November 2024 Thankful For: Upward Trending Christian Book Sales

Guess what, there’s continuing good news about Christian book sales.

Religious book publishing revenue has been going up for a while now, and something I read this week suggests the experts expect it to continue in this vein.

According to a story this week in Publisher’s Weekly (PW), “religious press sales continue to be the fastest growing segment of the trade publishing business.” This was also true in 2023.

That statement and some more detail about 2024 performance were part of a story about a major publishing house announcing expansion of their Christian brands. Referencing the growing sales in religious books, they are creating a new division because of the strength of Christian book sales.

Major corporations always study and run the numbers before launching new ventures. So, I pay attention when I see a story like that one. And I can’t speak to how this religious book publishing growth fits into the larger book publishing business.

But it got me looking a little further. Stats were just announced through August of this year, continuing the upward trend also evidenced in 2023.  In 2023 I learned, from previous PW stories, religious publishing achieved a 7.8% increase over 2022, according to data gathered by the Association of American Publishers.

Those stats also align nicely with their story reporting a Parable survey of more than 200 Christian retailers who also reported an 8% increase in sales in 2023 over 2022.

Articles associated with this trend do discuss the huge part of this played by the sales of Bibles, but that’s not the only thing going on.

Of course, increasing Bible sales is also good news about the Good News for more reasons than just business ones.

Plus the news about the growth in some stores was also encouraging.

We remain a fan of Christian retail stores and cheer them on (and shop at them) whenever we can. We’ve written about that here before.

Of course, for those of us old enough to remember when one could only shop in real life and didn’t hear terms like “brick and mortar” stores to differentiate from online stores, there’s still lament about the changes in the industry.

We’ve watched the number of bookstores decline, and big Christian book chains like Southern Baptist’s Lifeway chain, for example, close all of their retail locations and move completely online.

But the lack of brick-and-mortar store locations apparently isn’t hurting book sales.

And let’s also be reminded of another fact: it’s been almost 30 years since Amazon started selling books online.  I’m positive I didn’t know it was going on way back then, but Amazon started selling books, their first merchandise category, in July 1995.

However books get sold, publishers keep publishing, and readers keep reading – and buying — new books.

I’m sharing this with you to encourage you as a Christian writer or author, and also to highlight where I got this news.

Almost all of the above referenced articles and facts were gleaned from Publisher’s Weekly (PW). PW is to the book industry what the Wall Street Journal is to business. If you aren’t already familiar with it, or haven’t been on their website lately, you should drop by and dig in.

PW also has a division and programs for indie authors called BookLife, also worth checking out.

A vibrant business community of authors and publishing industry folks whose news is provided by PW, and Christian (and other religious category) book sales leading the pack. Much to be thankful for.

And that’s this week’s Thankful For topic.