'Slap a bonnet on the cover'

Almost any popular discussion of Amish romance novels -- the very successful evangelical-produced fiction with Old Order Amish settings and characters -- includes mention of the iconic covers. These are the "novels with covers adorned with beautiful, bonneted women and buggies," as one reporter put it. Or, as another observer wrote more elaborately, these are fictions with

covers each backlit with the golden glow of God’s everlasting presence and bucolic perfection: wheat fields, corn fields, rivers and barns beneath cerulean or honey skies. A plain-clothed woman in some state of muted emotional duress gazed into the middle distance beneath her white bonnet

Famously, a marketing expert at a Christian publishing house told Newsweek "You slap a bonnet on the cover and double the sales."

It's probably the apparently ironic contrast between the crass commercialism of such covers and the alternative to commercialism represented by the covers that attracts such interest from those who don't read Amish romance. The incongruity can be jarring.

The incongruity can also be really interesting.

Valerie Weaver-Zercher's excellent new book on Amish romance fiction (a book which also features a stock photo of an Amish woman on the cover) notes that these novels are both products of "hypercapitalism" and serve to create a space for those who want an alternative to that hypercaptialism. Part of what readers do with these novels is imagine what it would be like to live at a different, calmer, pace. But to do that, of course, also means buying and consuming the novels, commercial practices that entail participation in the whirring, speeding system of commodity production.

Weaver-Zercher writes that the pace at which these books are produced and consumed has a very direct effect on some of the iconic covers. One model, dressed to look Amish, can appear on as many as 10 different covers.

She writes, "Given their highly visual distinctives, such as dress and transportation, the Amish are particularly ripe for commodification. The emblems of Amish life -- coverings, capes, beards, hats, quilts, buggies -- render them useful in a consumer culture." These covers -- "young models with plucked eyebrows," Weaver-Zercher writes, who "sport Amish garb and gaze into the near distance" -- become free-floating cultural signifiers, signifying a respite from and alternative to consumer culture, which can itself be consumed.

There's only very little information readily available about the actual production of these covers, but the little that's out there is fascinating.

The model on the cover of a re-release of a Beverly Lewis novel, for example, recently talked about how she got into the business:

In 2009, a modeling agent approached [Claire DeBerg] at a wedding and asked her, 'What's your ethnicity?' DeBerg, who is Cherokee, says she is asked this question a lot. 

The agent was looking for 'ethnically vague models' and thought DeBerg fit the bill. 
DeBerg could not find a reason not to try modeling, so she agreed to get some headshots taken and have the agency represent her. 



DeBerg, who happens to be Mennonite and taught English for a while at the University of Northern Iowa, has modeled for Target, Walgreens, and H&R Block. She told The Mennonite magazine that the photographer who shot her picture specializes in Amish book covers, and the woman who did her hair and make-up was an expert in Amish makeup and hairstyles.

The strangeness of all this is obviously worth a laugh. But it's also worth thinking about: this is an example of the production of an imagined alternative to the culture created by that production. The internal contradiction in that results, in some contexts, in a jarring aesthetic experience, but it also, in other contexts, makes a potentially powerful cultural practice possible.

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Jerry Jenkins' vanity press

Jerry B. Jenkins is the consummate hack.

The man knows the Christian fiction market and he works it.

I'm not very interested in the moral and aesthetic disapproval that's normally implied by calling a writer a hack. I am quite interested in how book markets work, though, and especially how the Christian fiction market works. So I'm very interested in hacks. Hacks consciously and actively respond to the market as they find it. In some ways, they are just more pure. They're untroubled by fantasies that artistic quality correlates to commercial success, unbothered by the sense of aesthetic justice that insists artistic quality should correlate to commercial success. Hacks write for the world as it actually is.

Hacks write like it's their job.

They know that writing is their job, and they embrace that, and embrace all the marketing analysis and economic acumen necessary to succeed at that job. Jenkins, for example.

"I make no apologies for writing for the masses," he once said. "I am one of them."

