Tell Us How You Identify a Christian Bestseller Before It's Published

Book publishing can be a guessing game. Publishers are presented daily with hundreds of manuscripts from enthusiastic authors who believe theirs will be the most sought-after book of the century. Acquisition editors and publishers have to decide which manuscript has bestselling potential from the many that don’t.

We’d like to hear from you. What do you consider to be the best criteria for a book to reach the bestseller stratosphere? Write your ideas as a comment below and let us know. We plan to compile them into a list for a future post (along with our own ideas). Let the comments begin!

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Interesting question.

I used to judge the Christy Awards and found most of the Christian books submitted were message driven, not story driven. Action and dialogue were emphasized over context and character.

It's hard to know if the audience is changing, but it seems like younger readers (oxymoran?) might be looking for more nuance and complexity.

Maybe not. Maybe the next best seller is still some historical romance. It would be nice to think we were looking for something more authentic.

Maybe we are. The plethora of 20-somethings writing about how disenchanted they are with the church suggests we might.

I'll take nonfiction narrative for $200.

— Wally Metts
Thanks for your comments, Wally!
— Somersault Group
Wally sez: <>

I won't argue with that, Wally, although that's as much a marketing consideration as an editorial one. Christian publishers like Zondervan and Tyndale publish for the CBA market and for the inspirational sections of general market bookstores, and readers who buy their books there tend to look for a Christian message (or at least Christian characters) in their fiction.

But of course that's not unique to Christian publishing. The fiction of Michael Crichton is as likely to be message-driven as Christian fiction--he just has a different agenda. The fiction of the muckrakers a hundred hears ago, George Bernard Shaw, Barbara Kingsolver--all writers who wrote (or write) to a clear agenda.

THE SHACK was an anomaly, clearly, but as an editor of fiction, I find myself editing a lot more novels these days, post-SHACK, that challenge and stretch the reader's beliefs, rather than simply affirming them. And that's a big change, and a big improvement.

Will the Christian bestseller of 2015 be, perhaps, irreverent? Painfully honest? Less traditional in storytelling style? Humorous? Owing more to Adam Sandler or Jon Stewart than Jerry Jenkins or Janette Oke?

— David Lambert