Christmas comes early every year for academic religion publishers. At the annual meetings of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature (AAR/SBL)—held annually the weekend before Thanksgiving—authors come bearing gifts of unpublished manuscripts and proposals to acquisitions editors, and scores of professors and graduate students haul away books at deep discounts. These are book people, and between the excitement on the exhibit floor and the lively discussions in nearby cafes and bars, everyone leaves the conference in high spirits about the future of scholarly religion books.
For publishers and authors, this year's annual meeting in San Francisco (November 18–22) is a momentous one, as the two learned societies meet together for the first time in five years after a controversial split.
"From a publishing perspective," says Richard Brown, director at Georgetown University Press, "separate meetings were burdensome and not very conducive to good communications between teachers and publishers." Having weathered the split, religion publishers are excited about this year's meeting. Jim Kinney, editorial director of Baker Academic and Brazos Press, echoes the feelings of many: "We're glad to see the meetings back together again. Too many people were having to decide between them in recent years. AAR/SBL is still a highlight of the year for us and our authors, and there's no substitute for the opportunity to gather face-to-face with so many academics in our field."
The Year Past and the Year to Come
The feverish activity of AAR/SBL comes when academic publishing faces a number of problems: the national economic recession, the loss of retail outlets, competition from used textbook sales, shrinking library budgets, and the increasing pressure to produce electronic books. As David Dobson, publisher of Westminster John Knox Press, points out, "There's no doubt that this is the most challenging time for book publishers in decades. We're continuing to see the pressure that used-book sales place on our academic line, and the general economy and the decline of book retailers have hurt book sales. At the same time, our sales of e-books and digital products are exploding."
Despite these tensions, religion remains a solid growth category in publishing, and academic religion publishers have seen growth over the past year as they try to respond with care and thoughtfulness to the key issues. Princeton University Press is off to a good start this fiscal year, says director Peter Dougherty. "We've had several record sales years recently, so the bar keeps getting higher." Baylor University Press continues to grow, according to director Carey C. Newman. "Last fiscal year, which ended in May 2011, we were up 28%, and this year we are projecting another 18% growth." At Georgetown University Press, Brown reports "a very strong [2010], with sales up 6% from the previous year, which was our ninth straight year of record sales."
To increase revenue or in an attempt to modify their lists to reflect their strengths in a fuller way, some publishers have revised their strategies. According to Jon Pott, senior v-p and editorial director at Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, "We're doing fewer highly specialized academic monographs, fewer dissertations or books closely derived from them, fewer collections of essays (especially conference collections), and fewer choreographed multiauthor books, and we're trying to cultivate a higher percentage of thoughtful general market books." Other publishers have grown and increased profitability through acquisitions. Baker Academic Books and Brazos Press finished their recent fiscal year with strong sales—up 5% for Baker Academic and 25% for Brazos—after two flat years, according to Kinney. "Last year we had our best ever, fueled in part by our purchase of about 300 academic titles from Hendrickson. We expect steady improvement in sales and profitability in the next year."
Digital Strategies
As in the general trade, perhaps the greatest challenge these publishers face is moving from print to digital. All acknowledge the tremendous shifts in the landscape of publishing over the past five years and the steady rush to embrace electronic publishing, as well as the demands of consumers for digital editions of academic religion books. While the textbook market has still been largely unaffected by the rush to e-books—there is not yet a good or reliable platform that will allow students to easily annotate books, according to Fred Appel, senior religion editor of Princeton University Press—individuals and libraries are now buying more e-books. In addition, many authors are asking acquisitions editors whether their book might appear in an e-book format.
Religion publishers have recognized the importance of entering the e-book market, but most have been conservative and worked through partnerships with library aggregators to license content to libraries. The question of electronic publishing is complicated, as publishers try to decide which vendor—Amazon, Google, Barnes & Noble, Project MUSE—provides the best compatibility for their books. Although the jury is still out on the success of e-books as a means of generating revenue, publishers have begun to respond to the demand in numerous ways.
