When Simon and Schuster’s Atria division published The Secret in 2006, it would have been impossible to predict the phenomenon Rhonda Byrne’s book would become. Even visualizing a blockbuster, the expectations would probably have been a bit more modest than more than 20 million copies sold worldwide five years later. Soon—likely by December or January, predicts Atria publisher Judith Curr—The Secret will mark its 200th week on the New York Times bestseller list.

Before Atria published The Secret and last year’s follow-up, The Secret: The Power, Curr says her benchmark for the market’s interest in spirituality and New Age topics was the sales of the Dalai Lama’s books. Now she looks at sales for Byrne’s books and notes that more copies have been sold this year than last year, evidence that demand is still waxing, not waning. To meet that demand, Atria’s lineup includes a pair of books about achieving bliss, Josh Radnor’s One Big Blissful Thing (Nov.) and Sean Meshorer’s The Bliss Experiment: 28 Days to Personal Transformation (May).

“We were all into happiness last year, but this year will be about bliss,” Curr says. “Happiness seems more temporary, dependent on external factors, but bliss is internally created.”

Also on the way are two February titles that Curr says point to where the New Age category is trending: Ptolemy Tompkins’s The Modern Book of the Dead: A Revolutionary Perspective on Death, the Soul, and What Really Happens in the Life to Come and Elisha Goldstein’s The Now Effect: How This Moment Can Change the Rest of Your Life. According to Curr, “What’s happening in spirituality is that it’s becoming more serious—more mainstream.”

Many publishers note the trend of New Age concepts being more widely embraced by a mainstream readership. Brenda Knight, associate publisher at Cleis Press/Viva Editions, also sees books incorporating approaches that are more welcoming to such readers, citing a number of “brain books” that bring together science with New Age philosophy and spirituality. She sees “an explosion of new thinking, new science, and new publishing about the brain—better living through brain chemistry.”

Coming in November is Viva’s The Inspired Life: Unleashing Your Mind’s Capacity for Joy by Susyn Reeve with Joan Breiner, which considers how the science of creating new mental pathways can help people deal with troubling life issues and find greater happiness. The publisher is planning what it hopes will be a widespread communal celebration of the title at 11:11 a.m. on November 11, when its joint campaign with the authors to create an “Inspiration Nation” culminates by encouraging people to purchase copies at that day and time.

Meanwhile, Little, Brown’s Spontaneous Happiness (Nov.) continues Andrew Weil, M.D.’s integrative approach to health and medical topics incorporating Eastern and Western philosophies, this time focusing on mental health. Executive editor Tracy Behar says, “Now that alternative medicine has gone mainstream as far as physical health is concerned, we’ll see it applied more and more to mental health.”

A slew of other titles bring the same sort of big-tent approach to physical and emotional well-being. From Simon and Schuster’s Free Press come Priscilla Warner’s Learning to Breathe: My Yearlong Quest to Bring Calm to My Life (Sept.) and Martha Beck’s Finding Your Way in a Wild New World: Reclaiming Your True Nature (Dec.). The many offerings from Inner Traditions/Bear & Company include Planetary Healing: Spirit Medicine for Global Transformation by Nicki Scully and Mark Hallert (Sept.), Max Popov’s Weight-Resistance Yoga: Practicing Embodied Spirituality, and, providing tips on reducing stress and dealing with illness and depression from an unusual source, New World Mindfulness: From t he Founding Fathers, Emerson, and Thoreau to Your Personal Practice by Donald McCown and Dr. Marc Micozzi(Dec.).

Perhaps unsurprisingly given the aging boomer population, several publishers are also bringing together similar nontraditional, alternative spirituality approaches with research and practical advice in the area of aging.

Gotham Books publisher William Shinker says that while the house isn’t doing as many New Age titles as formerly, the proposal for Aging as a Spiritual Practice: A Contemplative Guide to Growing Older and Wiser (Jan. 2012) by bestselling author and Zen Buddhist teacher Lewis Richmond had immediate appeal for his editorial team.