He has always had an eye for the markets with mass potential, such as Christian children's series and Christian athlete biographies. He has authored or co-authored 220 books, by my count, or about 3.4 for every year he's been alive. Fourteen of those books have been New York Times bestsellers. He accepted the deal to co-author Left Behind where others would have balked (and did balk), and he wrote the first book of the series in under 24 days. Left Behind sold as many copies as Catcher in the Rye, and it's never been required reading for high schoolers. Jenkins stayed on for 12 more books, plus three prequels, and he cooperated with lots of spin-offs, including a series of 40 children's books. He was pretty consistently smart about how and where to push the franchise -- in one case, at least, smarter even than the people who actually made the marketing decisions.

So, when Jenkins takes up a new project, it's likely that that says something about the way the Christian fiction market is evolving. He's not necessarily innovative, but he's paying attention to the market, and responding to it. When that project, further, is explained specifically as a response to market conditions, it's especially worth noting.

His new project is a vanity press, Christian Writers Guild Publishing. They will be charging would-be authors nearly $10,000 to put their works in print.

Thus speaketh the consummate hack: this is the fiction market now.

His explanation for the vanity press -- which he doesn't call a vanity press -- is that authors now need well-established "platforms" to get published, and that the $9,995 will help aspiring writers get that platform. For the cost, Jenkins' group provides proof-reading, cover design, e-book formatting, an ISBN number, and a package of promotional material, "everything the writer needs for a successful book launch."

The vanity press does not itself sell the book, nor promote it, nor take any financial risk or responsibility for actual marketability, which is pretty much the definition of a vanity press.

Jenkins told Publisher's Weekly that "good, passionate authors are ignored because they're unknown," but that they can "prove their worthiness in the market."

There are a number of self-published authors who have became very successful that are kind of the model being promoted here. They chose an alternative route, built a fan base, "proved their worthiness," and became very successful. One noted recent example is Hugh Howey, who's self-published e-book sic-fi series Wool has become a phenomena. He reportedly has made as much as $40,000 a month while selling his e-books for as little as $1.99 apiece. Another is E.L. James, whose cultural juggernaut, Fifty Shades of Gray, started out as Twilight fan-fiction, available free online, and was then published by a vanity press, and was then picked up by a traditional publisher. In the Christian fiction market, the main example of this route to market success is William Paul Young. The first printing of Young's book, The Shack, was an edition of 15 -- photocopied at Office Depot. About one million copies of the book were sold before the rights were bought by a mainstream publisher.

There's a difference is a difference between self-publishing and a vanity press, but Jenkins' is kind of eliding the distinction. The promotional material for the press positions it as an aid to self-publication. Jenkins' claim is that his company can help aspiring writers follow this path to popular success, mostly by helping them produce a product that isn't as obviously terrible as most self-published fiction is. A decent edit job, a good cover, and a little marketing advice could make all the difference. Or so it seems is Jenkins' proposition.

That's the hope that costs $9,995.

Jenkins, of course, is not the only one who sees that the shrinking book market is accompanied by an expanding market of aspiring authors willing to pay for the chance to see their words in print. The Christian publisher Thomas Nelson -- owned by NewsCorp, FOX New's parent company -- has also recently launched a vanity press. Now, manuscripts rejected by the publisher may be referred to the WestBow division, where would-be authors can pay to have their books printed by the vanity press division of a major publisher. There's also a Catholic vanity press, which promises to provide "proper checks" to "ensure that authors' works are free from doctrinal or moral error," but which appears to charge extra for editing.

Many observers are skeptical of the self-publishing and vanity press models. Michael Ann Dobbs, at io9, writes that, "Once a sign of slightly deluded grandiosity, self-publishing now looks like a reasonable move for writers," but, still, even after these very public successes,

self-publishing landscape threatens to become a vast wasteland for authors too. They have few ways to get recognition and little to no support. They risk spending years trying to sell books no one seems to want, when a good editor or few more drafts could have made the books successful.

