We asked some of the sharpest editors in the field four key questions about the current state of academic trade publishing. Here's what they had to say.
PW: What is the most remarkable change you have seen in the market for scholarly books on religion in the past three years or so?
Rotor: For me, it would be the consistency of interest. As a humanities editor, religion was just one of the areas I was supposed to acquire in, but in the last three years I would say it has become my primary focus. Religion demands commentary. Even in the most secular aspects of American life, it's necessary to be literate about religion's place in the world.
Elie: For better or for worse, the publishing culture changes slowly. A lot of people would say there's a greater interest, but I've been interested for a long time. There's always a strong book on religion that a lot of people are reading, from Habits of the Heart to God: A Biography, Walking the Bible to The Jew in the Lotus.
Maisner: There continues to be a wider market for these books—depending, of course, on how they're written. We're doing a book by Susan Ridgely Bales about children's experience of the communion process [When I Was a Child: Children's Interpretations of First Communion, fall/winter 2005/2006]. It will interest academics and the general Catholic community. On the flip side, university press publishers are fighting to get books that are academically based, but will have a broader audience. That's not really a new trend—for me, it's old hat.
Corbin:One of the most remarkable changes is that scholarly authors are more savvy about how to make their works appealing to a general reader. I'm seeing authors with far sharper expectations of the publishing industry. And there's a greater realization that ideas that used to be confined to the academy are now resonating with the general culture.
Caldwell: The rise in scholars who can help us to understand not only the divide between secular and religious America but also between liberal and conservative religious America. This includes trying to understand the fear of homosexuality among religiously conservative cultures. In terms of the course adoption market, there's a real desire for books that don't read as narrowly academic and can effectively engage students.
Schultz:We're still amazed at both the way fiction could draw people to Christian history and the speed with which publishers and writers responded—though it's been difficult to find writers with both the credentials and the skill and sense of audience to make the history accessible. Even more interesting has been watching the development within Christian publishing of whole subject areas that are Christian versions of mainstream topics (cooking, diet, self-help, etc.) even as trade houses, with obvious exceptions, haven't been able to do the reverse.
Maudlin: There's more competition for publishing scholars. Scholars have also discovered, with the right house, they can be very successful in the general trade. There used to be a problem for scholars going with general houses, and that is it didn't look good to their peers. Now the success of top scholars in the general trade has lifted any stigma that might have been attached to doing popular writing.
PW: How have these changes affected what you buy?
Corbin: They haven't really. You always want a provocative, unique book that will attract readers. That will never change.
Maudlin: What we buy hasn't changed very much. We've been pioneering in this area for a long time, and we're still doing this pretty well. We have a lot of those up-and-coming scholars, like A.J. Levine—her The Misunderstood Jew: The Scandal of Jesus' Jewishness is coming out next fall.
Caldwell:I focus ever more strongly on crossover and trade titles, and that means I buy books that read. I look for scholars that obviously have the requisite intellectual and theoretical training to help them conceptualize, but also what I call a literary imagination and the techniques that go along with that. I want writers who are going out into the world and trying to understand contemporary religious culture.
Rotor: Religion is relevant in so many aspects of American life, so there's a wealth of opportunities to explore in terms of commissioning. I'm very excited about the acquisitions in the Very Short Introductions series. I got Richard Bushman to do Mormonism, Luke Timothy Johnson to do the New Testament, Michael Coogan to do the Old Testament and Eddie S. Glaube Jr. to do African-American religion. I am definitely learning the economics of acquisitions: publishing fewer books with bigger sales potential. I look at books now that will be more aggressive in sales and for which I can see lots of publicity opportunities..
Elie: We take it book by book. I'm happy to say that my own book, The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage, which was published by FSG in 2003, is one that is seen as having worked and has been read by a good many of the people who admire the four authors whose stories it tells: Thomas Merton, Walker Percy, Dorothy Day and Flannery O'Connor. Since then, proposals have come in because the perception is that we publish "this kind of book" well—that is to say, a literary book with a religious dimension—and Marilynne Robinson's Gilead proved the point beyond anyone's imagining.
