Special Report from BookExpo America
by Lynn Garrett and Jana Riess, Religion BookLine -- Publishers Weekly, 5/24/2006
BookExpo America, the largest U.S. book trade show, met May 19-21 in Washington, D.C., returning to the capital for the first time in 18 years. There were cheers for the city, but jeers for the convention center, with its sprawling and confusing layout. (For the full report on the convention, go to http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6336737.html
Sunny Skies for Religion
At a Friday (May 19) press conference at the show, the Book Industry Study Group presented its newest statistics, which for the first time included data from small and mid-sized publishers (with revenues under $50 million). Overall publishing sales rose 9.6% over 2004, to $34.59 billion. The inclusion of the smaller publishers made a substantial difference to the picture of the industry, adding $11 billion in sales. BISG is forecasting a 3.6% increase in 2006.
The news was all good for religion—in 2005 the category was up more than 8% in dollar sales over 2004. Said Albert Greco, whose Center for Communications and Media Management at Fordham University prepared the report for BISG, “Publishers got God, and they moved a lot of books. And it wasn’t just evangelical Christian books, it was all sorts.” He added, “Several years ago when we first saw this [rate of growth], we thought it was a bubble. But now we know it’s not going to collapse. This is THE growth area in publishing.”
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When RBL asked Greco what he attributed the health of the category to he said, “You’ve got great authors who know how to communicate and who have great messages. And it’s not just 9/11 or politics that’s driving it. It predates that.” He did note that the non-evangelical publishers are not collecting sales data that BISG can use in its research, and that if they did the market would show itself to be even larger. Other important missing numbers for religion are sales data from big boxes like Wal-Mart and price clubs like Costco, which BISG does not have access to. These outlets have become increasingly significant in recent years, especially for major evangelical Christian titles.
Aside from this happy news, the show was remarkably quiet on the religion front, with no big books creating a stir and no big deals announced. What buzz there was circled around the film version of The Da Vinci Code, which opened the same day as BEA. Countless publishers displaying books with words like “code,” “secret” and “temple” in their titles attested to the continuing influence of Brown’s novel.
Traffic Disappointing in Religion Section
Religion publishers were once again given the choice of exhibiting in the Religion/Spirituality/Inspirational section or being in the main hall with most of the general trade houses. This year the RSI section was far from the main floor: located upstairs with the children’s section, several escalator rides away, the area was only lightly trafficked on Friday and Saturday. By Sunday, foot traffic was virtually non-existent.Dave Lewis, director of sales and marketing for Baker Publishing Group, told RBL, “Every time we have a split hall at BEA, we have less traffic than when everyone is on one floor like in Chicago. But we like to support the other religion publishers, so we’ve chosen to be here. All of the people who want to find us eventually do.”
Other religion houses, like Barbour and Howard, also chose to exhibit in the quiet religion section, while publishers like Eerdmans, SkyLight Paths, Moody and Harvest House elected the main hall. “In looking at the layout and positioning of the halls for this year’s venue we determined that the traffic would be higher in the location we chose,” said John Constance, v-p of sales for Harvest House, who also said that “proximity to general market publishers would be better for making new contacts at BEA.”
Trade Houses Hungry for Religion
On the main floor, the increased attention paid this year to religion books at trade houses was obvious. Most major trade houses have at least one religion book for fall, more often than not a front-of-catalogue title rather than a mid-lister. Mark Tauber, deputy publisher for Harper San Francisco, reported that religion is among HarperCollins’s top three corporate categories, and “that’s not even including Zondervan.” Religion acquisitions today are highly competitive, Tauber said: “It used to be if we had a proposal, we had a pretty darn good shot. Now we’re competing with everyone; people who had just done religion occasionally are bringing out a major religion title every season. It’s a lot of publishers with big dollars. Sometimes that’s forced us to overspend—the prices for some books have been artificially inflated because the category is so hot.”
Tauber cited wider media exposure for religion as a major factor in maintaining the heat. “There were five network specials [on Christianity] this Easter, and the ratings they got are fueling the desire for more,” providing religion books and authors with an increasingly broader platform. (Editor’s note: Have you noticed how much religion there is on The Daily Show and The Colbert Report?)
Among the standouts from trade houses is Harvard scientist E.O. Wilson’s The Creation, about the meeting of science and religion, coming in September from Norton, which will also release Martha Simmons’s anthology of historic African-American sermons in March 2007. Simmons spoke about the collection at a Saturday afternoon panel at BEA. Also on that panel was NPR journalist Jay Allison, whose title with Henry Holt, This I Believe, will release in October. The book, which comes with an audio CD, is a collection of the best of more than 14,000 short essays that have been submitted to the “This I Believe” segment he hosts each week on NPR.
Also in October, Free Press offers The Faith Club, a chick lit-ish real-life memoir of comparative religion in action, with three women friends (who are Muslim, Jewish, and Christian) coming to terms with their own beliefs in a post-9/11 world.
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