It's called Music City USA, but Publishing City USA might be just as apt a nickname for Nashville, home to a community of high-powered publishers and other book-related companies whose increasing influence is being felt throughout the country.

Nashville-based publishers like Thomas Nelson and Warner Faith are turning out national bestsellers by feeding a mainstream hunger for inspirational titles, while Ingram Book Group is taking advantage of the city's central geographic location—it's within 750 miles of 65% of the U.S. population—to maintain its status as the nation's largest book wholesaler.

Signs of the city's long literary tradition—which includes such writers as Robert Penn Warren and Peter Taylor—mix with evidence of Nashville's thriving modern book scene. There's a shiny new outlet of the Joseph Beth—Davis Kidd bookstore chain, the locally produced and edited BookPage magazine, the popular NPR author interview show The Fine Print as well as the biennial Southern Festival of the Book.

Nashville publishing has come a long way since its start in 1854, when the Methodist Episcopal Church South set up a press to publish Bibles. Today, the United Methodist Publishing House (UMPH) continues to operate out of the building in downtown Nashville where the old printing press was located. Across the street is the flagship of the church's Cokesbury chain of bookstores—which now has some 71 outlets across the U.S.

While Bibles and Bible commentaries represent the core of UMPH's business, the company's Abingdon Press has published books since the 1920s on a variety of topics, making it one of the first religious publishers to move into publishing for the trade.

Only blocks away, B&H Publishing Group, a division of LifeWay Christian Resources, has offices in a complex covering seven blocks of downtown Nashville—a space so big it has its own zip code. Until this month, the publisher was known as Broadman and Holman. The new name is part of an attempt to "create a trade-friendly brand," says David Shepherd, publisher of B&H.

John Thompson, B&H's senior v-p, marketing, explains: "The Christian bookstore market is shrinking and the trade market is expanding. What we're trying to do is identify the new Rick Warren [The Purpose-Driven Life] and be savvy about how to take someone like them to a mass audience."

The publisher has persuaded a trio of bold-faced names, who also happen to be Christians—including Fox News commentator Oliver North, model Jennifer O'Neill and TV/film star Chuck Norris—to write their first novels for B&H.

Norris, in particular, has developed a devoted following among college students who came to know him through clips of Walker, Texas Ranger on NBC's Late Night with Conan O'Brien. "When we published Norris's novel The Justice Ridersand his memoir Against All Odds, we set up phone interviews with college newspaper editors," says Thompson. "They really got into it. One of them asked Chuck to roundhouse-kick him over the phone, which he did. Heeeeyah!" Bloggers are really into him as well. One Internet rumor claims "Chuck Norris's tears can cure cancer," says Thompson. "Too bad Chuck Norris has never cried," he deadpans.

Arenas Full of Book Buyers

Thomas Nelson's polished, modern headquarters sits at the top of a low hill in the leafy suburbs of Nashville, only a few miles from Opryland, the city's monument to kitsch.

In the fiscal year of 2005, which ended March 31, Nelson reported sales of $253 million. The company had eight books on the New York Times bestseller list in the 2005 fiscal year and reports that 49 of its trade books (not Bibles) sold more than 100,000 copies apiece. So far this fiscal year, the company reports having nine bestsellers, including Dave Holloway's book about his daughter's disappearance, Aruba: The Tragic Untold Story of Natalee Holloway.

Nelson's top-selling author, Max Lucado, has sold 51 million copies of his 200+ titles.

That success caught the attention of the private equity firm InterMedia Partners, which recently purchased the company for $473 million, a price not far off the $537.5 million Lagardère paid for the much more high-profile Time Warner Book Group, which it renamed Hachette Book Group.

CEO and president Michael Hyatt points out that in 1969, when the company was bought by emeritus chairman Sam Moore, "revenues were just $4 million per year." He attributes the company's growth to tapping into the buying power of the 80 million Christian Americans who buy as much as $7 billion a year in religious books, music and sidelines, according to Packaged Facts, a division of MarketResearch.com.

Hyatt attributes the success of inspirational publishing to three trends. The first is demographics: "As baby boomers grow older and confront their mortality, they are returning to their faith," he says. Next is globalization, which is "bringing new religions to our shores and causing people to reconsider how they worship." Last is the rise of megachurches, which turn preachers into celebrities (think Joel Osteen) and can turn out a huge audience for a single author appearance.

