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S i d e b a r
The State of Catholic Publishing
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This Rock
Volume 15, Number 10
 December 2004 
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I’ve been marketing books for more than twenty-five years now and running a small publishing house for over twenty of those years. What’s the future of the business? My thoughts:
Will book publishing become obsolete in the electronic age?
Writing is still the most important form of communication. All exchange of ideas begin with written words—and books are still writing’s primary medium, even in the computer age. Ultimately, every other form of communication is a derivative of books. You can have a web site seen by a million people a day. But one book on the New York Times bestseller list on the same topic generates more respect from the power elites than your web site ever could.
Anyone who hasn’t written a book is not taken seriously in his area of expertise. Academia and the publishing world don’t even consider you an expert without a book under your belt. The Church—which is inclined to be conservative in its approach to all things—is a wonderful example of this. It tends to convey its teaching by way of books. Everyone in the Vatican today with a policymaking role has either written books himself (such as Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, and, indeed, the Pope himself) or has key staff members who are published scholars.
Can a Catholic publisher be successful?
The answer is yes, with reservations. Under any circumstances publishing is a tough, low-markup business. Each product is a new creation. Regarding Catholic book publishing specifically, in the past several years it has become clear that we face a difficult market. Older, more educated Catholics are dying at the rate of more than a thousand per day, and their generation reads more. They can’t be replaced quickly. Nonetheless, it is heartening to see the resurgence of interest today in traditional Catholicism, using that term in its broadest and most generous sense.
What sells these days?
Roman Catholic Books, as I’ve said, does mostly reprints. There are a few new books such as The Deceiver and Index of Leading Catholic Indicators in our catalogue. What works for us? Some things you’d expect, and some you wouldn’t.
- Our segment of the Catholic market reads books on the End Times or the Antichrist. The titles, though, are few and far between, which, I think, reflects the Church’s judicious attitude toward the topics.
- Books about the life of our Lord sell just okay.
- Apologetics books sell better.
- Understandably, Islam is a topic of intense interest to traditional Catholics since the terrorist attacks of 9/11.
Of course, what sells is an ever-changing proposition. For example, there is a revival of interest in Pope Pius XII these days. So next year, we will reprint a backlist title currently out of stock, Pope Pius XII: Greatness Dishonored. This book provides a detailed defense of his record in fighting the Nazis and saving persecuted Jews.
The Church today is not quite the Church my father wrote about in 1973. At least in this country, it will never equal—or even come close to—the success of the Protestant houses, not in our generation or the next, anyway. But that doesn’t mean it cannot be a vibrant and healthy part of the publishing industry.
—R. A. M.
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