Some have decided simply to publish an e-book simultaneously with the print book. At Columbia University Press, says senior editor of religion Wendy Lochner, "all of our books are coming out in the full array of e-book formats, and we're in the process of doing the same for our complete backlist." Houses have been moving at various paces: Baylor's Newman characterizes its response to the demand for electronic publishing as one of both care and enthusiasm. "We do not think a headlong rush into e-platforms or e-distribution for all of our books is a wise move for us. We have, however, moved with swiftness and abandon with those titles we believe have large upsides."
At Princeton, Appel reports that all new books are being released simultaneously in print and electronic formats. Sales of e-books are increasing across the board, he observes; "we're now getting regular reports from our sales department on Kindle sales of our books." Baker's Kinney reports making sure to listen well to conversations about digital books and learn from colleagues in trade publishing about what books might best be digitized. "We're committed to making material available in whatever format readers prefer, and for the second half of 2011 we've hired some additional help to get much of our backlist digitized and ready for distribution." At WJK, "we've been aggressively converting our backlist to various e-book formats since early 2010, and we've seen the results this past year," says Dobson. "E-book sales year-to-date are up almost 1,000% over last year."
University and college libraries remain probably the most important customers for e-books. With shrinking library budgets for print books, many publishers have been less focused on digitizing books for availability on the Kindle or the Nook and more attentive to the demands of libraries. In 2003, Oxford University Press launched Oxford Scholarship Online (OSO). Oxford senior marketing manager Brian Hughes points out that OUP has always cultivated close relationships with librarians, trying to produce products to meet their needs. Libraries buy entire subject collections on OSO, and entire books and images are available within each subject area. New books are uploaded three times a year, including 300 frontlist and backlist religion titles per year.
Georgetown's Brown says that more of its titles are now available in digital format. "Sales of our e-books were up 141% during the past year, and for our books that are both print and digital, e-books represent 4% of total sales." Georgetown has many titles available through library aggregators like NetLibrary, ebrary, and Questia. Both Georgetown and Baylor have signed on to participate in the University Press Content Consortium, a digital library that will be sold to academic libraries on a subscription basis starting in January 2012. Brown also says that Georgetown has developed course-management systems that combine print books and real-time Web site interaction between teachers and students of the publisher's foreign-language books. Georgetown is thinking hard about how to develop similar kinds of programs for its religion books.
A Book for Every Scholar
The release of new books always brings excitement at AAR/SBL, and publishers look forward to introducing a wide range of books across a number of subject areas to scholars seeking just the right book to buy for their classes or to read on the plane home. Biblical studies volumes sell briskly, and publishers will offer a variety of such titles for this year's meeting (see "Biblical Studies: An Old Field Takes Some New Turns" in this issue). From Baker comes Greg Beale's A New Testament Biblical Theology (Dec.), which, according to Baker's Kinney, has been hailed as a landmark accomplishment in the study of the unity of the Bible.
For Brazos Press, Christian Smith's The Bible Made Impossible (Sept.) is garnering a great deal of attention. WJK has Douglas Knight's long-awaited Law, Power, and Justice in Ancient Israel (Aug.) and two new volumes—Genesis (Sept.) by Miguel de la Torre and Hebrews (Sept.) by Stephen Long—in its new series, Belief: A Theological Commentary. Eerdmans will feature The Eerdmans Companion to the Bible (Sept.), edited by Gordon Fee and Robert Hubbard, as well as Tammi Schneider's An Introduction to Mesopotamian Religion and James D.G. Dunn's Jesus, Paul, and the Gospels (both June).
A unique debut at this year's annual meeting is Princeton University Press's Lives of Great Religious Books series. Princeton's Appel invented the series and has so far contracted for 18 books, with more to come. Written for general readers by leading authorities, these small books examine the historical origins of texts from the great religious traditions, and trace how their reception, interpretation, and influence have changed, often radically, over time. Response to the series has been positive, according to Appel, and Princeton is introducing the series at AAR/SBL, with Garry Wills on Augustine's Confessions (Sept.), Martin Marty on Bonhoeffer's Letters and Papers from Prison (Sept.), and Donald S. Lopez Jr. on The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Sept.). Future biographies include Jack Miles on the Septuagint and the Vulgate, Vanessa Ochs on The Passover Haggadah, and Richard J. Smith on The I Ching. As Appel points out, the series' focus on texts rather than authors reminds us that all great religion books are living things whose careers in the world can take unexpected turns.
