Fall Partner Bookseller: (2) Dragonfly & The Silver Birch in Decorah, Iowa!
Fall Partner Bookseller: (2) Dragonfly & The Silver Birch in Decorah, Iowa!
How a trade bookstore and its sister Christian bookstore combine two worlds of American reading
Read Part One of this post here!
Until the 1980s, as Cathy Lynn Grossman describes in an illuminating history in Publishers Weekly (which has been prescient in its attention to religious publishing), Christian publishers, usually associated with a denominational mission, “percolated along” with books selling ten or twenty thousand copies until the eighties and nineties, when, with Evangelical denominations surging, some publishers and agents realized that there was a huge market for faith-inflected books. By finding a big readership for authors like Rick Warren, Gary Chapman, and Left Behind’s Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, appearing with mainstream publishers and sold through chains and big box stores, just as smaller Christian publishers like others were either bought by Big Five book conglomerates or themselves consolidated into more powerful groupings, they put Christian publishing on the map, but also starved out the more modest network of Christian booksellers and distributors that had been serving this community, who were also pinched, like all of bookselling, by the rise of Amazon. As elsewhere in publishing, the successes of the big sellers made a less hospitable environment for books with more modest audiences. In 2017 the Family Christian bookstore chain, after declaring bankruptcy, closed its last 240 stores, and 2019, the Southern Baptist Convention’s Lifeway Christian Resources closed its brick-and-mortar business, shuttering 170 stores. The Christian Booksellers Association went from 3,290 members in 1983 to fewer than a thousand today.
The booming Christian book business is in consequence mostly conducted through Amazon and direct marketing to readers (brick-and-morter bookstores account for a about 10 to 15 percent of regular trade bookselling). “When I came to Harper in 2002, the mission of the marketing department was almost exclusively to equip sales reps for getting our books into stores,” HarperOne’s Michael Maudlin told Scot McKnight’s blog in 2020. “Now our marketing department is fully direct-to-consumer.” Niko Pfund, President of Oxford University Press, which has a major Bible line, said “we have entire teams of people working on activities that didn’t exist twenty years ago.” The space that remains for Christian books in non-Christian retail is marginal. “Christian publishers have long complained that their books are hidden or miscategorized,” writes journalist Ann Byle, who covers Christian publishing for Publishers Weekly and other outlets. She quotes a senior acquisitions editor from the Christian publisher Tyndale, who says that readers would enjoy their books “if they could find them.” Pitching Christian writing to retailers like Target, Walmart, and chain bookstores, “it feels like Christian authors are criticized for either being too Christian or not Christian enough, sometimes both at the same time.”
Just as online distribution allowed Christian publishing to thrive even as its retail presence shrank, self-publishing and small independent publishing made possible by new technologies allowed readers and writers whose interests were being sidelined by the big commercial houses to show their force. The Hotsheet list of self-published bestsellers filters Bibles and Bible studies, but its compiler Jane Friedman says they would be a dominant presence if they were there. In the most recent Authors Guild Income Survey, Jane Friedman reports, self-publishing predominates in Christian nonfiction as well as self-improvement, relationships, and fitness and diet. As with romance, where men in the upper echelons were dismissive of the genre’s salience and many of its sub-genres until they boomed in self-publishing, women predominate among both authors and readership for Christian publishing, especially the powerhouse “Christian Living” category (25.9 percent of Christian sales in 2023), and self-publishing and social media have given them avenues to find their own audiences. In an article about how the Presbyterian Church is investigating one of the most popular devotional writers ever, Sarah Young, who died last year, Katelyn Beaty, an editor with Baker Publishing, observed church leaders can see female Christian writers as a threat to their spiritual authority. Sarah Young developed her form of devotional writing while counselling abused women; virtually housebound with debilitating medical problems, she struggled to find a publisher. Yet as her New York Times obituary said, her work eventually “sold tens of millions of copies and spawned an evangelical empire of sequels, television shows and podcasts.” “The book-buying market is more powerful than denominational leaders,” Katelyn Beaty continued. “I think there is a real reckoning with the power of a product intended for evangelical Christians compared with the weakening power of denominations.”
