Continually baffled.

(revamped, reworked and reposted!)

Things that I've found to be particularly interesting whilst becoming a published author. Ordinarily I wouldn't have given a second thought to this one particular item but since I ended up appealing to an audience I never expected to appeal to, well, I became interested. ;) Especially since being associated with this particular market has a tendency to drive interest in ones book way down!!!

I suppose the one thing that struck me as very interesting is that the Christian Booksellers Association isn't THE Christian publishing industry as they insist and that CBA was set up in 1950 to ONLY appeal to publishers who wanted to provide targeted denominational fiction to Baptist Bookstore visitors. Let me stop to clarify here that I didn't make that last comment up. I read that word for word at cbaonline.org. I posted a link at one time to show how I'd not taken this comment out of context but shortly after I posted said link the wording had been "updated" to read quite a bit differently.

Just a Coincidence?

Perhaps but now the wording doesn't emphatically state the audience at the onset. It just sort of eludes to it. For this reason I no longer provide links to cbaonline.org. They still only serve a very targeted denominational audience and have no plans of abandoning that audience or growing past them for fear of losing them. The information they removed from their "about me" page or rather "reworded" was important. I'm sorry they found it necessary to remove it.

Bottom line is the Christian Booksellers Association was created in 1950 when affiliated bookstores were called Baptist Bookstores. A group of these Baptist Bookstores created CBA to provide targeted fiction. They charged publishers who wanted to write for this audience a fee and in turn for the money, placed affiliated publishers fiction in ALL of those Baptist bookstores that were affiliated. The work had to meet CBA's approval as well. Meaning it had to stick to rigid denominational standards. If I had to give the fiction a name I would call it, "preach to the choir," fiction.

At some point the name Baptist Bookstore was dropped and affiliated stores simply called themselves. "Christian" bookstores. Shortly after that in the seventies, a group of affiliated publishers pulled away and created the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association or ECPA. I often wondered if these were affiliated publishers who thought, "hey, you know, this is targeted fiction. I don't think using the broader label "Christian" to define our work is really all that prudent." Either way, ECPA makes no secret about who their target audience is which is a nice plus for them.

Here's how some distributors handle the confusion in the markets. Hatchette Books has two imprints for Christian fiction. Faithwords is one. Faithwords is an imprint that only handles work put out by CBA affiliated publishers. Work designed to appeal to that exclusive and targeted market of "evangelicals" and some Catholics? That's how it reads at CBA.org. Apparently there are "evangelical" Catholics or "Christian" Catholics. Does this means all Catholics don't fall under the broader label Christian. Hmmmm . . .

Center Street is Hatchette's other imprint. Center Street doesn't care if the publisher is affiliated with CBA. And the work doesn't have to be targeted for that market. BUT it's very interesting to watch all the "big" affiliated publishers slide into this imprint instead of staying with Faithwords. It would seem that their fiction no longer tows the evangelical line. Interestingly enough CBA affiliated publishers such as Thomas Nelson and Zondervan don't seem bothered that some of their bigger authors such as James Scott Bell and Ted Dekker are distributing through non-affiliated Center Street while they're still under contract with them.

Here's how Hatchette Book Group explains the two imprints on their site:

Does Hachette Book Group use a separate imprint for its Christian books?

Books that are specifically and exclusively written for Christian audiences are identified with the FaithWords imprint. However, many Christian authors today are writing for a broader audience and those books are published under the Center Street or Hachette Book Group imprints. The determination is based on the content and intended audience of the manuscript. In addition, Hachette Book Group has the Walk Worthy Press imprint for the Christian African American market.

Now I've not been in the business long but I have to say that I'm very disillusioned by the fact that active CBA affiliated publishers who've been excluding non-affiliated Christian authors from their bookstores since 1950 are allowed to publish under a non-affiliated imprint while still being affiliated. But that's just a personal pet peeve I have. To me it's truly a sad commentary on the publishing industry as a whole.

Having these two markets separated is great but not when one of those markets doesn't do enough to state who their target audience is and in fact states emphatically and at every turn that they don't have one.

But back to Hatchette books and the confusion of the markets there. Why wasn't self-published Christian author William P. Young, who is now with Hatchette Books, placed into one of the two Christian categories instead of given his own imprint named after his own publishing company? That has to be the most bizzare case of confusion I've seen to date.

And where is William P. Young's next book?

Just keep in mind that CBA is a trade organization and before they came around there was no such thing as a Christian market, only general market. Actually that's still the way it is. CBA serves a niche market of the general market. There are now many publishers who serve that "target" audience as well but aren't affiliated. Most of them don't use the label "Christian" fiction to define their work because of the stigma the label "Christian" fiction draws due to CBA not being more specific. They're using labels such as Edgy Christian Fiction, Family Fiction etc . . . and as of yet not one label to truly define their audience. But then no publisher really has to define their market do they. So go have fun figuring out what you want to read and what you don't want to read. ;)