Publishers will also feature a number of books that provoke debate, break new ground, and provide new ways of looking at older subjects in the areas of religious studies, ethics, and religious history.
Over the past 20 years, religious studies has grown and evolved from narrow explorations of Christian theological answers to questions about relationships between individuals and the world, and broader theoretical examinations of various approaches to religion: sociological, philosophical, and historical. This year, Columbia features Gananath Obeyesekere's forthcoming The Awakened Ones (Feb. 2012), which explores visionary experiences from a cross-cultural perspective.
Harvard University Press will spotlight Religion in Human Evolution (Sept.), eminent sociologist of religion Robert Bellah's epic study of the development of religion throughout history. Duke sociologist of religion Mark Chaves explores what has changed and what has not in the religious practices of Americans over the past 40 years in American Religion: Contemporary Trends (Princeton, Sept.). The relationship of religion and science continues to be a popular topic within religious studies, and this year Georgetown features Jack Mahoney's Christianity in Evolution (Oct.), which argues that the significance of the Cross is in saving humanity not from sin but from meaninglessness. And in Darwin's Pious Idea: Why the Ultra-Darwinists and Creationists Both Get It Wrong (Eerdmans; a 2010 book, but published after the last annual meeting, so new at this one), Conor Cunningham demonstrates just how much evolution and Christianity have in common.
In ethics, Brazos will feature the always provocative Stanley Hauerwas's War and the American Difference (Oct.). Georgetown offers several new titles, including The Social Mission of the U.S. Catholic Church (Feb.) by its bestselling religion author, Charles Curran, who was dismissed from Catholic University 20 years ago and is now at Southern Methodist University. Amos Yong's The Bible, Disability, and the Church (Eerdmans, Nov.) asks pointed questions about the church's exclusion of the disabled and establishes a practical biblical ethic for addressing questions of exclusivity and inclusivity in the church. And in An Introduction to Christian Ethics (Abingdon, Nov.), Robin W. Lovin, dean of the Perkins School of Theology at SMU, encourages readers to use the book as a resource to arrive at their own solultions to moral problems.
The ever-popular Miroslav Volf explores the role and responsibility of Christians in the public square in Public Faith (Brazos, Aug.). In Womanist Theological Ethics (WJK, Oct.), editors Katie Cannon, Emilie Townes, and Angela Sims gather essays from nine well-known womanist theologians in a primer that offers an introduction to doing ethics from that perspective. WJK also offers Beyond the Pale: Reading Ethics from the Margins (Oct.), edited by Stacey Floyd-Thomas and Miguel de la Torre, a reader-friendly introduction to Christian liberationist ethics by African-American, Asian, and Latin-American scholars who explore how questions of race and gender should be brought to bear on the ideas of 24 classic ethicists and philosophers, from Augustine to Bonhoeffer.
Publishers also will feature numerous titles that focus on the history of religions. Princeton offers Hugh Urban's The Church of Scientology: A History of a New Religion (Aug.); Baylor will highlight Scott Poole's retelling of American history, one fear at a time, in Monsters in American History (Oct.). From Princeton comes Leora Batnitzky's How Judaism Became a Religion (Sept.), a robust intellectual history that will have a strong appeal in Jewish adult education circles. Columbia University features a philosophical interrogation of the history of Judaism in What Does a Jew Want? (Sept.) by Udi Aloni with Judith Butler, Alain Badiou, and Slavoj Zizek; the book promises to be controversial. In an examination of the complexity of American religious history, Latino Catholicism: Transformation in America's Largest Church (Princeton, Nov.), historian Timothy Matovina looks at how Latinos are changing the face of American Catholicism and how America is changing Latino Catholics.
Authors and publishers will leave AAR/SBL loaded down with new ideas, sheaves of freshly printed manuscript pages, and stacks of new books that advance the scholarly conversation about religious and biblical studies. But a major challenge remains for academic religion publishers, as Georgetown's Brown points out: "How can we provide more open access to our content without giving away the store? The coming generation will expect more and more free content. Publishers need to be good citizens while having a black number on the bottom line, and that challenge is not getting any easier."