“We felt that given the shift in the demographics of the country, with the baby boomers turning 65, they’d be looking for a book like this,” says Shinker. The publisher is confident that the title will find a ready market, given Broadway Books’ experience with Richmond’s first book, Work as a Spiritual Practice, and healthy sales for the publisher’s own Jungian-focused book, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life by James Hollis (2006), which Shinker describes as “a very nice success.”

Focusing on a related topic is New World Library’s Leaning into Sharp Points: Practical Guidance and Nurturing Support for Caregivers by Stan Goldberg (Mar. 2012), which focuses on helping people cope in the difficult circumstance of caring for those they love as they face the end of life and related issues. And since this is the New Age category, after all, what about what comes after death? One of Llewellyn’s lead fall titles is Mark Anthony’s Never Letting Go: Heal Grief with Help from the Other Side (Oct.), which offers advice on how to connect with dead loved ones as a method of coping with loss.

In fact, the distance between books like Dr. Weil’s and Anthony’s beyond-the-grave tome help illustrate the crux of an ongoing controversy within the category—whether the New Age moniker has outlived its usefulness and should be replaced by the already-in-use “Mind Body Spirit” or something else entirely.

The debate over terminology isn’t going anywhere, not in a market with so many titles mashing up nontraditional “New Age” practices with mainstream topics, issues, and approaches—and when publishers don’t necessarily agree on the need for a change in the first place.

Tarcher editor-in-chief Mitch Horo-witz is himself a noted expert in the New Age field—not just as a longtime editor of related books who’s frequently consulted by various media outlets but as author of 2009’s Occult America: The Secret History of How Mysticism Shaped Our Nation. He encourages people to embrace the term New Age. “Everyone wants to run from it because it seems unserious or old hat, but the term has a genuine and noble pedigree—it means therapeutic spirituality. And it also has recognition among booksellers in a visceral way,” says Horowitz, adding that “publishers should stick with core terms and categories during times of change.”

Not that Tarcher isn’t embracing change, too. Later this year, the Penguin imprint will be rolling out a new subscription-based product that’s “platform agnostic and expands upon one of the imprint’s bestselling brands.” More details about the project, which is part of Penguin’s effort to expand its use of digital products and processes announced in August, will be revealed in October. In the meantime, the publisher is preparing for a flurry of activity related to the 20th anniversary of the seminal text The Artist’s Way by inspiration and creativity guru Julia Cameron. To mark the occasion, Cameron has written the first new installment to the Artist’s Way program line in over a decade, The Prosperous Heart: Creating a Life of “Enough”: it will be released right after Christmas, just in time for creative and fiscal resolutions. Tarcher will also publish two related gift sets in December and January, and will be hosting a national creativity contest and Artist’s Way group on the Internet.

Also in December, New World Library celebrates its own landmark anniversary with the publication of a 25th anniversary edition of Shakti Gawain’s Living in the Light: Follow Your Inner Guidance to Create a New Life and a New World. When New World published Gawain’s first book, Creative Visualization: Use the Power of Your Imagination to Create What You Want in Your Life in 1978, publisher Marc Allen says the company consisted solely of him and Gawain working part-time—sales for 1977 had totaled just $800. But by the time Living followed in 1986, the earlier title had already sold two million copies. Gawain’s own favorite of her works, Light has sold three million copies in English, and she has updated the text and provided a new preface for the anniversary edition.

Allen believes the New Age title isn’t outdated, but is a bit of a misnomer. “It’s a bit of an odd title because there’s nothing new in the New Age—it’s what Aldous Huxley called the Perennial Philosophy. There’s nothing new in it, but every generation needs to hear it rewritten, in their own words.”

There are, however, plenty of people whose opinions come down firmly on the other side of the terminology question. For instance, Amy Opperman Cash, publisher, marketing, at Larson Publications, says, “New Age as a term has been out for quite a while.” She acknowledges that coming up with an alternative title isn’t easy. Larson’s upcoming books are a good example of the category’s diversity, from Paul Brunton’s The Gift of Grace: Awakening to Its Presence (Oct.), a title that speaks to the core of the field, to Kathleen Damiani’s Molly O’Brien and the Mark of the Dragon Slayer (Nov.), a YA fantasy novel that weaves in New Age concepts.