Maisner: I've been looking for books that will reach out to general readers. For example, Robert Fuller's Wonder: From Emotion to Spirituality [spring 2006], which takes an interdisciplinary approach to wonder, discussing it as an emotion in the tradition of Descartes and illuminating how important wonder is in the practice of religion. It's very accessibly written. .
Hammer: Our just-published T.D. Jakes: America's New Preacher by Shayne Lee looks at the rise of a faith industry that emphasizes material rewards. It's a book we had modest hopes for, but we got such a terrific response from the wholesalers and chains all the way down that we went back to raise our print run and lower our list price to respond to the groundswell of interest. This book fits squarely into our list's focus on religion in America and on religion and race while taking advantage of readers' growing interest in the phenomenal growth of innovative churches, even as mainline churches are declining.
Schultz:Jenna [Johnson, associate editor] recently acquired a first novel, Born Againby Kelly Kerney, about a young evangelical who is assigned Darwin as academic summer camp reading. She reads it in secret, setting off a whole chain of events. Fiction can offer a way to engage controversial issues around faith without the demand for position or a skeptical distance that nonfiction imposes. You can ignore accusations of both secularism and agenda and just explore the religious landscape.
PW: What do you see as the hottest subject areas today and in the near future?
Elie: I don't know what the hot subject areas are, but I know the ones I am hot for. Great books are books we read with our lives. We don't segment off some part of ourselves to read them. It's only natural in religion especially that people would look to see how scholarship takes its place in a whole life. I'm attracted to books where the author has worked out a convincing relationship to the religious tradition in the text. Two examples would be Stephen Prothero's American Jesus, an account of the different images of Jesus that have arisen in America over the centuries, and Mark Oppenheimer's 13 and a Day, which is an account of bar mitzvahs around the country by a writer trained as a journalist who also has a Yale Ph.D. in religion.
Maisner: It is hot to break commonly held stereotypes about religious practitioners. Ethnography often lends itself to this. We're publishing a book by Lynn Neal this spring, Romancing God: Evangelical Women and Inspirational Fiction. Neal writes about evangelical women reading religious romance novels, showing that they are trying to work out a lot of religious ideas through reading fiction. It is a book that will make people think twice.
Hammer: There is growing interest in religion and race, as research more fully takes into account the diversity of religious life in this country, with more books coming on Latinos and on Asian-Americans. Examples include our recently published The Virgin of El Barrio: Marian Apparitions, Catholic Evangelizing, and Mexican American Activism by Kristy Nabhan-Warren, about a Mexican-American woman who has been seeing visions of the Virgin Mary in South Phoenix, Ariz., for the past decade and the vibrant activist community that has sprung up around her, and our strong backlist title God in Chinatown: Religion and Survival in New York's Evolving Immigrant Community by Kenneth J. Guest, about the new wave of Chinese immigration and the new spiritual traditions these immigrants bring.
Caldwell: I'm most interested in books and scholars that can help us cross the divide between intellectual, cultural and religious worlds, scholars who aren't afraid to delve into controversial topics, who have a certain boldness. One book that's particularly exciting to me is Hella Winston's Unchosen: The Hidden Lives of Hasidic Rebels[Nov.].It looks at the lives and dilemmas of Hasidim deeply unhappy with the restrictiveness of their communities. Another book that I loved was Timothy Beal's Roadside Religion[May].He traveled to various roadside religious sites that are examples of a sort of outsider religious art—the world's tallest 10 commandments, and my favorite, Golgotha Fun Park. Again, this is a book that helps us understand what drives people to construct these sites and how they function in their religious imaginations.
Schultz: Science and religion is a packed field, but it's only going to produce more books. We also see more charismatic leaders branching into the trade market as they, like everyone else, build their brands.
Corbin: Interest in early Christianity is going to remain hot. Authors like Elaine Pagels [Beyond Belief] and Bruce Chilton [Mary Magdalene, Nov.] are finding a wide readership. People want to learn for themselves what happened in the first couple of centuries of Christianity.
