by Jay Hartman
Happy April! It’s hard to believe we’re going into the fourth month of 2022 already, when it seems as if we just got done packing away winter holiday decorations.
However, while many people think of December as the high point of holiday celebrations, April is actually a month that’s chock-full of religious celebration. April 3 brings us the Muslim holiday of Ramadan. Hindu celebration Rama Navami pops up on April 10, as does Palm Sunday for Christian celebrants. The next thing you know we have Good Friday on April 15, our Jewish friends celebrate Passover on the 16, and Easter arrives on April 17. This doesn’t even include a number of other related holidays that occur during the month.
The reason I bring this up is because there’s a market out there that doesn’t get a lot of the recognition it should: the religion/inspiration market. Regardless of what you particularly feel about organized religion or spirituality (and hey, we’re going to include humanism, Satanism, Flying Spaghetti Monster, Cthulu, and any other belief system), there is no doubt a large market exists for this material and not enough service given to the readers who look for it.
According to Statista, in 2021 religious book sales generated $705M in revenue, and the category has continued to grow every year since 2017. Even more astonishing is that unlike its other category compatriots, the religious-book category does better in hardcover than other formats. This trend continues even with the closing of the Christian-book chains Family Christian Bookstores and Lifeway.
As publishers we distribute faith-based publisher eLectio Publishing around the world, and we saw the demand for the material. eLectio’s work isn’t hardcore religion or Bibles or books of that sort; they dedicate a majority of the catalog to inspirational works. The fiction they produce doesn’t include “naughty bits” like sex scenes or curse words, but keeps it clean and accessible for all readers.
One thing to ask yourself as an author “am I reaching as wide an audience as possible?” Maybe you have some material that represents the Jewish experience during the Holocaust. You might have a romance novel where the two people meet in their Amish community. It could be a cozy mystery that takes place during Lent. That’s before we ever get to nonfiction categories. People want to read about people like themselves. They may not know your title will give them that experience.
If you need real-life examples of bestsellers from the religion and inspiration category, there’s the Chicken Soup for the Soul books, legendary Christian historical-fiction authors Janette Oke and Francine Rivers, Jewish Book Award Winner (and an Untreed Reads author) Gloria Goldreich, Elie Wiesel’s Night, still taught in schools, and so many others.
You’ll notice none of these examples are fire-and-brimstone authors/titles or preachy works or particularly heavy on the religious aspect. The category may be called “Religion and Inspiration,” but rest assured the driving force of sales is the inspirational end of things. Religion often plays a role in the books to help deliver the message, but the most successful books in the category use it as a base and develop from there.
So, take a look at your titles and ask yourself if your book fits any one of the huge number of BISAC subcategories of Religion. If you want to position your book as historical fiction or cozy mystery, you may miss out on marketing to this important demographic eager to embrace your work.
Looking to get The Publisher Perspective? Send your questions to jhartman@untreedreads.com with TPP in your subject line. If your question is used, we’ll send you a free ebook from Untreed Reads.
Jay A. Hartman, editor-in-chief at Untreed Reads Publishing, founded Untreed Reads to promote ebooks with an emphasis on independent authors and publishers. He’s written about the ebook industry for fifteen years and previously served as content editor for KnowBetter.com, one of the internet’s oldest sites reporting on ebooks and epublishing.
