No End for End Times

Tyndale House reported a marked increase in orders for the Left Behind series in the wake of the September 11 attacks. Sales for the trade paperback version of Left Behind jumped 100% in the second half of September. Other titles in the series saw significant increases as well. Sales for the Left Behind product line spiked to more than 45 million copies in September. Tyndale shipped 125,000 copies of the trade paper edition of Left Behind, book one, for the month. It also shipped nearly a million copies of the 18 Left Behind: The Kids books—the most ever in one month. The juvenile series alone has now sold more than 8.8 million copies. Orders for the nonfiction Are We Living in the End Times? also escalated, with more than 50,000 copies shipped within the last few weeks. Tyndale just introduced a new title, Perhaps Today, a 90-day devotional by Left Behind series authors Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. To date, Tyndale has shipped more than 100,000 copies. Tyndale expects the numbers to stay high through October with the release of Desecration, the ninth installment in Left Behind. The one-day laydown is scheduled for October 30, with a 2.8-million-copy first printing. According to Tyndale, pre-orders have exceeded those for its predecessors four weeks prior to release.

With reporting by Dick Donahue.