Clapp: Figuring out the role of religion in public affairs is very important. Also, there is a lot of deep soul-searching about whether conservative evangelicals are going to embrace the theocratic leanings of the hard right. Brazos books in this area include last year's Anxious About Empire, edited byWesley Avram, a professor of communication at Yale Divinity. Another book in that line, from 2004, is Colossians Remixedby Brian Walsh and Sylvia Keesmaat. I noticed, looking through the American Academy of Religion program, two or three scholarly treatments of the Book of Revelation from the viewpoint of a couple of different cultures, including how the African-American churches read Revelation. We'll see more books on Revelation, the Apocalypse and the role of religion in public affairs.
PW: What specifically are you looking to acquire for your press?
Rotor: I'm looking for a short book on Narnia. I know it's late in the game, but if they're doing a whole series of movies, I think Oxford could do a short stand-alone volume. Also, I'd be interested in seeing a short treatment of Freemasonry. Because of The Da Vinci Code, there was a heightened interest.
Caldwell: I'm very interested in scholars who grew up in fundamentalist and evangelical backgrounds of one stripe or another, but are no longer in that world. They have a lot to tell us. I'm not looking for memoir necessarily, but people that can explore different aspects of these worlds by virtue of their personal and intellectual backgrounds.
Elie: There have been too many religious memoirs of a certain kind, that portray the same experience in the same way—a religious childhood and the emancipation from it, or the rediscovery of religion in midlife. We need books that will show us how people bring their religious convictions to their everyday lives—memoirs of religious adulthood. We're doing a book called Rumspringa: To Be or Not to Be Amishby Tom Schactman, which we'll publish next spring. It's an unusually revealing portrait of the Amish drawn by focusing on this one year of their lives—what it means for the kids, the parents and the society. At the same time, it's a book about American adolescence.
Maisner: I want books that can stimulate readers to look beyond their stereotypes, especially when it comes to evangelicalism and Islamic studies. I'm looking for books that deal with Islam in South Asia and the U.S., that bring Islam into conversation with current theory. Our [June 2005] title Ghazali and the Poetics of Imagination by Ebrahim Moosa exemplifies what I'm looking for. Moosa brings Al Ghazali, an important medieval jurist and theologian, into conversation with postmodernism.
Hammer: We're just starting a new book series entitled New and Alternative Religions, to be overseen by scholars Timothy Miller and Susan Palmer. It will capitalize on the increasing attention being paid to emerging and nonmainstream religious traditions. I think the market for works on religion is continuing to expand and that some books can cross over to gain trade appeal, but they have to be the right books. The topic has to be right, but the book also has to be written in a compelling way.
Schultz: I'm looking for academics or journalists who are truly able to write for trade audiences about the history of religion, authors who give me the sense of discovery I get from Elaine Pagels or Karen Armstrong. Historical fiction, like Anita Diamant's The Red Tent, has an audience still out there waiting for another book they can pass to their friends. And someone who can write about politics and religion in America so that people on all sides respond.
Johnson: Books that help you find God as a young person in a secular world; that speak to young people searching for faith but feeling isolated from traditional religious voices; that search for the reason behind the embrace of fundamentalism by young people; that deal with religious pluralism in necessarily ever more complex ways—reconciling the splintering off and self-isolation of small groups with the reality of a more religiously vehement America.
Maudlin: Gnostic Christianity and early Christian thought is going to be the focus of New Testament scholarship in the next couple of decades. Multidisciplinary approaches also are going to be big. We're doing a book by Rodney Stark called TheCities of God [for next fall] where he takes a look at the first few centuries of the church and how it became an urban force. He's using statistical and economic analysis, and applying it to historical work. It's pioneering. We're also doing The Spiritual Brain [winter 2007] by Mario Beauregard, which deals with religion and neuroscience from a sympathetic point of view, doing brain-mapping.
Clapp:Another area we're looking at that's rather different is theological interpretation. This month, we are releasing the first volume of The Brazos Theological Commentary on Scripture by Jaroslav Pelikan, a prominent scholar of church history and historical theology and a professor emeritus at Yale. This is more about reading the Bible as it is in front of you, rather than trying to get behind it, looking at the text for patterns and meaning, and how to apply it to today—the way preachers actually preach. We also have just out Holy People, Holy Land: A Theological Introduction to the Bible by Michael Dauphinais and Matthew Levering, two Catholic scholars. These books will help readers read the Bible itself in an interpretive way, rather than drawing on outside sources and criticism.
