Who Are Our Customers?

Tsunami-sized changes are sweeping through Great Britain’s publishing industry as they are through ours. It’s instructive to eavesdrop on what British publishing professionals are saying about this. I believe they are asking questions we should ask ourselves in this time of radical change.

The May 18 issue of The Bookseller (Britain’s equivalent to Publishers Weekly) featured an article by Hannah Macdonald of September Publishing, who challenges publishers to ask who their customers are. Twenty years ago, most publishers said their customers were retail bookstores. They thought that if they persuaded stores to carry their books, readers would find and purchase them. No more. The number of retail bookstores has shrunk radically and large store chains have disappeared altogether because fewer readers find and buy books through brick-and-mortar bookstores.

Publishers have responded with a variety of new schemes—free e-books with the purchase of print editions, special editions printed on demand, etc.—but none of these strategies have swept back the tsunami. So Macdonald reminds publishers:

Retailers are just a part of our customer base… Readers are the point of it. And authors are our partners in it, sales channels of their own. We should be rethinking all our processes, structures and ambitions—everything—through that new perspective. We sit at the centre of that glorious, electric, world-changing relationship between book and reader (or listener). That human creative exchange is our single most important purpose….

Note the main points of Macdonald’s argument, because she identifies some changes for all of us:

a Retailers are just a part of our customer base...Readers are the point of it. Publishers who try to cater to bookstores by imitating cover designs, popular characters, or settings of best-sellers, they may sell our books into stores but not through them. Readers spot knock-offs and avoid them.

a Authors are our partners in [publishing], sales channels of their own. Too often we are tempted to think, I’m the creative part of the publishing equation. I’ll do the writing and the publisher will do the selling. However, each of us has a network of contacts with family, friends, and members of the same congregation, alumni of the same college, etc. If we tell them about our latest books, we can start sales rolling.

a That human creative exchange [between book and reader] is our single most important purpose. We can take this cue from innovative publishers if we visualize our readers at each step of the writing process. We can imagine them asking questions as we write and listen as they respond to our stories. This will make readers our co-creators, not merely consumers of what we write.

Widespread change can be frightening, but loyal readers are loyal customers. If we satisfy them, they will come back for more of what we have to share. So take heart. It's time to recapture the principles that used to guide Christian publishing. They can determine where we land when the publishing tsunami passes by.

Joe Allison writes both fiction and nonfiction, and has been a member of the Indiana chapter of American Christian Fiction Writers since 2010. He lives in Anderson, IN, with his wife Maribeth.

Reading Evangelicals, By Daniel Silliman

 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, 2021)

News editor of Christianity Today, the flagship magazine of American evangelicalism, Daniel Silliman has given us a candid assessment of the movement, based on five blockbuster books or book series. These crossover books are the public face of evangelical Christianity for most secular readers. Silliman argues they have also set the agenda for current evangelical thought and redefined how many conservative Christians see the world and their role in it.

For example, most Christians once held that an abundant life is one of proper belief and orthodox religious practice, so they looked to books of doctrine and biblical commentary for guidance. Then Jeannette Oke’s novel Love Came Softly dared to reimagine “spiritual fullness as falling in love, and feeling safe, and knowing someone has the best plans for you” (32). It marked a watershed.

Oke’s novel convinced readers that the Christian life is not a solitary intellectual experience, but a relational odyssey with God and those who love us. In the tidal wave of Christian romances that followed, we saw that God can give a believer more than a correct belief system. The pleasure, personal fulfillment, and joy of a romantic relationship are equally important gifts of divine love.

Silliman shows that blockbuster Christian novels have also had a significant impact on evangelical philosophy and doctrine. Crossway Books produced apologetic volumes by Francis Schaeffer, C. Everett Koop, and others who argued that the Religious Right was Christianity’s last bastion against secular humanism. But these books appealed primarily to intellectuals and the discussion of secular humanism was primarily an effete topic. Then Frank Paretti’s novel This Present Darkness catapulted it into the public square.

Another example: Only a few Christians believed dispensational teachings about a global Tribulation and an endtime Rapture of faithful believers until the Left Behind novel series was published. These doctrines were then embraced by many evangelical Christians who had not given much thought to the Bible’s endtime teachings until then.