John Hays, director of sales and marketing at Inner Traditions/Bear & Company, says the broad range of subcategories covered by the term is part of the reason a new one may be needed. He cites distinct facets of the field, such as spirituality and new science, ancient traditions (magic, ritual), ancient mystery and alternative history, sacred sex, and visionary plants/psychedelics, alongside books designed to appeal to mainstream self-help, psychology, and health readers.

“We wouldn’t call most of our books New Age, although they have what might be considered a New Age readership,” says Hays, adding that it can be a challenge for bookstores to steer new readers to titles. “Perhaps if we better describe the books contained there, more readers would find the book that’s right for them.”

Cofounder of Hampton Roads, Robert Friedman has been involved with New Age publishing since 1975 and last fall launched the new Rainbow Ridge book line distributed by Square One. He agrees with those who find the term New Age too limiting and says much of the material may indeed be getting lost as it is incorporated into other sections of the bookstore. He remembers trying to persuade the chains years ago to make a concerted effort to do shelf-talkers and keep related books in a central New Age/metaphysical section rather than shelving them in other categories.

As an example, he points to Rainbow Ridge’s November title, Dance of the Electric Hummingbird, a memoir by Patricia Walker about an out-of-body experience at a Sammy Hagar concert. “Where would they put that one?” asks Friedman. “It’s time to rethink and resection the way books in the New Age genre are presented and shelved.”

On the other hand, Llewellyn publicity director Steven Pomije says, “People still use the term New Age. In this industry and in trade publications, Mind Body Spirit is accurate for our numerous self-help–styled titles. Neither term, I think, aptly defines our paranormal titles, however.”

Those paranormal titles are among ones fueling a surge in e-book sales for Llewellyn, which has seen “near exponential” growth for its nonfiction e-books. Moving forward, the publisher plans to offer more short form e-books of 8,000–11,000 words on its most popular topics, priced below $2.99 and available for all the major devices. Its first e-book shorts—All About Auras and Remembering Past Lives, both by Carl Llewellyn Weschcke and Joe Slate—released this month, with All About Smudging by Margaret Ann Lembo and Spook E-Tales by Vivian Campbell due in October, and Real Estate Magic by Olivia Denmark in December.

According to Pomije, “Any e-book short also offers a great variety of opportunities to introduce topics to a new audience, cross-promote, and offer samples from related titles.” Of course, its traditional publishing program will continue to be the bulk of its business, with two more titles out this month: Deonna Kelli Sayed’s Paranormal Obsession: America’s Fascination with Ghosts & Hauntings, Spooks & Spirits and Ingrid P. Dean’s True Police Stories of the Strange & Unexplained.

Finally, for those who simply wish to understand topics such as wicca and neo-paganism better, Acorn Guild Press has a revised and expanded edition of Kerr Cuhulain’s The Law Enforcement Guide to Wicca out this month with an updated title, Pagan Religions: A Handbook for Diversity Training, 4th Ed. “As wicca and neo-paganism become more mainstream, there need to be books explaining these alternative spiritual traditions to nonpagans,” says publisher/editorial director Kel Winter. Winter recommends the handbook for “the media, social service organizations, educators, and law enforcement personnel, as well as practitioners.” It seems that even pagan practices are becoming less fringe than they used to be.

Everything's Coming Up Aliens

Several publishers say reader interest is increasing only for works dealing with the ever-present subjects of alien visitations and abductions, UFOs, and related phenomena.

One of the seminal works in this area, often credited with opening the larger conversation about alien encounters, is 1987’s Communion by Whitley Strieber. In that classic text, Strieber popularized the concept of aliens called “Grays” with large rounded heads, oversized oval eyes, and slender bodies, and revealed the details of his own abduction and encounters. Strieber’s oeuvre now includes more than 20 novels and nonfiction works, several of which have been made into movies (the most recent, The Day After Tomorrow, was based on The Coming Global Superstorm by Strieber and Art Bell).

