Two weeks ago, I outlined some thoughts on why Christian authors are special; but today, we will look at ways Christian books are not special at all.
Since the mid-1990s when Internet commerce began eroding sales at Christian bookstores, the uniqueness of the Christian bookselling market has declined to the point where now, for the most part, Christian books play on the same field as every other published book.
Of all the “Gone are the days …” statements that apply to Christian book publishing, most have their roots in the decline of Christian retail. The Internet has altered the landscape of selling books in both the Christian and broader markets.
Today, whether a Christian book is published using a traditional, hybrid, or self-publishing model, it is the same as all the hundreds of thousands (millions?) of books published every year in the eyes of Amazon.
Christian books had a long run of broad, special retail support that drove the discoverability of new authors, created promotional events, and served as a curated space where messages focused on things important to Christ-followers were allowed to live.
Some of these special safe places still exist, but every traditional publisher, Christian or not, gets over half of their sales at Amazon. Nontraditional publishing models depend entirely on Amazon.
The “special” days are all but gone, replaced by massive online global corporations that care only that you have your metadata complete and your cover and manuscript have the correct digital file structure.
Christian retail was a relatively short-lived piece of the puzzle in the scope of US book publishing history. It grew from the 1950s and peaked in the early 2000s before experiencing the same economic forces that drove many bookstore chains (Christian and general) out of business. Christian bookstores are still around; and if you know of one, please shop there regularly.
The truth is, running a Christian bookstore was never easy. Ask Steve Laube, who managed a store in Phoenix for over a decade. Even at its peak, a store required long hours of work and tedious attention to detail that tended to drain much of the joy from anyone involved in a retail business if they didn’t keep their eye on the mission. No one was in it for the money.
But there was the fruit of the work: people who purchased a book that a store associate recommended that became part of God’s process to change lives, moms and dads who found the resources they needed to raise their children to honor God, and millions of stories of altered paths from the Bibles they sold.
If you are a writer, know that the competition can be suffocating, coming from the 20,000 or so new books released weekly in the US. You must be good at what you do, learn about best publishing practices, and devote yourself to your spiritual growth and writing craft.
Since selling Christian books is no longer special, what is in the book becomes the most essential part of the process.
