Hitching a Ride on the Amish Buggy

People don't usually pair the words “Amish” and “commercial success” in the same sentence unless they are talking about furniture. But suddenly publishers are attracted to all things Plain like bees on shoofly pie.

It wasn't always this way. When Beverly Lewis first published her adult novel The Shunning a decade ago, there was no such subgenre as Amish fiction. Dave Horton, v-p of editorial for fiction at Bethany House, says the press started with “quite modest expectations” for the book, but it quickly found an audience among fans of historical fiction. To date The Shunning has sold 766,000 copies, contributing to the 4.5 million total copies sold of Lewis's Amish-related adult fiction.

It's not surprising, then, that other publishers are hopping aboard the fast-trotting Amish buggy. This year brings a fresh crop of Amish stories, with Colleen Coble's suspense novel Anathema from Thomas Nelson and The Forbidden, Lewis's latest from Bethany, both releasing this month—Lewis's with a first print run of 350,000 copies. On May 27, Avon Inspire also gets into the act with Hidden, Shelley Shepard Gray's romance between an Amish man and the Englisher young woman who finds shelter in his community.

Later in the year and into 2009, there's a veritable mini-explosion: Gray will follow Hidden with Wanted on December 23 and Given in fall 2009. Harvest House is releasing two separate Amish-themed titles, B.J. Hoff's Rachel's Secret in October and Mindy Starns Clark's Echoes of Lancaster County, in January. Thomas Nelson has debut novelist Beth Wiseman's Plain Perfect in November; Zondervan will launch its first installment of the Kauffman's Amish Bakery series by Amy Clipston in April 2009; and WaterBrook has Cindy Woodsmall's When the Soul Mends, the conclusion of her Sisters of the Quilt series (Sept.). Barbour, which has its answer to Beverly Lewis in Wanda Brunstetter's several series about Amish characters, has Brunstetter's novel A Sister's Hope releasing in July. Brunstetter's sales don't yet match Lewis's, but they are wonderful-gut: according to senior fiction editor Rebecca Germany, Brunstetter's Amish novels have topped 2.2 million copies.

Why are Amish stories suddenly so popular? Of course, there is the news; Americans' curiosity about the Amish spiked after the tragic West Nickel Mines School shooting. But there's also a timelessness that transcends headlines. “There's something about the Amish community that feels like another place and time, even in the midst of our contemporary culture. There are many people who would like to envision themselves in a simpler life,” says Bethany's Horton. “The Amish lifestyle encapsulates many things we find attractive—a strong sense of spirituality, a close-knit community, and the ability to remain relatively constant in a changing culture.”

Dudley Delffs, v-p and publisher for trade books at Zondervan, agrees that there's a “utopian quality” to Amish fiction, especially during our era's unpopular war and recession. Then, too, Amish fiction—which often focuses on the individual in conflict with the community—“can give people permission to wrestle with some of their own doubts about how their faith intersects with the culture.”

Although these stories track a people who are thought—perhaps naïvely—to be unchanging, the subgenre of Amish fiction itself is already diversifying and maturing. WaterBrook editor Shannon Hill says that the “gentle read” of Brunstetter and Lewis is expanding to include edgier stories like Woodsmall's and Coble's, in which “bad things can happen to the Amish, or the characters make realistic, sometimes questionable choices.”

What's next? One new frontier in Amish fiction may not be Amish at all: in August, Revell is expecting big things from its Shaker novel The Outsider by Ann Gabhart. At press time, the book's expected first print run was 50,000 copies, tripled from the original projection based on enthusiastic early response from retailers. Revell is hoping that an Amish-looking cover will appeal to the same fans who are curious about the “beautiful simplicity” of another way of life, says publicity manager Deonne Beron.