The numbers are pretty dismal. The average book published by a vanity press sells between 40 and 200 copies, according to Jane Smith of How Publishing Really Works. Self Publishing Resources reported that one vanity press with 10,000 titles had seen an average of 75 copies sold per title. If the would-be authors that use Jenkins' service have similar sales, they would pay between $50 and $200 per copy sold, recouping just a few dollars with each sale.

A survey of self-published authors found that over half of them never even sold $500 worth of books.

None of the reports on Jenkins' vanity press or the press' promotional material give any indication for how things would be different for the aspiring authors who use this service. It is true that those who get help with editing, cover design, etc., generally sell more copies than those who don't. Not $9,995 worth of more copies, though. Even if a lot of Jenkins' authors do better than half the self-published authors out there now and sell, say, 168 digital copies on Amazon at $2.99 each and make a gross of $500, they'll pay Amazon 30 percent of that, net $350, and still be more than $9,000 in the red.

This is a vanity press, too, so all the burden of selling will fall on the author, which has led some to call this whole thing a scam.

Victoria Strauss of Writer Beware doesn't use that word, but seems a little flabbergasted by the audacity of this enterprise. There's little to nothing in the way of a plan that would vault one into the ranks of a Hugh Howley or an E.L. James or a William Paul Young. She writes: "Can [Christian Writers Guild Publishing] really be expecting authors to pay nearly $10,000 for a path to publication that doesn't even get their books into retail channels? .... Even with distribution, $9.995 is a hell of a lot of money." According to Strauss, Jenkins' vanity press is expensive even when compared to other vanity presses.

The man who has himself has has more than 200 titles published by traditional publishers responded to such criticism when asked about it by a reporter from Christianity Today. He said the cost is "reasonable only for those who can afford it and want the quality we offer."

And it seems reasonable, of course, to those who believe that this is their way to prove their worthiness to the market, the money understood as a sign of good faith and fealty to the book market's gods.

There's not a market for all the Christian fiction books that are being written right now. But there is, clearly, a market of aspiring novelists willing to pay for the chance, the promise, the hope, of breaking into the little market that there is. Readers may not be consumers, but with a vanity press, books aren't the product, authors' ability to call themselves authors is the product. And there's a burgeoning market for that. This is the first conclusion about the market for Christian fiction that can be drawn from the new project of the always-saavy Jerry Jenkins: there's money to be made off of those who want to be the next Jerry Jenkins.

There's also a constriction of opportunities for traditional publishing. Publishers are just making fewer bets on the unknown, these days. Christian fiction publishers especially.

This isn't entirely new. It's always been the case that Christian fiction presses have been incredibly cautious and tended to put their resources into known commodities. Series have always been popular, new names have always struggled for recognition, and there's always been strong support for established genre fictions and a great leeriness of anything that doesn't have an established audience (i.e., market). But with the book industry as a whole suffering, those tendencies have become even more acute.

Add to that the third thing that can be concluded from Jenkins' latest project, the reality that's inducing angst among publishers and aspiring authors alike: it's just not clear that there's a standard model for success in publishing, anymore. As late as the '90s, it seemed clear what worked. There were paths, routes. Popular fiction publishing seemed like a business with rules, and there was a belief it was possible to know who had the potential to be the next Steven King, the next Danielle Steel, and possible to know what to do with a book that had that potential to launch it into the upper echelons of bestsellerdom.

Jenkins, for one, knew what those rules were, and followed those rules, and reaped his success. He embraced his inner hack, and was willing to do what he had to do to move books.

Now it seems like no one knows what the rules really are. Those who are willing to offer a sacrifice to the market don't know what sort of sacrifice they should be making. If someone tells them the required sacrifice is $10,000, that's at least can seem like a definitive answer.

The bestselling authors of the last decade on the other hand don't seem like they offer models for success, but really seem to be flukes. Stephanie Myer's story is the most traditional, but even it depends on a bit of an accident, where the person who reviewed the manuscript for the agent didn't realize the book was significantly too long and should have been rejected out of hand. E.L. James' path to success is stranger and less likely to serve as a decent model than Meyer's; Steig Larson's success doesn't really seem easily emulatable; and Hugh Howley does not even appear to know how he did what he did, much less what someone else should do if they wanted to do what he did. It all seems very anarchic, right now, like no one knows exactly what one has to do to get a chance to prove worthy of the market.

