New World Library

Thirty years ago, in the kitchen of a small apartment in Oakland, California, Marc Allen and Shakti Gawain started a publishing firm known as Whatever Publishing to put out a few books and booklets they had written. It was a shoestring operation, started with very little capital. Total sales in 1977 were $800.

Today New World Library owns its own spacious building in Novato, California, has seventeen employees, and had 2006 revenues in excess of $11 million. The company’s name changed in the mid-1980s to better reflect the quality of its developing list. One of its first books, Gawain’s Creative Visualization, became an international bestseller and has sold more than 3 million copies in English and been translated into more than thirty foreign editions.

In the early 1990s, Shakti Gawain formed Nataraj Publishing, and Marc Allen became sole owner as well as publisher of New World Library. In 1998, Gawain and Allen, still close friends, formed a new working partnership, and Nataraj Publishing became an imprint published by New World Library.

Many of New World Library’s books are categorized as New Age, though Allen says “there’s really nothing new in New Age; it’s been around for a long time. It’s the perennial philosophy, after all. Certainly for many, though, a New Age is dawning. Perhaps it will prove to be a great New Renaissance, possibly even an era of cooperation and global peace. We certainly hope so, and we are publishing material that can show us how to create far better lives for ourselves (such as The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle) and a world that works far better (such as The Power of Partnership by Riane Eisler).”

Two other joint publishing ventures, with Amber-Allen Publishing and H J Kramer, have contributed heavily to New World Library’s success over the past decade as well. Between late 1993 and 1995, six books and six audio cassettes were published under the Amber-Allen imprimatur. One of those books, The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success by Deepak Chopra, has gone on to sell more than 2.3 million copies in North America and has been translated into more than thirty foreign languages. It was on both the New York Times and Publishers Weekly bestseller lists for over eighteen months.

In 2000, New World Library entered into a joint venture with H J Kramer, the publisher of such authors as Dan Millman, Sanaya Roman, and John Robbins. New World Library assumed responsibility for many functional areas of H J Kramer, including sales, marketing, subsidiary rights, fulfillment, production, and accounting. H J Kramer has continued to focus on author relationships and acquiring and developing new books, particularly new children's titles from Holly Bea.

New World Library publishes books and audios that inspire and challenge us to improve the quality of our lives and our world. The ultimate goal of the company is a sweeping one: personal and planetary transformation — awakening both individual consciousness and global social potential by publishing inspirational and practical materials in spirituality, personal growth, and other related areas.

“The best thing about the business, as far as I’m concerned,” Allen says, “is the large amount of mail we’ve received over the years from people who have been deeply affected by our publications. All I need to know is that I’ve made a positive impact on someone’s life — that makes it all worthwhile."