From Forbes:
When LifeWay Christian Resources announced it was closing all 170 bookstores late last month, following the 2017 closing of all Family Christian’s 240 stores, you’d be forgiven if you assumed it was the end of days for Christian bookselling. Each at the time of their closing was the nation’s largest Christian bookstore chain.
The reports of a retail apocalypse for Christian bookstores, a phrase borrowed straight from the Bible, is more “fake news,” but the kind that could become a self-fulfilling prophecy, believes Greg Squires, the owner of The Parable Group, a data-driven marketing agency that supports Christian retailers, publishers and ministries.
“There is a broad perception among Christian pastors, church leaders and faith-based consumers that bookstores are gone,” he shares. “Even among Christian publishers there is a lack of depth and understanding about how meaningful the interactions are in a Christian bookstore.”
. . . .
Yet Christian and faith-based books are a bright spot in the overall publishing industry. In 2016 the Association of American Publishers (AAP)reported that books with religious and inspirational themes from both religious and trade publishers were among the best-selling books.
. . . .
“Religious presses, imprints that focus on religion, spirituality and faith, grew 6.9% to $1.13 billion from 2015 to 2016,” the association announced.
“Books that emphasized values, simple living or had inspirational messages like the Magnolia Story, Present Over Perfect, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up and Uninvited were among the most popular in 2016,” reported Tina Jordan, APA’s vice president of trade publishing.
That growth continued from 2017 to 2018, with religious presses accruing 4.5% revenue growth and in January this year, the latest AAP StatShot reports religious presses led the field with an 8.1% increase in sales, compared to the industry’s drop of -3.2%.
. . . .
All told over 400 Christian bookstores shuttered in the past three years, including LifeWay and Family Christian, leaving some 2,000 or so stores still in operation. But what did LifeWay in was more than the impact of Amazon or the lack of interest in shopping at a Christian bookstore.
LifeWay, as the bookselling arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, shifted from selling a broad range of faith-based books to ones that largely promoted Southern Baptist perspectives. “It returned a bunch of product six-to-18 months ago basically saying it would no longer stock everything, but only hand-picked titles from the major publishers,” Squires shares.
For example, it gave preference to the denomination’s Christian Standard Bible, but short shrift to other popular translations. “There was a gap. Customers couldn’t find books they expected to find there, so they wouldn’t come back. A Christian retailer needs to serve a wide spectrum,” Squires says.
. . . .
The key advantage for independent Christian bookstore owners is the passion they bring to serving the spiritual needs of the community. It is their calling, not just selling books, but helping people in their spiritual journey. “Christian booksellers are very industrious, very dedicated. They believe they are doing the work of the ministry,” Squires says.
Successful independent book store owners also curate their product selection to the wide range of faith preferences in the community, unlike LifeWay which took a top down, rather than an across-the-denominational-divide approach.
“Most successful Christian bookstores over the past decades have been the ones that are most adaptable from a topic perspective and most willing to serve a broad range of audiences,” he explains. “It is more about localization focused on the customer, rather than aligning around a certain strand of evangelicalism, theology or denomination.”
Link to the rest at Forbes
“The reports of a retail apocalypse for Christian bookstores, a phrase borrowed straight from the Bible, is more “fake news,””
Boy, is there a lot packed in there! We can start with the claim that “retail apocalypse” is found in the Bible. Really? Where? (Hint: even the bare word “apocalypse” doesn’t occur in the Bible. The Book of Revelation belongs to the genre of apocalyptic literature, and “Apocalypse” is sometimes worked into the title of the book by editors, but that is another matter.)
Then there is “fake news,” apparently used in the sense of “news I don’t want to hear.” The argument with general bookstores is that while the big chains are dead or dying, the number of independent bookstores is increasing. I was expecting a similar argument hear, but it never appears. Rather, it segues into a discussion of Christian publishing, which is to say it changes the subject. It later discusses independent Christian bookstores, but without any numbers. All in all, this looks like hand-waving in the hope that the reader won’t notice the actual statements of fact.
All of this.
Christian bookstores are dying because they only appeal to a smaller and smaller segment of customers: white, conservative, Evangelical, Protestant Christians who like spiritual and feel-good themed knick-knacks and don’t want to see anything around them that could possibly be considered “not Christian” or “sinful”. Those customers of Christian bookstores insisted on a white-washed, saccharine-sweet, sanitized view of the world that ignored anything that would make them the slightest bit uncomfortable.
