidden Messages in Water by Dr. Masaru Emoto, the whirlwind pace of publication helped prepare Cohn and Black for an even bigger challenge.
While they were en route to New York to visit executives at Atria Books, with whom Beyond Words had recently formed a partnership, a snowstorm left them stranded at a Chicago airport. A conversation with another waylaid passenger led to their meeting a feng shui expert who appears in Rhonda Byrne's movie The Secret. Cohn and Black then approached Byrne--who had previously turned down similar requests--about producing a book version of the film. A crash production schedule had The Secret out within months, in time for the 2006 holiday season, and it has since been translated into 45 languages and sold 23 million copies worldwide.
Beyond Words' success stems in part from Cohn and Black's willingness to take risks--a good example is when they were asked to distribute the DVD version of the documentary What the Bleep Do We Know!? Rather than forgo the opportunity for lack of expertise in that area, they decided to give it a try. After all, they had been new to bookmaking once, too. They placed What the Bleep Do We Know!? in bookstores, where it sold extremely well, and, later, they became the exclusive distributor of The Secret DVD.
Headlining the summer list is Creative You: Using Your Personality Type to Thrive by Otto Kroeger and David B. Goldstein (July); Kroeger is a renowned expert in the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Assessment.
This fall Cohn and Black are "very excited" to share Elisa Medhus's My Son and the Afterlife. A medical doctor, Medhus--once a skeptic about the existence of an afterlife--shares the story of how she came to communicate with her 20-year-oldson after he took his own life.
Thirty years after a phone call launched Cohn and Black into the publishing world, their core mission remains the same. "Not only do we work collaboratively with authors and filmmakers to produce the best information possible on a subject," said Cohn, "we're also partners with our audience, the ultimate reader, to provide an opportunity for transformation and personal growth."