In January, Strieber will revisit the topic he’s best known for in Solving the Communion Enigma: What Is to Come from Penguin’s Tarcher imprint. The book will expand his theories on alien intelligences to look at how they may be involved with such disconnected, unexplained events as crop circles, cattle mutilations, UFO sightings, and implants—including one that Strieber claims was found in his own body.

Tarcher editor-in-chief Mitch Horowitz says the decision to acquire the book was complicated, because he believed the subject needed to be handled “very delicately.” Horowitz encouraged Strieber to treat the book more in the memoir style of Communion than as a work of reporting, and the author did a total rewrite before the deal was struck.

“I place serious value in personal reports of anomalous experiences, provided they are written with verisimilitude and intellect,” says Horowitz. “The risk, however, is that writers and readers are tempted to rush into hard-and-fast certainties based on personal experiences. Whitley has avoided that—and strengthened the genre by sustaining and deepening its questions.”

Red Wheel/Weiser also has two notable entries on extraterrestrial topics coming from its Hampton Roads imprint. Paul von Ward’s We’ve Never Been Alone: A History of Extraterrestrial Intervention was published this month, and Freddy Silva’s Legacy of the Gods: The Origin of Sacred Sites and the Rebirth of Ancient Wisdom is due in October.

Red Wheel/Weiser publisher Jan Johnson describes the fall titles as mixing “New Age mythology and folklore with history,” and sees the renewed interest in the topic as no surprise. “Both the Vatican and the U.S. government are holding court about the presence of ETs in our midst,” she says.

When Simon and Schuster’s Atria division published The Secret in 2006, it would have been impossible to predict the phenomenon Rhonda Byrne’s book would become. Even visualizing a blockbuster, the expectations would probably have been a bit more modest than more than 20 million copies sold worldwide five years later. Soon—likely by December or January, predicts Atria publisher Judith Curr—The Secret will mark its 200th week on the New York Times bestseller list.

Apocalypse Maybe

The end of the Mayan calendar in December 2012—and the predicted end of the world as a result—has been a hot topic for several years. There were notably fewer 2012-related titles submitted this year, but books dealing with possible apocalypses aren’t likely to disappear anytime soon.

“On December 12, 2012, there will still be books to publish—and for our money the world isn’t going to end at the end of the Mayan calendar,” says Brenda Knight, associate publisher of Cleis Press/Viva Editions.

The publisher is so certain that in October it will publish John Michael Greer’s Apocalypse Not: Everything You Know About 2012, Nostradamus and the Rapture Is Wrong. The title tackles theories about the end of days from a historical and sociological perspective, and has proved popular with science and space museum stores in pre-pub orders. Knight notes that all the theories discussed have one thing in common: “None of them is true!”

Red Wheel/Weiser continues to see strong reader interest in the end-times, noting healthy sales for such backlist titles as Barbara Hand Clow’s The Alchemy of Nine Dimensions: Decoding the Vertical Axis, Crop Circles, and the Mayan Calendar and Drunvalo Melchizedek’s Serpent of Light: Beyond 2012. Coming from the Hampton Roads imprint are this month’s Surfing Aquarius: How to Ace the Wave of Change by Dan Furst, discussing the new era that will begin in 2012; Joseph Felder’s The Myth of the Great Ending: Why We’ve Been Longing for the End of Days Since the Beginning of Time (Mar.) explains what such predictions have to say about humanity.

Jan Johnson, Red Wheel/Weiser publisher, says, “I doubt there’s anyone in book publishing, bookselling, or conducting spiritual workshops and healing sessions who hasn’t heard of—and has their own take on—2012 predictions.”

For its part, Inner Traditions/Bear & Company offers a different take on apocalyptic change. Timothy Wylie’s The Return of the Rebel Angels: The Urantia Mysteries and the Coming of the Light (Aug.) provides angelic reassurance that “Armageddon has been canceled,” while previewing the large-scale transition on the way with the return of the fallen angels.