Swelling Religious Book Industry Finds Widening Market
The publication of religious books has become a vast and swelling industry in this country, with annual commercial sales estimated at more than $500 million and 130 million volumes.
That’s nearly twice as many volumes as were sold 10 years ago and 5 times the dollar amount. The total has been figured at more than a third of the commercial market.
While the statistics, compiled from various sources and perhaps not complete because of the diverse scope of the industry and no comprehensive tabs on it, the phenomenal growth is shown by a central source.
That is the Christian Booksellers Assn., based in Colorado Springs, Colo., sales of whose 3,400 member stores climbed to about $1.3 billion last year, five times the 1975 total, almost twice what it was five years ago.
At the same time, calculations of the number of religious books sold by those stores has nearly doubled to about 42 million copies.
That includes about 7 million Bibles, still the all-time best seller every year, the annual total of which probably exceeds 15 million, including various other outlets. A big chunk of the additional Bibles are distributed by the American Bible Society, which last year sold 1.9 million full Bibles and 1.6 million New Testaments.
Other Bibles flow through denominational conduits, specialty publishers and house-to-house salesmen.
For various kinds of religious books, the Book Industries Studies Group estimates 1985 annual sales at $516.3 million, involving 131 million books, not counting denominational output. “Megatrends” analyst John Nesbitt says the total is more than a third of the total domestic commercial book market.
William H. Anderson, president of the Christian Booksellers Assn., says the business has soared, “and in the next five years will mushroom even more.”
He attributes the growth to rising religious interest, to more sophisticated marketing and display by stores, and to a more appealing quality of religious books turned out by publishers.
“A decade ago, most new religious books were theological, but now they’re coming from psychologists, sociologists, pastors, other specialists and lay people,” Anderson said.
“They’re aimed at the average American, while a decade ago they were aimed at the theologian.”
He said current books deal with religious aspects of social issues, human relations, art and culture, along with personal experiences.
“Primary interest is in life-related problems, of Christian solutions to such things as death, living with cancer, raising kids, dealing with a marriage falling apart,” he said.
“It’s not the old self-help sort of books, but those that offer sound values for facing difficulties and gaining strength through them. This kind of book draws a great deal of attention.”
Next to that genre, he said religious fiction is commanding increased demand, with more good writers and more people looking for that sort of light reading, with religious elements.
Anderson said that religious best sellers outsell general best sellers by a “2-1 or 3-1” ratio, although only occasionally do they appear on secular best-seller lists, which are compiled from surveys of general trade stores.
As a result, the association has started compiling its own best-seller lists, now being carried supplementally by the Los Angeles Times, some smaller papers and occasionally by Publishers Weekly.
Anderson said the association’s member stores in the past tended to reflect denominational stamps, but now generally have a more ecumenical approach, handling materials “across the board,” mainline and evangelical.
“They’re serving the whole community,” he said.
The association includes 675 associate members, publishers and suppliers, about 125 of them publishers of religious books, with about 35 to 50 of them publishing more than 100 titles annually.
Among major houses are Zondervan of Grand Rapids, Mich.; Thomas A. Nelson of Nashville, Tenn.; Word Books of Waco, Tex.; Tyndale House of Wheaton, Ill.; religious departments of Doubleday of New York and Harper & Row in San Francisco; Multnomah Press of Portland, Ore.; Harvest House of Eugene, Ore.; Twenty-Third Publications of Mystic, Conn.; Crossway Books of Westchester, Ill.; Leaven Press of Kansas City; Ballantine Books of New York, and William B. Erdmans of Grand Rapids.
There also are major denominational book-publishing houses, the United Methodists’ Abingdon Press in Nashville; the Presbyterians’ Westminster Press in Philadelphia; the Catholics’ Paulist Press of Mahwah, N.J.; the Baptists’ Judson Press of Valley Forge, Pa., and Broadman Press of Nashville; the Lutherans’ Fortress Press of Philadelphia, Augsburg Press of Minneapolis and Concordia of St. Louis; and the Unitarian-Universalist Beacon Press in Boston.