Fewer and fewer Christians have any use for that view of the world anymore, but the bookstores never had the courage to change, because they feared the power of the loudest voices that looked at any change as an attack on their worldview (and it is, because they would have had to see the world as it really is, not as their blinkered gaze insisted it was). So the bookstores are dying because the world has no use for the lie they are peddling anymore.
(As an aside, I say this as a Christian who has avoided Christian bookstores, Christian literature, and Christian music for years because of this very issue, and whose friends all do the same.)
I am a Christian who actively seeks out Christian music, but by that I mean Bach, Mozart, Mendelssohn, and so on. That a recording of the B Minor Mass is not classified as “Christian music” by the “Christian music” industry tells us everything we need to know about that industry.
Bravo! I’m not sure I am a Christian by current standards, although I listen to classic Christian music, read and think about Christian scripture and theology regularly. But the last two centuries of Christian thought leave me cold. Max Weber’s Capitalism and the Protestant Ethic was a turning point for me.
Those customers of Christian bookstores insisted on a white-washed, saccharine-sweet, sanitized view of the world that ignored anything that would make them the slightest bit uncomfortable.
Any chance those folks easily find what they want on Amazon, and use it for all the reasons zillions of others do?
Maybe, but a significant part of that mindset includes the importance of status-signaling and making sure to be seen doing the “right” thing. Also, they don’t want to encounter things that aren’t approved by the “right” authority, so they’d be more likely to go to an online Christian bookstore like christianbook.com. Amazon doesn’t filter out the “wrong” stuff well enough for their demands.
Reminds me of days gone by when all kinds of people wanted to be seen in bookstores.
I probably shouldn’t be surprised that this liturgy for LifeWay doesn’t mention it’s scammy vanity publishing partnership with Author Solutions (CrossBooks) which it worked assiduously to keep secret – a la B&N and Lulu.
I don’t think “liturgy” is the word you were aiming for. “Eulogy,” perhaps? Though that isn’t quite right, given that the piece is critical of LifeWay’s business strategy.
So a Japanese women who writes about discarding items that don’t spark Joy is a bright spot of Christian bookselling? Am I reading that right?
I read it the same way.
However, I’ve yet to meet the booklover who considers Marie Kondo as “inspirational”, with her infamous (and probably misquoted) 30-book rule.
Internet sales (not just Amazon) have diminished Christian bookstores. Just like what’s happened, and is happening, to retailers of anything anywhere.
Christian bookstores are not special snowflakes; they are subject to the same financial and mercantile forces all brick and mortar stores are dealing with.
I wonder if being a specialized store gives them a stronger customer base, or is more likely to have a fragmented, factionalized customer base. “We don’t shop there because they sell ‘those’ kinds of books”?
I expect it’s a bit of both. It’s like any specialist store: if you rely on bricks-and-mortar, you need to be where your customers are. If you only sell Southern Baptist books, then you may not do well if there isn’t a handy population of Southern Baptists to buy them. On the other hand, if you’re a really good store with an internet presence, Southern Baptists from across the nation will buy from you – online.
Yes, there will be some people who won’t shop at a store because it’s run by X, or they also stock Y, but I reckon for most people the most important factor is “Do they stock what *I* want?”
I vaguely remember reading the Waterstones in the UK moved from a top-down method of choosing stock to allowing booksellers to pick their stock depending on the local area and did better with that model.
They did.
Waterstones stopped letting publisher money dictate what books they featured in their windows and front tables and gave control to their store managers. The result was a net gain in sales and revenue.
Local control made a big difference, even within neighborhoods in the same city.
Anyone know what publishers pay for upfront placement in stores? Does the local store manager see that as revenue on his P&L?
Waterstones cited £27M as the payment forgone. That’s for the entire chain. 283 stores.
https://www.thepassivevoice.com/?s=Waterstones
So who are you going to believe?
The bookstore owners who shut down, saying “there’s no money to be made here anymore.”
The “data-driven marketing agency” telling you “There are at least 100 markets with 50,000 people without a Christian bookstore within an hour’s drive” and that “there is a lack of depth and understanding about how meaningful the interactions are in a Christian bookstore.”