Commercial publishing was also slow to embrace the increasingly popular genre of Christian fiction, which appeals not only to Christian readers but others looking for less racy reading experiences (in the industry parlance, “clean” fiction). In 1998 a group that included Publishers Weekly religion editor Phyllis Tickle got together to create the annual Christy Award to recognize excellence in religious fiction, with the implicit goal of improving its quality. (This reminded me of a conversation I had a few weeks ago with the conservative publisher Eric Nelson, who said he went into publishing conservative authors out of frustration over how poorly conservative works were published, and how little publishers understood that audience, because it was not a field that interested most of the publishing-insider demographic.) Writing in Publishers Weekly last summer, Evangelical Christian Publishers Association CEO Jeff Crosby, whose own bookstore in the 1980s had only about a hundred feet of shelf space for fiction, mainly by the likes of Dostoevesky and C. S. Lewis, proclaimed the effort a success. A few months ago The New York Times profiled Karen Kingsbury, the “Queen of Christian fiction,” who had struggled to get her first faith-based novel published though she was a successful true-crime writer. She has now sold 25 million books and created her own production company to adapt them for Amazon Prime.
Ann Byle wrote recently in Christianity Today that the country’s largest independent Christian bookseller, Baker Book House in Grand Rapids (also a center of Christian publishing and the home of Ann Byle), increased its fiction shelf from about forty feet twenty-five years ago to two hundred and sixty feet today. She describes the growing strength of Christian fiction, not only with expanding and more diverse audiences but with a new readiness to take on complex and challenging subjects. A budding enthusiasm for faith-based science-fiction/fantasy is beginning to be recognized by major Christian publishers. With limited visibility in bookstores, readers mostly find their Christian fiction online.
One theory about this surge in religious publishing is that, especially since the pandemic, more and more Americans identify as “very religious” without going to church. Christian publisher David D. Cook CEO Bill Reeves told Publishers Weekly, “People are still gathering to study God's word. But they don't want to do it in a suit and tie on Sunday at 11 a.m. They want to wear their flip-flops and study with their friends.” Some, like Beth Moore, author of a series of phenomenally successful Bible study guides, who left the LifeWay publishing giant and the Southern Baptist Convention to create her own ministry and publishing company in 2021, have been driven away from traditional congregations by restrictive teachings and limited opportunities for influence. Reporting on Christian publishing for Forbes, Pamela N. Danziger observed that “a defining characteristic of these highly religious Americans is they are committed readers, as well as committed believers,” quoting the Pew Research Center to the effect that “seven in ten people who are highly religious say reading the Bible or other religious materials is essential to their religious identity”—a classic “minimum viable audience,” in marketing lingo. “Christian bookstores serve such a potentially engaged audience, yet they remain underserved … The Parable Group’s research finds there are at least a hundred markets with fifty thousand people without a Christian bookstore within an hour’s drive.” This population, along with a growing cadre of Christian home-schoolers, creates a natural market for books.
Recalling Kate’s experience in The Silver Birch, Greg Squires, President of the Parable Group, a professional research group that tracks Christian publishing mentioned above by Paula Danziger, told Forbes that the “broad perception … that bookstores are gone” underestimates “how meaningful the interactions are in a Christian bookstore.” Stan Jantz, president and CEO of Evangelical Christian Publishers Association, noted that the chain store managers “varied in their level of local engagement and curation.” Independent Christian booksellers however, not unlike other independent booksellers, view their work as a calling. “Christian booksellers are very industrious, very dedicated. They believe they are doing the work of the ministry.” Successful independent Christian bookstores today, like The Silver Birch, are “adaptable from a topic perspective and most willing to serve a broad range of audiences … It is more about localization focused on the customer, rather than aligning around a certain strand of evangelicalism, theology or denomination,” in contrast to once-dominant LifeWay, which represented Southern Baptist leadership.
Many Christian publishers have also broadened their ambit to include popular “spirituality” offerings more broadly, an audience that dovetails “Christian Living” with the hugely popular guide-to-life genre that is widespread in self-publishing and, for example, made a TikTok star of self-taught Jungian guru Keila Shaheen and her “Shadow Work Journal.” The “religious publishing” category actually extends to the occult and esoteric disciplines, embracing tarot cards and astrology, perhaps not so popular with the Southern Baptist Convention but beloved in other quarters. Byron Borger, owner of the Pennsylvania bookstore Hearts and Minds, described for Christianity Today how his store has “large sections of books offering Christian perspectives on nursing, engineering, art, business, education, law, media studies, and the like. Christ is, after all, Lord of these areas, and we are called to serve him in all that we do. The virtue of intellectual curiosity, particularly as it relates to the relationship between faith and public life, simply isn’t cultivated in most churches.” His commitment to intellectual curiosity has caused “confusion … [for] some of our customers,” but he sees it as essential to his work.