Which is why some will willingly do what a consummate hack says, and pay that hack $10,000, since he at least has a history of knowing the market and really working it.

Even if "working it" now means selling a different sort of fiction.

But to see how he does it is to see something state of the Christian fiction market right now.

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Abstracts: regarding contemporary evangelical cultural engagements

The Kincade Case for Kincade: The Painter of Light’s Arguments for His Art 

When Thomas Kincade died in 2012, his images hung in one out of every twenty American homes. His works sold for up to $250 million annually, and were regularly dismissed as kitsch. Kincade, however, continually argued with the gatekeepers of the art establishment about the importance and aesthetic value of his work. He positioned himself as peer to Daimen Hirst and Jeff Koons, and also Walt Disney, refusing to accept that popularity was antithetical to artistic value, or that his ideological embrace of sentimentality meant he could never be taken seriously. This paper traces those career-long struggles.

Previous scholars -- notably in Thomas Kincade: The Artist in the Mall, edited by Alexis L. Boylan -- reevaluated Kincade by considering him in the context of conceptual and transgressive art, problematizing distinctions between art and kitsch. This paper seeks to further that reevaluation, demonstrating that Kincade’s own arguments should be taken seriously.

Explaining the Market for Christian Fiction

Christian fiction occupies a peculiar place in twenty first century America. Despite significant commercial success and these novels’ regular best-seller status, people are still surprised Christian fiction exists. Readers puzzle over reasons for Christian fiction genres on websites such as Goodreads, and express shock in one-star reviews on Amazon.com. Cultural critics psychoanalyze Christian fiction readers, speculating on their pathologies and on what the popularity of these novels says about contemporary American.

This paper proposes a better answer to the question of why Christian fiction exists. Examining historical developments in twentieth and twenty-first century book markets and critically examining the evolution of what Robert Darnton called books’ “communications circuit,” i.e., processes of authorship, publication, distribution, sales and consumption, the argument is made that the Christian fiction readership should be demystified and “detotalized.” Shifts in consumer capitalism, rather than readers’ religious pathologies, account for the market for Christian fiction.

Re-considering Demonization in Popular Spiritual Warfare Fiction

Demonization marks the end of the possibility of reasonable discourse. When opponents are characterized as demonic and disagreements are not thought of as matters of method or degree but rather as about ultimate fealty to forces of good and evil, dialogue is rendered impossible.

The prominence and success of spiritual warfare fiction in the last 35 years, then, would seem to be another sign of the intractability of America’s “culture war.” In this wildly popular genre of evangelical Christian fiction, cultural conflicts are depicted as the machinations of Satanic forces. The metaphor of “demonization” is imagined in the most literal ways. Millions of readers avidly consume these novels, where demons are elaborately realized and contemporary social reality is re-rendered as spiritual battle. Imaginations formed by such fictions, it would seem, would be completely closed to compromise. As journalist Daniel Radosh wrote, speaking on behalf of liberals, “common ground will never be possible because they don't object to specific ideas that can be reframed or adjusted. They object to Satan, whose bidding we are doing.”

Counterintuitively, this paper argues that this genre of evangelical fiction doesn’t foreclose discourse, but opens new possibilities. The paper closely examines representations of the demonic realms of cultural conflicts in the popular fiction of contemporary Pentecostal novelists such as Frank Peretti, Tosca Lee and Linda Rios Brooks, and considers them in the context of theories of ideology and ideological conflict. Investigating specific instances of the conceptualization of spiritual warfare enables a more nuanced and thorough understanding of the function of imagined demons, demonstrating the multiple ways the fictive depictions of demonic spheres serve to move readers to more open and even empathetic engagement with those with whom they disagree. Fictions of demonization mark out a possible space for dialogue, rather than obdurate disagreement.

