Have you seen the mega boom of eBooks being publishing these days? Thanks to the likes of Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble and Smashwords.com, eBook sales have risen steadily since 2009, now to the point where they’ve exceeded the sales of trade paperbacks in all genres.
This trend has been seen in the sale of religious titles as well. In fact, it looks as if the sales curve for this category is on a definite upswing, which is welcome news for Catholic Christian authors who want to spread Jesus’ good news in a way most effective in reaching the Millennial Generation of Catholics in this country — on their PC and Mac computer, Kindle, Nook, Kobo, Android, Blackberry, iPad, iPod touch, or netbook.
Clearly, we’re witnessing the dawn of a new opportunity for eBooks related to Catholic Christian religion and spirituality. The Kindle Bookstore, for example, lists a total of nearly 826,000 eBooks in all genres. Among these, nearly 61,000 (seven percent) are classified in the religion and spirituality genre; over 27,000 — forty-four percent of the R & S category — of which are classified in the Christianity sub-category, which contains a substantial number of classic and contemporary Catholic titles written by Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Thomas à Kempis, Saint John of the Cross, Saint Teresa of Avila, Saint Ignatius of Loyola, Saint Francis de Sales, John Newman, G.K Chesterton, Benedict XVI, Thomas Merton, Scott Hahn, Henri Nouwen, and many others. Barnes and Noble’s Nookstore offers about 35,000 titles in its Religion and Spirituality categories. Traditional Catholic bookstore blogs offer online sales of many eBooks by Catholic authors, especially those which appear on the Catholic Book Publishers Association’s monthly top ten bestsellers list.
Still, there are many good contemporary Catholic writers who are not published in the eBook format. They must if they want to spread the word about Christ and His teachings to young American Catholic adults via eReader apps for computers, eReader tablets or smartphones.
If today’s Catholic authors want to reach and capture the readership of Catholic adult students and professionals between the ages of eighteen and fifty, this is where they’ll find most of them — and they’ll have to sell them by marketing to them at their e-mail and social media addresses.
For the Catholic author of today, eBook publishing is a faster, much easier way to publish. Catholic publishers of print books turn out very few titles per year, and can no longer bear the entire burden of marketing the print titles that they do publish. Consequently, much of the responsibility for publicizing their books rests with the authors themselves. Ten percent of the sixty-eight member-publishers of the Catholic Book Publishers Association — notably Liguori Publications, Liturgical Press, RCL Benziger, St. Anthony Messenger Press, Saint Mary’s Press, Sheed and Ward Book Publishing and USCCB Publishing — publish currently in an electronic format, variously called a digital, download, eBook or internet format.
eBook authors also carry the lion’s share of the promotional responsibility for their own books, but the major eBook publishers (e.g., Amazon Kindle, Barnes and Noble Nook and Smashwords.com, with whom I’ve published) do supply support by providing excellent emarketing tools such as a personal book page and author page and free downloads of eBook marketing guides on their sites for the newbie author with instructions and suggestions on how to use them effectively to sell their own eBooks.
I urge Catholic book readers to look into buying electronic Catholic books online at various Catholic bookstore blogs, or, if you can’t find a specific title there, look into such major online booksellers as amazon.com or barnesandnoble.com or Samashwords.com. On each site, search for the Religion and Spirituality category, then the Christianity sub-category. If you can’t afford the prices of the eReader tablets or the smartphones with eReader apps, Kindle, Nook and others offer free downloads of eReader applications for your computer or smartphone.
If you are a published Catholic author, I suggest that you investigate with your print-publisher the possibility of publishing your print books in eBook formats as well, and to publish these on any or all of the major online digital publishing sites so as to expand your coverage of this key Millennial Generation market. Most book publishers are well aware of eBook publishing procedures.
If you plan to self-publish your eBook, based on the effort that you put into your manuscript formatting and your post-publication promotion via email, blogs and the social media, you may not only realize your dream of getting published, but you will begin to fulfill effectively your Christ-given mission to share your Faith with others.
If you haven’t already done so, think about starting your own blog on Catholic topics you like to write about. In 2008, I began my blog, entitled Catholic Writers Notebook, which I promote shamelessly on my Facebook page. On both my blog and my Facebook page, I shamelessly publicize my first eBook, Jesus’ Six Keys to a More Perfect You (See! I can’t help it; I’ve done it again). I boldly publicize it because I believe in it, and in the Holy Spirit’s power to use it for the good of the reader and of the Church at large.
The entire post-publication phase of eBook publishing centers on the book promotion platform, in which I am transformed into a relentless self-promoter for my eBook. In book publishing circles, promotion means publicity. For starters, since I have published in the Catholic Christian eBook genre, there are a number of Catholic market segments on which I’m focusing my publicity efforts to maximize my coverage of this market. I’ve segmented my e-mail address book into a variety of specific groups: my family, my former seminary classmates, my fellow parishioners, my Catholic friends in other parishes throughout the country, Catholic news services, editors of independent national Catholic newspapers and Catholic archdiocesan and diocesan newspapers in the many places where I’ve lived in parishes or studied as a seminarian.
In addition to these, I am contacting Catholic book or book-review blogs and websites to offer them a free 14-day loan of my eBook (provided by my publishers) if they’ll agree to considerate it for review on their site. I am making the same offer also to those Catholic magazines which provide reviews of selected Catholic books as a service to their readership.
It’s a great deal of work, but it’s an inexpensive way to introduce my book, and, more importantly, to spread Christ’s teachings as I am obliged to do by the Trinity-given grace of my Baptism. For this reason, I chose this method of distribution for my first book, Jesus’ Six Keys to a More Perfect You, and will do so again and again with other manuscripts in development.
I highly recommend this new technology for all Catholic writers. It is easy to accomplish, without the disappointments and delays of the traditional print publishing process. In some rare cases, it may even reverse the process by using these digital distributors to place my e-published work before the eyes of literary agents and print publishers.
The downside, of course, is that I must assume the multiple responsibilities of the tradition print publisher — editing, seeking permissions, ISBNs, publicity, etc. — or pay a qualified freelancer to do so. Fortunately, I can handle these chores myself, having spent most of my forty-five year career in writing, editing and publishing, so it is well worth the effort to put my eBook into the computers, eReader tablets or smartphones of the future parish lay leaders of the Catholic Church in America.
Like the shepherds of Bethlehem, I am chosen by the Father to spread the Good News about Him, His only begotten Son and the Holy Spirit. Now I have the technology and the instantaneous distribution to do the task far more efficiently.