But church isn't the only venue where the faithful gather in big numbers. The Women of Faith franchise, headquartered in Dallas, which Nelson bought in 2000, operates "spiritual spas" offering music and a roster of speakers (often Thomas Nelson authors) in an arena setting over two days. It attracted 422,000 paid attendees last year—an average of 15,000 people per event. The events now bring in 12% of Nelson's revenue.

Christian bookstores may be the least important factor in Thomas Nelson's future. In 2004, the company hired Tamara Heim, then president of Borders Bookstores, as chief publishing officer to rethink the publisher's strategy in dealing with retail outlets. Her presence has already had an impact: Hyatt says the general trade market, which represents 9% of the company's annual sales, is the fastest growing segment of all, and 2005 was the first year trade bookstores outsold Christian bookstores.

Attention Wal-Mart Shoppers

Far from considering it a disadvantage to be overcome, Nashville publishing people say that being in Nashville, as opposed to New York, brings benefits. One is the proximity to the company's core customer, says Jonathan Merkh, publisher of the Nelson Books imprint. "We go to church with the people who buy our books," he said.

That core audience resides largely in red state America, and to address that constituency, the Nashville wing of Hachette Book Group, in addition to Warner Faith, has also launched Center Street, a year-old imprint focusing on "heartland" values. One forthcoming titles is We've Got It Made in America: A Common Man's Salute to an Uncommon Country by former Cheers barfly John Ratzenberger.

Nashville's music scene has brought an influx of entertainment professionals from the two coasts, and some local publishers have found like-minded partners with which to collaborate. Integrity Publishers was founded in Nashville in 2002 as the book arm of the Christian music label Integrity Media. Integrity publisher Byron Williamson is another veteran of Thomas Nelson, and he is already trumpeting similar outsized sales numbers, such as the 340,000 copies sold of Dr. Emerson Eggerichs's marriage guide Love and Respect. Earlier this year, the company scored a publicity hit when its author, the Iraqi general Georges Sada, was interviewed by Jon Stewart about his political memoir Saddam's Secrets.

Phil Ollila, the senior v-p who runs Ingram Publisher Services, Ingram's two-year-old distribution arm, points to yet another of the city's advantages: "Nashville is more diverse than you'd think," says Ollila, another Borders veteran. He cites the geographic diversity of some of the 30 publishers his own company distributes, including Luath, in Scotland, and Roli Books, in India. "It is a Southern city that can be extremely conservative, but there are certain areas of town that can be downright avant-garde."

On the technology side, Ingram's Lightning Source division has been a pioneer in print-on-demand. A quick tour with president J. Kirby Best demonstrates how Lightning Source is able to produce as many as 48,000 individual books—even single titles—a day. Beginning in September, Lightning Source expects to be able to produce glossy illustrated books.

Local Literary Scene

Some of those books are likely to make it onto the shelves of one of Nashville's numerous bookstores, which include outlets of Barnes & Noble, Borders, Books-a-Million and Davis Kidd.

"Nashville is definitely one of our busiest, biggest-volume stores, and we've seen a nice bump in sales since we moved to the Green Hills Mall last fall," says Michele Sulka, spokesperson for the Joseph Beth—Davis Kidd chain based in Cincinnati.

One bookseller at the store, Roger Bishop, has participated in nearly every aspect of local literary life over his 40-year career in the Nashville book trade. Bishop, who retires from bookselling this month, managed the Vanderbilt University bookstore in the 1960s, in a period long after John Crowe Ransom and Robert Penn Warren had founded the literary magazine The Fugitive and established themselves as star scribes. Today, Nashville's leading literary lights are Ann Patchett and her mother, Jeanne Ray; Mark Jarman; and Tony Earley.

In 1984, Bishop helped found "BookTalk," which was later transformed into the monthly BookPage book review tabloid that continues to be produced and edited in Nashville, with Michael Zibart, scion of the Zibart bookstore chain, acting as publisher.

In the 1980s, Bishop cohosted the BookWorld Hour, an author interview show on local radio. The tradition of on-air literary chat is upheld by Rebecca Bain, who has recently returned from a long hiatus to once again host The Fine Print, a weekly hourlong author interview show on Nashville's NPR station, WPLN.

Also in the late 1980s, Nashville literati put together a festival drawing from local writers, which eventually became the Southern Festival of the Book. The festival was held in Nashville for 15 years, until 2004, when it was moved to Memphis because of work being done on the state capital. The festival—which now hosts 200 authors over three days each October—will alternate between the two cities each year. In 2007 it will be back where it started, in Nashville.