Sinomedia International, a media enterprise geared towards providing high-quality cross-cultural news, publications, entertainment and networking opportunities, was established in 2011 by the Beijing-based China International Publishing Group.

Positioned as an informational platform "bridge" between East and West, Sinomedia focuses on cultural exchanges and tries to bring together English-speaking communities that share a passion for China-related topics, according to Wang Xin, Sinomedia's US president.

Currently, Sinomedia operates China Books and Long River Press - with a combined history of 60 years in book and periodical publishing and distribution - and the online news portal Web On China.

"We see now as the best time ever as interest in China is soaring," said Wang. "We are finding an ever-growing and increasingly diverse audience of scholars, students, travelers, universities, libraries, governments and businesses."

Still, Wang feels they have yet to meet the US market's needs. Unfamiliarity with local communities, Americans' reading habits, writers' styles, distribution channels, loyalty, industry rules and regulations, have all resulted in a modest and sluggish operation.

As digital publishing grows in the US, squeezing traditional industry players out of the market, Sinomedia has modified its business model accordingly: it shut down its bricks-and-mortar bookstore in downtown San Francisco and is utilizing Amazon's Kindle to sell a wide range of selected publications - from children's books and learning Cantonese or Mandarin, cooking and history, to books about Confucius, astrology and ancient proverbs.

"It's not an easy job," said Wang, who reported for duty in San Francisco three years ago from Beijing, bringing with his luggage his nearly 30 years of publishing industry expertise.

A 1987 Peking University graduate majoring in cross-cultural communication, Wang said he was born to be a cultural messenger between the US and China.

"Every morning when I woke up, I would calculate how many books and periodicals we would have to sell to keep our business running," he said. The parent company, China International Publishing Group, had high hopes for this US foothold, he said.

"Fostering cultural exchanges between the US and China is a mission of lofty meaning and significance," said Wang. "We can't let our predecessors down."

Wang said there have been three big defining moments in the history of China's cross-cultural publishing and distribution in the US.

The first took place in 1984 when China International Publishing Group opened its first US subsidiary company, Cypress Books, in New Jersey.

"Back then, the demand for information from the US was skyrocketing, as China and the US had a normalized bilateral relationship since 1972, and China had started its opening up in 1978," he explained.

All of Cypress' books, magazines and periodicals were written, edited and printed in China, and shipped to the US for distribution through wholesale and retail networks, said Wang.

There was nothing local on the content production side until 2002, when Cypress Books acquired San Francisco-based China Books & Periodicals, an established publisher and distributor specializing in China-related books and magazines founded by Henry Noyes, who was born to missionary parents in Guangzhou.

"This purchase was of strategic significance," said Wang. "We not only inherited its resources in terms of readers, clients and channels, but also the capacity of publishing locally."

The third defining move was to start using local talent. Wang spares no effort to localize Sinomedia's operation by hiring native-speaking editors and marketing pros to fill the ranks of its workforce in San Francisco. "Let the locals choose topics the locals will have interest in reading; and let the locals sell books in the US using methods appealing to the locals," he said.

Sinomedia relies heavily on local talent to develop its business, from topic selection, research and editing to marketing and sales. "We benefit a lot (by doing so)," said Wang. "We are currently looking for an online marketing professional now to help us generate sales on Kindle."

"We are expecting a surge in our business, both through traditional and digital channels," said Wang, walking through the 1,000-sqaure-foot display room with hundreds and thousands of books lining the shelves. "I would say our publications about China are definitely cultural gems."

junechang@chinadailyusa.com

(China Daily USA 11/01/2013 page10)