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What can be learned from repeated misprints in journal citations

Mistakes, misprints, and typos are easy: a transposition of characters can happen with the slip of fingers;  a word can be added or dropped from a quote with a shift of the eye. These things happen.

The way these things happen, their frequency and their patterns, may also be important.

As M.V. Simkin and V.P. Roychowdhury argue in a 2002 paper, "misprints in scientific citations should not be discarded as a mere happenstance, but, similar to Freudian slips, analyzed."

In that paper, pointed out recently by demographer Conrad Hackett and historian Yoni Applebaum, claims that mistakes made in scientific citations can tell us something about academics' work. Simkin and Roychowdhury, from the University of California, Los Angeles, look at the way certain mistakes in citations are repeated, copied, and spread. They identified one paper, for example, that had been mis-cited 196 times. Out of those 196 citations that did not exactly, correctly reproduce the information of the original paper, 78 made exactly the same mistake. There were identical misprints in more than half of the cases where there were misprints. That is statistically improbable, according to Simkin and Roychowdhury, if everyone were reading the original paper. It's just not plausible that 78 different papers made exactly the same mistake.

They argue that these 78 identical misprints of a single source are, rather, reproductions of a mistake.

Simkin and Roychowdhury reported that they found a dozen cases of this, and from these sets of identical mistakes they attempt to work out a method to mathematically estimate the percentage of people who have not read the work that they cite. Their conclusion:

Up to 80% of those who cite popular academic journal articles have never actually read them bit.ly/14FSf3H (h/t @conradhackett)
— Yoni Appelbaum (@YAppelbaum) February 17, 2013

There are some questions raised by this conclusion. The paper is ambiguous on some points. For example, is it reasonable to think that accurate citations are being reproduced at the same rate as inaccurate citations? Also, does it hold that because one oft-repeated citation was re-cited without examination of the original that that is also true for less common citations? If it's true that 80 percent of those who cited a particularly popular paper didn't actually read that paper, does that mean that, therefore, 80 percent of all citations are second or third hand? Or that 80 percent of authors always do this? It's not clear to me that there's an argument that these particular cases are representative of all cases of citations. There are good reasons to be skeptical of a strong version of this claim, such as,

In journal articles, 80% of authors include citations to articles they probably haven't read, suggests study. bit.ly/14FSf3H
— Conrad Hackett (@conradhackett) February 17, 2013

This is a very bold interpretation of the evidence being offered. It is not a misrepresentation of the authors' arguments, but it's nevertheless a very strong claim that may not be completely supported by the study.  A more cautious interpretation of Simkin and Roychowdhury's argument might be that there is a class of citations that are copied and reproduced by scholars who don't take the time to search out the original source.

If one sets aside the question of whether or not these citations were copied without consulting the original, and thinks about this research as just examining how citations are propagated, a stronger and more important conclusion emerges. This is the conclusion that Simkin and Roychowdhury reach in a later paper on the same subject. There, they claim "Our analysis of misprint propagation provides the evidence that citation copying dominates the dynamics of the network of scientific papers" (emphasis original).

There may or may not be evidence that eight out of 10 journal article authors are not doing due diligence with as many as eight out of 10 of their sources, but the way misprints are reproduced does demonstrate something important about the way information spreads.

The more apt metaphor for these misprints that are being reproduced might be genetic mutations. Simkin and Roychowdhury describe the errors as Freudian slips, but that's not quite right. A slip of the tongue may reveal much, but it's not repeated and reproduced.

The suggestion implicit in these studies is that these mistakes are important, but not that they're important in and of themselves, necessarily, but important in how they demonstrate the functioning of information networks. What is visible, with these repeated mistakes and misprints, is the way that academic information is not distributed in a way that's simply linear and unidirectional. Units of information, represented by citations, are not actually, mostly, passed from the original source to a recipient, but from a source to multiple recipients, who are then also sources for other recipients, in a multidirectional, webbed process.

As Simkin has elsewhere argued: "a paper that already was cited is likely to be cited again, and after it is cited again it is even more likely to be cited in the future."

