There's no question that the tumultuous events in the world in recent years have had their impact on the field of academic religion publishing. But that impact has not necessarily been a negative one, as a new urgency to understand the thinking of the non-Western world has spurred interest in the influence of religious belief and practice on political and public life. For some publishing houses, the increased desire on the part of the academic community to strengthen their religion courses contributed to turning a so-so year into a very good one; for others, it simply wasn't enough to counteract the effects of a rocky economy.
Religion Made a Difference
At Georgetown University Press sales overall have been so good that "we're trying not to get too giddy right now," director Richard Brown says. "We're running 12% ahead of budget and 20% ahead of last year, but returns and fate can always intervene." After a strong July and August things moderated a bit in September, and while religion is a strong factor in the sales picture, Brown attributes the spike in sales to the heightened interest in "anything Arabic"—particularly an Arabic-language textbook line.
"It has been such a miserable two to two and a half years for scholarly publishers," Brown says. "When we go to meetings [of academic publishers], the mood is very grim. We know we're really fortunate."
Other houses sharing in the good fortune include the University of Notre Dame Press, where editorial director Barbara Hanrahan considers the market for religion books to be a healthy one—so healthy that the press has exceeded its sales goals. At the University of California Press, textbook and crossover trade books have sold well. Abingdon's core market for Methodist studies helped that publisher exceed sales expectations. For Cornell University Press, sales of religion titles did particularly well compared to overall sales—something of an anomaly for a campus once known as "godless Cornell," director John Ackerman points out.
At Baker Academic, director Jim Kinney credits internal improvements for the steady increase in sales in recent years. "That doesn't reflect what the marketplace is," Kinney says. "We've been working to upgrade marketing and editorial quality; we're rebuilding the engine to make it go for the long term. You can't fool the academic community—if the quality isn't there, the book will be dropped."
Scholarly trade books have made the difference at Princeton University Press, where religion titles are generally low-key unless a crossover book like Frank Peters's The Monotheists (Oct.) begins to draw attention outside the academic community. And for the U.K.—based Blackwell Publishers, the outlook is favorable for the future of religion titles; last year, three of the company's 10 top sellers in the U.S. were religion books. "From Blackwell's point of view, the sales picture is a very buoyant one. Even in the U.K. and Europe, where a lot of theology and religion departments have been closing down, our sales still increased in that area," says senior commissioning editor Rebecca Harkin.
Not quite as buoyant is the situation at Catholic University of America Press, which is slowly rebounding from a drop in sales last year. "We had a run of really good years" until last year, says director David J. McGonagle. "So far this year, we're running a little bit ahead."
Despite what she calls a "tough climate," Cynthia Read, executive editor of the academic division at Oxford University Press, says library sales in particular have held up well, thanks to the rigorous approval process that Oxford books undergo. "Librarians are aware that Oxford's scholarship is reliable. Perhaps it's because the Oxford brand is perceived this way that we've been fortunate in that regard," Read says. "We know not everyone has had this experience."
Also seeing strong sales in both the academic and public library markets is T&T Clark International, Continuum's scholarly religion imprint that includes the former Sheffield Academic and Trinity International imprints. "We're ahead of where we projected our budget to be this year," says Henry Carrigan, T&T Clark's U.S. publisher and former Trinity editorial director. "We've seen an upswing in sales, because we've had better representation of our titles and deeper market penetration. Our move to Continuum helped in that regard, by giving us access to the channels that weren't natural for us before."
Those publishers holding the line or reporting a slight drop in sales include Augsburg Fortress, where the drop in sales at the academic Fortress Press was offset somewhat by an increase in sales in the Augsburg trade division; SUNY Press, which is seeing a slight sales rally after a considerable decline in the hardcover library market; the Jewish Publication Society, which saw a slight decline in academic books last year; and Eerdmans, where sales have remained steady. "We're all feeling the stresses of the problems in the publishing industry, but the academic world is a fairly stable one," Eerdmans v-p and editor-in-chief Jon Pott says. "We don't have huge ups and downs, because professors always need monographs and textbooks."
Accommodating a New Generation
Evangelical and denominational houses have discovered that the textbooks professors need today are likely to look substantially different from the textbooks of even a few years ago. "It's our feeling that today's students, especially today's undergraduate students, are expecting not only good solid content but also content that is presented in visually attractive and visually informative ways," Stan Gundry, Zondervan v-p and editor in chief, told PW.