I believe we can find instructive insights in Silliman’s book. I most appreciated his bios of the authors, which reveal how they came to write these landmark books. Nearly all of them were first-time authors who wrote their books to draw readers into a more meaningful understanding of the Bible or to reexamine their own relationship with God, as William Paul Young did with The Shack.

Another vital subtheme of the book is the current realignment of the evangelical book pubishing industry.  Silliman mourns the loss of Christian bookstores as "discourse communities" where such theological ideas can be discussed and compared. They are fast disappearing along with other brick-and-mortar bookstores. Silliman describes how Christian publishers viewed these blockbuster books with suspicion, then delight and amazement as they racked up sales in the tens of millions of copies. But as bookstores disappear, the cost of marketing books skyrocket and profit margins plummet, so publishers are slashing their plans and merging to survive. For these reasons, the whole landscape of Christian publishing is changing dramatically.

He concludes with two criticisms of these five blockbuster novels:

·       “The novels promoted individualism, first of all. In Oke’s romance novel, the heroine flourished when she realized God’s love for her…[However,] that woman was never asked to imagine how her abundance related to her neighbor’s needs, or how her fullness and flourishing were bound up with that of other people” (190).

·       “The best-selling fiction, second, encouraged readers to oppose pluralism. Pluralism is imagined as the cause of cultural upheaval, and readers are asked again and again to imagine how upsetting difference is. In Left Behind, it is pluralism that prompts crisis.…The novel asks readers…to imagine feeling attacked and imagine defending themselves. Every encounter with difference is presented as a site of struggle” (191).

Fair or not? Constructive or not? Most important: How does our work look in light of Silliman's critique?

Joe Allison writes both fiction and nonfiction, and has been a member of the Indiana chapter of American Christian Fiction Writers since 2010. His most recent book is Hard Times (Warner Press: 2019). He lives in Anderson, IN, with his wife Maribeth.

 

In Search of "Clean Reads"

 Librarians have long wrestled with the question of what they should recommend to adults who want to give formative books to the children and adolescents in their lives. We live in a society whose authors love to push the envelope of propriety, so how far can a book go and still be considered a “clean read”?

The question is so important that some bloggers now compile lists of books they consider to be “clean reads.” A few examples are The Fussy Librarian, Compass Book Ratings, Life and Lit, and the Library of Clean Reads.

However, the question is more complex than it first seems. Readers of one generation may consider a book to be “clean,” while the next generation doesn’t. The same is true of readers from various faith traditions.

For example, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is often cited as the quintessential American novel, yet it has been banned from libraries for various reasons since its publication. The public library of Concord, Massachusetts banned it immediately as “racist, coarse, trashy, inelegant, irreligious, obsolete, inaccurate, and mindless.” Two decades later, during the prim Edwardian era, the New York Public Library removed Huckleberry Finn from its shelves because it used crass terms like “sweat.” Still later, when the civil rights movement was at its height, hundreds of libraries banned the book because it used racial epithets. Although librarians respected Huckleberry Finn as an authentic narrative of a boy's life in antebellum America, many believed it was not a “clean” one.

Some books fall short of being “clean reads” because they contradict the religious convictions of certain groups. A pair of Amish ladies asked their public librarian to recommend a good YA novel on horses that their preteens could read.  She checked the list of recent books and found a novel written by an award-winning author, so she recommended that. The ladies returned it a few days later, quite upset. The premise of the story was that the spirits of championship horses rose from the dead during race season and inspired their descendants to win races again. That wasn't what Amish parents wanted to teach their children!

We Christian authors grapple with this same question. How can we make our stories authentic without offending prospective readers? Can we put profanity in a character’s mouth, regardless of whether that person is a believer? Can our characters drink alcohol, regardless of whether we name it for what it is or use a euphemism like “amber liquid”? Can boys and girls swim together, regardless of how much their swimwear reveals?        

In my next blog, we’ll examine the standards that various Christian authors and publishers use as their benchmarks for a “clean read.” In the meantime, consider sending a sample of your work to websites that recommend "clean reads." They can open doors to libraries as well as individuals.

