Growth in the Christian Market

Reading the first few chapters of the Writer’s Market Companion helped me understand the growing and declining categories of books and magazines. I found it interesting how the Christian market is growing: “In 2001, for the first time, religious titles sat atop both fiction and nonfiction Publishers Weekly best-seller list”(12). I have been witnessing the success of religious titles in my church. The church that I attend owns numerous Christian bookstores and tries to promote the titles by new authors. I even remember the minister suggesting that we buy Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life, which the book refers to as the longest-running nonfiction best seller on the Publishers Weekly 2003 charts. In the table labeled “Category Growth and Decline in Trade Publishing” in page 16, the titles published in the religion category doubled from 432 in 1992 to 834 in 2002.
I found that there are Christian Resource websites such as www.christianbooks.com. When I entered this website, I saw different columns for bestsellers, fictions, children’s books, music, etc. Among the bestsellers were works by well known authors like Rick Warren, Tim LaHaye, and Karen Kingsbury. The bestselling books and other categories are said to be updated weekly. It says in Writer’s Market Companion that books seem to fragment into niches. I found this evident in the website since the book titles are categorized into smaller niches: Church, Pastoral, Theology, Philosophy, and others. Browsing through this site made me realize once again the growth in the Christian market.

[Note: corrected link -- David]