How to succeed in Christian Fiction Publishing

Christian Publishing has been fraught with a lot of challenges, especially for small publishing houses. The industry is dominated by just a few of the major publishing houses. So how does one succeed in this field of Christian publishing? There are a few strategies that smaller publishing houses are using and this article will take you through some of them.

Follow your readers

There are several subgenres within the Christian fiction industry. Some of the most popular are Amish, romance and holiday themes. These already are dominated by the major publishers and a small publisher would face a big challenge in succeeding I these subgenres. Well, one way that you can succeed in this area is to create a series of novels, which tell just a part of the full story. This strategy has successfully been used by some small publishing house, because it leaves the readers in suspense. Once the first one comes to its conclusion, it indicates that the story is not yet finished, and reads are let anticipating the release of the second novel.

Another way to follow readers is to write a historical fictional story. One can take the history of a successful personality and then research on the spiritual life of that person and write a quasi-fictional story that would show how the spirituality of the person influenced his or her success. For example, one could think of writing a spiritual story of Nelson Mandela and how his spirituality gave him strength through his struggle to end Apartheid.

Consider the libraries

Marketing channels are another challenge for smaller publishing houses that do not have the resources of the bigger publishers. When it comes to Christian fiction publishing, there is a great demand for books in libraries. The library editions should be in hard cover so they can stand being borrowed many times over.  Librarians play a great role in advising people on which the popular titles are, and also new releases, whether they come from small or big publishing houses.

Go for the mass markets

Mass marketing a book can be a costly affair, and this is where pooling of resources comes in. Several small publishing houses can pool resources and take a book to the mass markets. This model has the effect of having high sales volumes of the low-cost books, resulting in quick returns. This model is successfully used by large and established publishing houses.

There is a lot of soul searching going on within the circles of smaller Christian fiction publishing houses. They need to know how to survive in a very competitive industry. These strategies mentioned above are just a tip of the iceberg. It only requires some great imagination in order to break it big in this industry. Questions about whether they should use data or go by the gut and just publish are issues that they are looking into. New methods may be empirically researched or adopted just because they seem like “Good Ideas”.

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