Joe Allison writes both fiction and nonfiction, and has been a member of the Indiana chapter of American Christian Fiction Writers since 2010. His most recent book is Hard Times (Warner Press: 2019). He lives in Anderson, IN, with his wife Maribeth.

Is Religious Book Publishing Dead?

Fake news has been with us for a long time. A century ago, after Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) had been out of the country several months on a speaking tour, an American newspaper published his obituary, asserting that he had died penniless in London. A correspondent for the New York Journal contacted him for comment. The author acknowledged that his cousin James Ross Clemens had been near death in London a couple of weeks earlier, but had recovered. “The report of my illness grew out of his illness,” he said in a laconic note. “The report of my death was an exaggeration.”

Publishers of religious books find themselves in a similar predicament these days. Hundreds of bookstores have closed, including nationwide chains such as Family Christian Stores and Lifeway Stores. Major Christian trade shows have folded. Christian authors seldom appear on late-night talk shows anymore. With such visible changes, some people assume that Christian book publishing is dying.

If you hear that, take a look at the facts.

January’s statistical report from the Association of American Publishers (AAP) showed that religious book sales have increased more than any other category, up 8.1% from a year ago.  Click here to see details.

Brick-and-mortar bookstores are closing, not because people have stopped reading, but because they can find more books online. The largest physical bookstore can display just a tiny fraction of the new books published each year—nearly 305,000 new titles in the United States alone. Click here to see how our publishing output compares to other countries.

Then there’s self-publishing. First-time authors now have new technologies to publish their own books. Amazon says that more than a thousand authors earned over $100,000 each in royalties through Kindle Direct Publishing in 2017. Not all were Christian authors, to be sure, but many were. Click here to see details.  

So if someone tries to discourage you from writing because they think books are dying, give them a benign smile. As Mark Twain would say, that report is an exaggeration.

 

Death Comes to a Bookstore

I am in shock. My seminary bookstore has closed. After local Cokesbury, Berean, and Family Christian Stores turned out the lights, I comforted myself with the thought that my seminary store was still a place where I could browse and buy the newest Christian books. Then came an email announcement that the store would close September 21. The store’s website now reads: "CTS Leadership has discussed at length how to balance the enjoyment and convenience of having a bookstore with whether it is good stewardship to draw away significant resources from other needs in order to keep it open."  Their decision? "The Bookstore has now closed. Students should contact Follett Books for their textbooks this semester."

When business news commentators noted the demise of general bookstore chains such as Dalton’s and Walden’s, they predicted that specialty bookshops would weather the storm. Stores devoted to local history, crafts, sports, and other niche interests have loyal clienteles, and it seemed safe to assume these folks would  buy their wares at a premium for the privilege of having a place to read and converse with like-minded people. But things haven’t turned out that way. (After all, what could be more specialized than a seminary bookstore?)

The outcome reminds me of a conversation I once had with Christian college president. He told me that the future of his institution depended on nurturing its source of income, but noted that most faculty members were indifferent to donors. With homespun sarcasm he said, “Ticks should be powerfully interested in the health of their sheep.”

I think we’ve reached that point as Christian authors. We need to be powerfully interested in the health of bookstores that carry our work. How might we do this? A few suggestions:

• Patronize your local bookstores. Yes, you can save money by buying books online, but you can save your bookstores by buying through them. This assures that you'll have places to discover books that aren't touted online and "mission stations" that introduce books like yours to the general public.
• Recommend these bookstores to others. The excitement of discovering a new author or new book can be contagious. Talk about your excitement as freely as you talk about the latest episode on your favorite sitcom.
• Volunteer to coordinate special events for these bookstores. Offer to organize a book reading by several local authors on a "hot topic" such as racism or terrorism. If you know how to write an effective press release, do that promote the event. Bake some cookies. Provide folding chairs from your church. Enlist others to help with the logistics.
• Encourage your local bookstore staff. Offer a word of thanks for a particularly good book recommendation. Send a "thank you" card for a job well done. And of course, pray for these frontline workers as they strive to make good literature available in your community. Make them aware that someone does care about their success.

Joe Allison has been a member of the Indiana Chapter of American Christian Fiction Writers since 2010. He lives in Anderson, IN. His non-fiction books include Setting Goals That Count and Swords and Whetstones.