Since 9/11, Americans have entered into two wars, witnessed a devastating tsunami in Asia, learned the inconvenient truth about global warming and watched the Middle East erupt in violence. Given all the chaos out there, it's no surprise that Americans are tempted to look inward, turning to the Mind/Body/Spirit shelf for books that promise comfort and individual enlightenment. The question is: At a time when Americans could use a heavy dose of political awareness and global understanding, do these books help readers become better citizens, or just help them feel better?

In Selling Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion (Routledge, 2005), Jeremy Carrette and Richard King argue that the mind/body/spirit industry is privatizing and commodifying Eastern religious practices and texts like the Tao Te Ching. "New Age Capitalists," according to Carrette and King, are erasing the ancient religion and philosophy from these sources and repackaging them for profit. Even more disturbing, these repackaged products are lulling consumers into a stupor while Western political powers rage forward, unchecked.

The mind/body/spirit industry produces books and other products that act, say Carette and King, "like Prozac and give the impression of making life better, while hiding the real underlying problems of society."

Yet publishers who specialize in mind/ body/spirit titles argue that their books do help equip readers to tackle the world's problems.

Why Self-Help Leads to Other-Help

Consider Julie Fisher-McGarry's Be the Change You Want to See in the World (Conari Press, Nov.), which shows how transforming daily habits—recycling, for example—ripples out to affect the world. "Fisher-McGarry gets readers first to think about how living green is good for the self, then shows people why what's good for the self is also good for the planet," explains Jan Johnson, publisher for Red Wheel, Weiser Books and Conari Press. "Our books help people know more about themselves and better understand their place in the world," adds Johnson, who offers as another example Urgent Message from Mother: Gather the Women to Change, Save the World by Jean Shinoda Bolen (2005).

New World Library editors look for books that get beyond the personal to address global issues, says president and publisher Marc Allen—for example, The Power of Partnership: Seven Relationships That Will Change Your Life by Riane Eisler (2002), which starts with personal partnerships, then argues that partnership on many levels is the key to solving global problems. New World Library hoped that Eisler's book might compete with the bestselling The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenmentby Eckhart Tolle (1999). But Allen acknowledges that sales have been disappointing, indicating that not all readers are interested in books that nudge them to look beyond their own problems. "We've seen lots of submissions of books about the environment and activism, but it's a trick to get these books to sell well," he says.

"Activism is not the focus of the genre, and self-help and mind/body/spirit books should not tell people what to do," says Jill Kramer, editorial director at Hay House, though she cites the forthcoming Four Acts of Personal Power: How to Heal Your Past and Create a Positive Future by Denise Linn (Dec.) as a book that talks about community activism. For Kramer, mind/body/spirit books are not about doing but about being. "They are about making yourself the healthiest, best, most compassionate, loving person you can be, with the understanding that once you achieve this kind of state, then the world becomes a more compassionate place by you being in it." Hay House also published two memoirs this year it hopes will increase empathy—Spiraling Through the School of Life: A Mental, Physical, and Spiritual Discoveryby Diane Ladd and Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust by Immaculée Ilbagiza.

The mother of the New Age genre, Llewellyn, champions the idea that if one first transforms the self, then he or she is able to make a bigger difference in the rest of the world. "Most of the books at Llewellyn have practical applications. Our longest-lived annual, The Moon Sign Book, first published in 1905, is about the application of lunar astrology to farm, garden and practical decision making," says Carl Llewellyn Weschcke, president and publisher. "And all of our yoga books are practical in nature, since a healthy body is a necessary foundation to a spiritual life." Weschcke explains that "to ignore the material in favor of the spiritual is like building a house without a foundation of any kind. It will blow away with any good wind storm—you don't have to wait for Katrina to do it." And Weschcke is not alone at Llewellyn when it comes to publishing books with worldly implications. "As we see more extreme weather—tsunamis, hurricanes, heat waves—coupled with the rise in terrorism, we brace ourselves for even more. Everyone feels global change breathing down their necks," says Elysia Gallo, the publisher's Wicca, paganism and magic acquisitions editor. Llewellyn is publishing Christopher Penczak's Ascension Magick: Ritual, Myth & Healing for the New Aeon(Mar., 2007), which explains ascension, a belief system that tries to help humanity evolve on both individual and global levels. These same concerns, says Gallo, are reflected in Penczak's other books, including The Mystic Foundation (Sept.).

It's clear that an industry that's often been derided for encouraging self-centeredness is aiming to enable readers to help themselves and the world.

What's in a Name: Mind/Body/Spirit Is In
Publishers who package and sell spirituality have dumped the old label "New Age" for what they consider to be the more marketable "mind/body/spirit," and they say it's paying off by attracting consumers who were put off by the old moniker.

"New Age has negative connotations and it sounds out of date, whereas mind/body/spirit has more appeal," says Jill Kramer of Hay House. "Even metaphysics seems to be more palatable than New Age. But mind/body/spirit is also a more state-of-the-art term—it covers more territory: spirituality, quantum physics, personal health and all kinds of topics that aren't strictly related to psychic phenomena like out-of-body experiences, UFOs and psychic mediumship." For Kramer, while Diary of a Pyschic: Shattering the Myths (2003) by Sonia Choquette was "strictly New Age," Choquette's subsequent books, including Trust Your Vibes(Nov., 2007), about bringing intuition home to yourself, your children and your family, fits squarely in the mind/body/spirit category.