The third edition of A Survey of the New Testament, Zondervan's undergraduate textbook that has been in print since the early 1970s, released over the summer with a new, four-color look. Sales have been so encouraging that Gundry says producing four-color texts on the graduate and seminary level is not out of the question. And a 2002 release—a four-volume, four-color scholarly reference book on the New Testament, The Zondervan Illustrated Bible Backgrounds Commentary—has sold so well that a similar set covering the Old Testament is in the works.
Fortress Press is revamping certain textbooks for undergraduates and first- and second-year seminary students. "With the typical challenging academic volumes, we're seeing the need to do textbooks that provide a more accessible treatment of the information," says newly named general manager Scott Tunseth.
Academics themselves are striving to make their work more accessible to the masses and not just to their students, according to Jim Kinney, director of Baker Academic, who frequently sees manuscripts from scholars who want to write on broadly appealing topics. "There's a need to connect the theory of religion to what is actually happening in the world" for today's students, Kinney says.
Faith, Politics and a World in Crisis
What is happening in the world today is in some cases so closely tied to religious faith that some publishing houses have been inundated with book proposals relating to current events. Most noticeable is the wealth of titles examining the Islamic faith.
At Cornell, the focus of Islamic studies shifts from the Middle East to central Asia and the former republics of the Soviet Union. Because of the press's extensive Russian history list, a number of books examine the relationship between Christian orthodoxy and Islam, both historically and in the volatile regions of Central Asia today. "That's where you see some of the impact of 9/11, even though the research predates the attacks," Ackerman says. "The reawakened interest in religion seems even more important, and publishers like us are more actively looking for books on this subject and putting them further up in the catalogue."
The situation is somewhat similar at Princeton, where Islamic studies were evident on the religion list throughout the 1990s. "Everyone knows about the bump in publishing on Islam, and Princeton's recent attention to this area is no different," says religion editor Fred Appel, whose interest in the relationship between religion and politics has resulted in a number of Islam-related titles. Among those is Islam and the Challenge of Democracy by Khaled Abou El Fadl, slated for spring release.
"Prior to 9/11 the conventional wisdom was that any book on Islam was doomed to failure," says Zondervan's Gundry. "But we're about to publish another one, and one we had published in the past has done quite well, better than we would have expected five years ago."
Books on the relationship between religion and politics continue to find a strong following both on the campus and in the general market. God's Rule: The Politics of World Religions (Georgetown, July) by Jewish scholar Jacob Neusner examines the way each major faith tradition understands politics, Brown says. "It's already getting some course adoptions, so that's how we're pitching it, though we've seen some pickups in trade bookstores," he adds.
Another recent Georgetown release is the first book in a three-part religion and politics series, The Christian Right in American Politics (May), edited by John C. Green, Mark J. Rozell and W. Clyde Wilcox. A second title, School Board Battles: The Christian Right in Local Politics by Melissa M. Deckman, is scheduled to release in the spring along with the third title, Of Little Faith: The Politics of George W. Bush's Faith-Based Initiatives by Amy E. Black, Douglas L. Koopman and David Rydenn.
"Interest in contemporary religion and public life waxes and wanes, but there does seem to be interest in that subject again right now," Hanrahan notes. A September Notre Dame release, Human Nature and the Freedom of Public Religious Expression by Stephen Garrard Post, is selling well, she says.
From the Academy to the Trade
Like many academic presses, Georgetown occasionally hits on a title that finds a measure of success in the general market, such as the July release Saints and Feasts of the Liturgical Year by Jesuit scholar Joseph N. Tylenda. But trade success is seldom a concentrated goal. "We're much better off and much wiser to make sure our books are getting into the classroom and not pinning all our hopes on trade books. That's a potentially dangerous game," Brown says. "On occasion we'll have books that cross over, but they have to have some scholarly credibility in the first place or else it just gets too risky."
Hanrahan echoes that sentiment. A spring release from Notre Dame, Stephen Barr's Modern Physics and Ancient Faith, has found the kind of trade success that academic presses would like to see in their crossover titles. Without a budget that allows for extensive marketing, Hanrahan simply looks for the best possible books and hopes they will reach a broader audience.
"If you have unrealistic expectations about how a book will sell in the trade, you're setting yourself up for trouble," she says. "You must operate carefully and make good decisions. It's a matter of old-fashioned sticking to your principles and standing your ground and remaining serious about the quality of the scholarship" in order to survive as an academic press. She concludes, "What it comes down to is this: We try to keep our heads above water and not make any big mistakes."