To a certain extent, this is obvious. After all, in our own era of techno-social networks, the operations of some networks are readily apparent. It's easy to see that Conrad Hackett's tweet about this paper was retweeted more than 30 times, and one can trace a transmission line quite simply, from, say, this blog post to Yoni Applebaum's tweet to Hackett's. This is how the data from a paper published more than a decade ago spreads. While it's less apparent that the 32 journal articles that cite this 2002 paper about citation also can by this information in this fashion, it's plausible to expect that similar sorts of networks were at work.

Despite the common appearance of such networks, though, and the apparent ways that information is distributed, i.e., reproduced, it's commonly forgotten.

One way that this is ignored in my own area of study is that readers, in my case specifically readers of contemporary Christian fiction, are thought of as singular. There are assumptions of isolation: readers reading what they read all by themselves, individuals, completely detached from any social processes. This isn't always true, but it's often the case that the ways in which readers are networked and connected are ignored. There's still a persistent practice of thinking of texts as transmissions of information from the author to the reader, in a simply, linear, unidirectional process.

A fuller understanding of what has to happen for an individual reader to read a text can reveal a lot of detail that would otherwise by mystified.

As Robert Darnton has written, there is a "communications circuit," a cycle through which books, and also more generally texts, "come into being and spread through society." Darnton argues that the history of a text should be broadened to include not just the author and the reader, but the author, the publisher, the printer, the shipper, the bookseller, and the readers. None of these agents are acting in isolation, as kind of pure individuals. When a reader reads, all of these other agents are also at work. The reader is always part of these social contexts and processes, these networks -- though, Darnton notes, "Reading remains the most difficult stage to study in the circuit that books follow" -- and also there are networks of readers.

The dynamics of such networks, as Simkin and Roychowdhury say, often dominate, which is to say they go a long way in determining who reads and how.

This is true, too, for academic readers, and can be traced in the way academic information is distributed. The reproduction and propagation of misprinted citations is one interesting way to see that.

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E-books & the changing market for Christian fiction

The data on digital books, the market for e-books and e-book readers, is kind of conflicted at the moment. Prognosticating the future of reading is for the most part futile, anyway, but the tea leaves right now are especially mysterious.

Sales of e-readers dropped by about 36 percent, apparently due to the popularity of tablets and devices that do more than reading, leading some industry experts to predict the waning of the Kindle moment.

The rate of e-book buying has also slowed. The market's soft. About a third of those who read e-books haven't bought one in the last 12 months. This might be because they haven't read the ones that are already on their digital devices. An analyst talking to the New York Times called it the "overloaded night stand" effect: "someone isn't going to buy any more books until they make a dent in reading the ones they've already acquired."

On the other hand, the percentage of Americans owning an e-reader went up in the last year, from 10 percent to 19 percent, and the percentage who owned any kind of device that can be used for reading digital books increased by 15 points, so now more than one third of Americans could read e-books if they wanted.

Which they do: as of November 2012, about 30 percent of people who read had read an e-book in the last 12 months.

I don't know what to make of that. What's happening or what's going to happen. It's not clear whether the whole trend has crested or whether, as others say, the digital book future is just beginning.

The market, however, has already changed the way people read and what people read. The effects can be seen in the market for Christian fiction, which looks different now than it it did in 2007, and different in ways that can be directly linked to digital books.


For one thing, in the last five years, the sorts of Christian fiction that are available, the genres and sub genres, has dramatically diversified. The market has opened up so that, for instance, a novel about Reformed Christians on an alien planet in the future fighting a guerrilla war to defend "New Geneva" against invading Khlisti, a new religion described as "incorporating revamped Marxism, Islam and a dash of New Age spirituality," can now not only get published, it can reach number nine on Amazon's chart for science fiction sales. As the author of that book said, "The advent of e-books changed everything."

For another thing, in the last five years, the sorts of people reading Christian fiction has diversified. Where once only a dedicated customer could have found Christian fiction at a special store devoted to evangelical products, now people are stumbling across these books, picking them up (virtually speaking) on a whim, reading them without knowing really what they are or what they are about. This can be seen in the backlash against Christian fiction's lack of a label, though presumably not everyone who found themselves surprised to be reading Christian fiction was angry about it.