Other publishers concur that the "New Age" tag, ironically enough, makes a book seem dated, while "mind/body/spirit" sounds more current and is more inviting to mainstream audiences. "We've always had a problem with 'New Age' because any label with "new" in it seems to denigrate traditions that came before," says Marc Allen at New World Library. "But there is nothing new in New Age—it's all the same perennial philosophy, just re-worded for a new generation." The mind/body/spirit category is not only more appropriate, adds Allen, but it has helped boost sales of such backlist titles as Creative Visualization by Shakti Gawain (1978). Once shelved (and ignored) in "occult," Creative Visualization has moved briskly in the renamed category and now boasts sales of three million copies.

But Munro Magruder, associate publisher and marketing director at New World, asserts that his house does not actively strive to mainstream its books; it simply publishes good titles. "I don't think the change in terminology away from New Age has resulted in 'mainstreaming' the category," Magruder explains. "Rather, the general public's widespread acceptance of spiritual practices such as yoga, meditation and alternative medicine has widened the audience."

Jo Ann Deck, v-p and publisher for Celestial Arts/Crossing Press (both imprints of Ten Speed), notes that definitions of New Age change with the times. "The Shakers were new age for a time. Certainly Jesus was the new age of thinking during his time and still is for many people," says Deck. "But the category mind/body/spirit helps move books into the mainstream." Moreover, says Deck, the mind/body/spirit label gives topics once considered odd, such as personal health, wider audiences. "When we first published Dr. Elson Haas's Staying Healthy with the Seasons [Celestial Arts, 1981], the concept of staying healthy was eccentric, but now, with his most recent book, Staying Healthy with Nutrition [Aug.], personal health is simply a basic, everyday concept," explains Deck.

The Fringe Finds Us

But not everyone hopes the mind/body/spirit label will make their books acceptable to the masses. Inner Traditions has seen its share of titles that have sold in the millions—Margaret Starbird's Woman with the Alabaster Jar: Mary Magdalene and the Holy Grail(1993) is one example—but ask anyone at Inner Traditions about targeting mainstream audiences and they balk. "We are always publishing what we see as the cutting edge in the field. And when someone becomes popular, they are probably not going to come publish with us," says Rob Meadows, v-p of sales and marketing. "Every publisher wants to sell as many books as they can, of course, but if something is mainstream, we will probably not stay long in that genre." Meadows doesn't see this as a drawback, but instead as what makes his house stand out among its competitors. "What's on the fringe finds its way to us," he says. "When we published The Art of Aromatherapyin 1978, it was the very first book on aromatherapy in English. Initially people thought it was crazy, yet now aromatherapy is totally integrated into our culture; we started that trend."

Once in a while, "the zeitgeist is with us," says Ehud Sperling, publisher, founder and president of Inner Traditions. This is especially the case with the house's books about Mary Magdalene, which appeared long before Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. Perhaps the zeitgeist will again be with Inner Traditions as it publishes (under its Destiny Books imprint) such esoteric-sounding books as Plant Spirit Shamanism: Traditional Techniques for Healing the Soul by Ross Heaven and Howard G. Charing (Sept.) and The Haitian Vodou Handbook: Protocols for Riding with the Lwa(Jan. 2007).

Regardless of how vigorously a publisher is seeking to appeal to the masses, the change in terminology seems to have helped the industry, wooing readers who wouldn't be caught in New Age sections but are perfectly comfortable buying books to enhance their minds, bodies and spirits.

NAPRA's Afterlife
When is a trade association no longer a trade association? In the case of NAPRA (Networking Alternatives for Publishers, Retailers and Artists), when its founder and president subsumes it into her own private business.

That's what Marilyn McGuire did when she disbanded the New Age trade association, which she founded in 1986 and says had members in every state and 16 countries. The last issue of the association's bimonthly magazine, NAPRA ReView, appeared in fall 2002, the year in which McGuire laid off her 25 employees due to a falloff in advertising revenues. ("I now hire freelance workers as I need them," McGuire explains.) Those revenues, according to McGuire, once reached as high as $1 million annually, but receded, she says, when so many of the New Age stores closed their doors because of "inadequate business practices. They weren't really merchants," she says, "they were people espousing a philosophy."

NAPRA's author breakfast at BEA continues, albeit without the NAPRA imprimatur, although McGuire says, "We still call it the NAPRA breakfast, because that's how people think of it." She reports that Marilyn McGuire & Associates Inc., her 20-year-old literary and marketing services firm, has the same mission statement that NAPRA did.

McGuire has also formed a partnership with Independent Publisher Online to revive the Nautilus Book Awards, which were suspended in 2006 but will be awarded at next year's BEA in categories such as Ecology/ Environment and Social Change. Past winners include Deepak Chopra's The Book of Secrets: Unlock the Hidden Dimensions of Your Life(Harmony, 2004) and Laura M. Ramirez's Keepers of the Children: Native American Wisdom and Parenting(Walk in Peace Productions, 2004).

Confused about whether NAPRA is alive or dead? You're not the only one. When first questioned about the group's demise, McGuire says, "NAPRA has undergone a transition—it's the case of a highly successful organization that had to do some revisioning and reengineering." When the point is pressed later, however, McGuire admits, "There is no NAPRA—only Marilyn McGuire & Associates."

Visitors to McGuire's Web site (www.marilynmcguire.com) may be perplexed, then, by a tab labeled "NAPRA shopping" that brings browsers to a page selling "products that support NAPRA's mission of personal growth, healthy living, and positive social change," which include essential oils and incense as well as books. Attempts to access the former NAPRA Web site, www.napra.com, however, redirect to McGuire's.

—Natalie Danford