This idea that publishing and bookselling have the opportunity at the local level, for people led by such a vision, to meet people where they are, respond to their under-recognized needs, and nurture curiosity and self-challenge is very powerful to me. I have been reading recently Arlie Russell Hochschild’s 2016 book, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (she has a new book coming out in a week or so updating her analysis and taking it from Louisiana to Kentucky), which has a lot to say about how extremist political ideas have benefited from inchoate feelings of exclusion and estrangement harbored by many Americans. Thinking about the ambient untapped audience for, say, Christian speculative fiction reminds me a bit of how many bookstores have benefited in recent years from adding a section for romance, which not only brought new readers into the store but helped to signal friendliness toward readers of a variety of stripes. I think a lot about how the world of all the people who read is quite a bit bigger, and more eclectic, than it can seem from the blocks between Rector and 59th Streets in Manhattan. If more readers felt like we were all inhabiting one great library, perhaps visits there might be the beginning of a more civil cultural conversation, like the kind they have at Dragonfly and The Silver Birch.
I am told, but I cannot quite see, that there is also Jewish religious publishing, which I know only from the storied literary imprint Schocken and some scholarly lines. Is there a hunger for Jewish science fiction? The Massachusetts publisher Interlink specializes in books from the Islamic world; the literature of Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism benefit from strong hubs outside the United States. I wonder if US Christian publishers are making, say, romances based in the Black church or Latin American Catholicism (in Spanish!). There seem many ways here to reach the hearts of people who may feel themselves outside the prevailing culture, to make choices that make for a larger, more convivial cultural room. Kate Rattenborg Scott is doing that every day, when she orders a bestseller, an obscure work of history, a book excluded from the school libraries of Iowa, a novel in translation, or a Bible study guide for Dragonfly Books and The Silver Birch. The unique harmony of their togetherness is her constant labor, respecting standards of truthfulness and kindness but not dictating answers, attuned to the wind blowing through the trees and crops in the surrounding landscape, waiting to speak to the students and farmers and travelers and office workers and parents, the little kids and the old people, parishioners, seekers, and secular people, the lonely and the seeking, the public-spirited and the festive, the well-off and the struggling and the newly arrived, who happen by in the durable, embracing plurality of an American town.
Some Book Posts on religious themes: Allen Callahan on the Black Church; Adam Kirsch on the Rabbinic Halakah; Sarah Ruden on Marilynne Robinson’s Genesis; Hagith Sivan on women in ancient Judaism; Edward Mendelson on Bible translation; Sumana Roy on Hindu Bakhti poet Surdas; Kate Gaddini on “nonverts”; Michael Robbins on miracles; Joy Williams on Meister Eckhart.
Many thanks to Ann Byle, Jane Friedman, and of course Kate Rattenborg Scott for helping me to learn about Christian publishing! Mistakes are all mine.
Ann Kjellberg is the founding editor of Book Post. You can find all her portraits of Book Post’s partner booksellers here.
Book Post is a by-subscription book review delivery service, bringing snack-sized book reviews by distinguished and engaging writers direct to our paying subscribers’ in-boxes, as well as free posts like this one from time to time to those who follow us. We aspire to grow a shared reading life in a divided world. Become a paying subscriber to support our work and receive our straight-to-you book posts. Coming soon: Yasmine Rashidi on Egyptian memoir, real and imagined; Kathryn Davis on National Velvet.
Dragonfly and The Silver Birch, sister bookstores in Decorah, Iowa, are Book Post’s Fall 2024 partner bookstores! We partner with independent booksellers to link to their books, support their work, and bring you news of local book life across the land. We send a free three-month subscription to any reader who spends more than $100 at our partner bookstore during our partnership. To claim your subscription send your receipt to info@bookpostusa.com.
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Ann, thank you for this informative and gracious follow-up post. As someone who teaches at a small evangelical university (I am a Lutheran, married to a Catholic, who is starting his 24th year teaching at a Wesleyan school... which makes me either very ecumenical or just confused), I know well that my evangelical students and their families feel ignored (or scorned) by the major centers of culture. (Not just publishing, of course.) But these students are serious, hungry to learn, and far more open-minded than the stereotypical image of evangelicals would lead one to suppose. Thanks for encouraging all of us to be generous-hearted in building broad and diverse networks of readers--a house with many rooms, not to mention plenty of corridors connecting them.