Books about religion and spirituality are hot, the great publishing success story of the decade, with sales up nearly 100 percent in the early '90s and still growing, even though sales of other kinds of books are flat.PHYLLIS A. TICKLE (Religion Writer): Would you like a book? There you go.
Unidentified Woman #1: Thank you.
Unidentified Woman #2: Thank you.
Ms. TICKLE: The overwhelming is the boomers. We have a huge part of the adult population -- 65 million of them -- who are passing over the magic 50th birthday. When you turn 50, you turn around and say, "My God! How'd I get here?" and the minute you put it that way, it's become a theological question.LYNN GARRETT (Religious Editor, PUBLISHERS WEEKLY): A lot of people are exhausted after the rampant consumerism and careerism of the '80s. They discovered that there was more to life than being a success, making a lot of money, and having a lot of toys, and I think that people now realize that without a spiritual element, that life is kind of empty.
ABERNETHY: Familiar religious and devotional books remain popular, but there's also huge interest in new kinds of spirituality -- New Age, eastern meditation, and this fall's big sellers, titles about Jewish mysticism and Celtic prayer. Through all this, a do-it-yourself seeking, independent of traditional authority.
Ms. GARRETT: There are people who are discovering or rediscovering liturgical churches, and there are people who just want to do their own thing and who want to have kind of a salad bar spirituality where they pick and choose from a number of different traditions.ABERNETHY: Bookstores are often where the salad bar seeking goes on. These people -- most of them from traditional Judeo-Christian backgrounds -- are studying Hindu scriptures.
Ms. NIKKI DIPALMA: One of the first questions I was asked was, you know, "Why are you here? What are you doing?" and I said, "I'm searching for inner peace."
ERIC MAJOR (Religious Publishing, Doubleday): What is happening is that inspirational Christian religious publishing -- no matter what name you put on it -- is paralleling general trade publishing, so that if you have a book about the stock market in the general trade, you'll have a Christian book or an inspirational book about the stock market; if you have a book about exercise or dieting -- like a book like we published, like THE WEIGH DOWN DIET -- that is ignoring what is happening in the secular market.
ABERNETHY: So for millions of Americans, spiritual seeking now seems as likely to begin in a bookstore as in church. Last week on THE NEW YORK TIMES best-seller list, four of the top 15 titles were about religion and spirituality, but that's not the whole story. Newspaper rankings do not count sales in the Christian bookstores, and there are 2,500 of them doing massive business. For instance, the name Jeanette Oak is not widely known, but she writes Christian fiction and has sold 15 million copies of her books worldwide.