Both of these changes -- diversifying readership and diversifying genres -- can be traced the change in the ways e-books are sold.

As NPR's Zoe Chace reports:

The price of an e-book isn't fixed the way it is with physical books. Ten years ago, a publisher would have sent out its books to the bookstore with the price stamped on the cover. After that, it was done — the publisher couldn't put it on sale to sell more books.

'The exciting thing about digital books is that we actually get to test and price differently,' [Sourcebook President Dominique] Raccah says. 'We can even price on a weekly basis.' Once publishers have this tool, the ability to adjust prices in an instant, they can do whatever they want with that tool — like use it to get publicity. That's what Little, Brown did with presidential historian Robert Dallek's book on John F. Kennedy, An Unfinished Life.

In the middle of November, Little, Brown dropped the price from $9.99 to $2.99 for 24 hours — the digital equivalent of a one-day-only sale. 'That sparks sales; it gets people talking about it,' says Terry Adams, a publisher with Little, Brown. 'You've just expanded the market.'

Dropping the price of An Unfinished Life did get people's attention. 'Here, we had an opportunity to increase the audience,' Adams says. The book — originally published in 2003 — launched itself back onto the best-seller list. And because Little, Brown could raise the price again, it wasn't stuck with a money loser.

This kind of promotion leads to discovery, something that used to just happen in brick and mortar bookstores. But with fewer of those around, publishers are using price to create discovery.

That strategy has been very popular with Christian fiction publishers. It's not uncommon to see whole lists of evangelical novels being sold on Amazon for $2.99, $.99, or even being given away in a promotional blitz.

Such strategies have changed the shape of Christian fiction, as the genres adjust to the market and make use of the market that's there. In the past, the Christian fiction market has taken the specific shape it had because of other developments in how books are produced and distributed. Christian romance emerged as a distinct genre only after a distribution network of retail outlets was organized, catering specifically to evangelicals, and especially evangelical women. Christian fiction only breached bestseller lists and broad cultural recognition after big box retailers such as Wal-Mart began carrying Christian fiction titles such as Left Behind and The Shunning, embracing the idea that buying such books was act of cultural identification that left customers more strongly allied with the cultural politics of the corporation.

Digital books, Kindle and Amazon, have likewise transformed the market, so what Christian fiction is, and who reads it, and how many, have been changed by how books are sold.

These latest developments to the market may well also determine the shape of the Christian fiction market in the future. How, of course, remains to be seen, but then, even the ways that market developments of the past have already had an influence on the markets for Christian fiction is only very poorly understood.

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The variety of Christian fiction

The current variety of Christian fiction is illustrated pretty well in the Library Journal's list of the year's five best.

There's an Amish romance, though the review calls it a "fresh take on an overcrowded genre," two historical romances', one set in Tudor times and the other on the Titanic, a Christian horror novel, and an apocalyptic/CIA novel.

That might still seem rather limited -- Christian fiction authors of more speculative works, such as sci fi and horror, certain complain about the constraints of the market -- but it was only a decade ago that an organization with a name like American Christian Fiction Writers only served romance novelists.

Update:
Another year-end list, from a LifeWays Christian Stores' book buyer, shows the variety to be found even in what is still, broadly speaking, the romance genre. via Carole.

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Christian book covers

The Evangelical Christian Publisher's association has announced the finalists for the 2012 cover design awards. Most seem to me ... underwhelming. Some are very bad. There's certainly a clear preference for visual puns and over-literal interpretations.

I'm not an expert at these things. Perhaps the above, for example, does what it's supposed to do in a bookstore, catches attention and communicates a basic idea very succinctly. I can't help but feel, though, that such covers communicate also a deep disrespect for the intended audience.

The very worst of the nominated covers:

Presumably such dreck actually helps sales, though.

Update: A summary of the marketing research behind these designs can be found here.

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