The following is a quote taken from a book titled, "You Can Do It: A Guide to Christian Self-Pulishing" by Athena Dean. It shows how UN-Christian, Christian publishers actually are. How they are only interested in making big money, and not in publishing important truth that the body of Christ needs to hear. This sort of behavior is shameful and ungodly. Don't expect to find the truth in books published by the Thomas Nelson or Word. They won't be publishing Elijha or Enoch or John the Baptist.

Back in 1996 I attended a reunion for Christian Leaders, Authors & Speakers Services (CLASS) held during the annual Christian Booksellers Association (CBA) convention. As one of the senior editors for Thomas Nelson Publishing gave her session, I felt overwhelmed with how obvious it became that the celebrities were the only ones getting any attention at all from Thomas Nelson Publishers. She shared that it came down to dollars and cents: If they weren’t absolutely sure that theycould move 25,000 hardcover copies of a book in the first year, they weren’t interested. Just a few years later one of our editors represented WinePress Publishing at a Christian Writers Conference in Pennsylvania where another representative for Thomas Nelson took the spotlight. Here’s the email I received from her:

Dear Athena: Just wanted to let you know the Mercer (PA) Christian Writers’ Conference went well. I taught on Self-Editing and Writing the Nonfiction Book. An interesting turn of events set up my second session quite well. The keynote speaker was the editorial director for Thomas Nelson.

I sat in on his workshop entitled, “What CBA – Especially Thomas Nelson – is Looking For.” After reading your book I almost didn’t go, but then I figured the conferees in my late afternoon workshop probably would have heard him earlier in the day.

Basically he told us that Thomas Nelson was looking for “luminaries” – the professional athlete, gospel singer, or preacher / teacher who is already famous. They want a star who can move 25,000–50,000 copies in the first five months of a books release.

You could just sense his announcement took the wind out of the sails of these budding writers. At the close of my session, I acknowledged how difficult it was to be published with Thomas Nelson, but that shouldn’t dash everyone’s dreams of having a book in print. I passed out the WinePress brochures, showed the press kits, and held up the WinePress sample books. I think it sparked some hope in those who attended my workshop. Sincerely, Debra

If we are going to have realistic expectations, then we ought to take a close look at the Christian publishing industry, the trends, and the real state of affairs. Publishing companies have basically two ways of doing business. The first is to publish a multitude of titles with the expectation of decent sales for all; the other is to publish fewer titles with high sales volumes for each one. The trend that most Christian publishing companies are following is the second one—fewer titles and higher sales volume—which means “big name” authors. Right there the majority of us are excluded!

One year, while on faculty at the Mt. Hermon Christian Writers’ Conference, I taught a class on self-publishing and one on promoting and marketing your book. After the class I had the opportunity to take in some of the other sessions, so I sat in on one by an editorial representative from a major Christian publishing house. He told how they receive 24,000 unsolicited manuscripts per year and publish only 12 to 17 new titles per year. He went on to explain that in order to be one of their authors you “have to bring something to the table.” That list includes:

1. A cutting-edge topic that is unique but still falls into their publishing niche
2. A Ph.D. or some other certified training that makes you an authority in your area
3. Strong communication skills and / or the ability to speak in front of large crowds
4. An established speaking or mail-order ministry that would purchase (in order to sell at your speaking engagements) at least 2,000 copies a year

. . . [Below is a quote from an article, quoted in this book: “Whatever Happened to Christian Publishing?” by Gene Edward Veith. World Magazine, July 1997]

Surely the free-market economy is a good thing. America’s prosperity and freedoms are tied to marketplace competition and disciplines. But while consumerism, the profit motive, and survival of the fittest are good for the realm of economics, they should not rule theology. Jesus, who drove the salesmen out of the temple, warned about the impossibility of serving both God and money. The prophets strenuously denounced religious leaders who told the people pleasant words from their own minds rather than the unsettling truths of the Word of God.

The apostle Paul could have been describing today’s religious marketplace: “For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear” (2 Tim. 4:3). A free-market economy, catering to consumer desires, gives us convenient supermarkets and shopping malls. But a marketing approach to religion requires “suiting desires” that because of the Fall are innately evasive of God. Religious consumerism involves “scratching ears” by telling the customers only what they want to hear, instead of the Word of God they need to hear. . . .

Here again, the publishers are merely following the market instead of attempting to teach. Polls have shown that many Americans are interested in the Bible insofar as it can give “practical principles for successful living.” Christian publishers, instead of finding ways to show that the Word of God has the power to save, sometimes domesticate it into a rule book for a contented, prosperous, middle-class lifestyle. Thomas Nelson offers titles such as The Management Methods of Jesus and The People Skills of Jesus: Ancient Wisdom for Modern Business. . . .

Some smaller publishers resist the pressures of commercialism and continue to publish theological books—but some of them nevertheless have drifted away from biblical orthodoxy. InterVarsity Press for many years was a lifeline for Christians engaged in the intellectual battles of the universities and the secular culture. IVP still publishes books such as Phillip Johnson’s Darwin on Trial, a work that broke through into secular circles to ignite fresh debates about evolution. But IVP also publishes “megashift” theology, as in The Openness of God and other works by Clark Pinnock, which maintains that God changes, that he condemns no one, and that salvation is possible apart from faith in Christ.

William B. Eerdmans for many years was one of the relatively few publishers to specialize in solid, scholarly research from the perspective of conservative Protestantism. Eerdmans still publishes on occasion important evangelical books such as David Wells’ No Place for Truth, but it also puts out books from the perspective of contemporary liberal theology, Roman Catholicism (including hagiographic lives of saints), and even Judaism (including a book on anti-semitism that argues, in the words of the catalog, that “the New Testament itself expresses a deep distrust of the tradition into which Jesus was born”). Both InterVarsity and Eerdmans are interested in post-modernist theology, with its assumptions that theology in our “postfoundationalist” age is “constructed” rather than revealed. Again, such books may deserve to be printed, but why by the few publishers available for conservative Christian scholarship? What has gone wrong in the Christian publishing industry can perhaps best be illustrated in the career moves of Mr. Peretti, the million-selling author. Word lured Mr. Peretti away from Crossway, the company that launched his career, for a reported $4 million and a plan to turn Mr. Peretti into a crossover hit, helping him to break into the coveted secular market.

According to a veteran publishing insider who spoke on condition of anonymity, Word took the first manuscript Peretti delivered, The Oath, and hired a secular editor from the New York publishing establishment to make it more acceptable for the tastes of the non-Christian market. As might have been, The Oath has failed to win the big sales of Mr. Peretti’s first novels. Apparently, it has not attracted the attention of Stephen King fans, for many of whom overt evil is what is titillating. Nor has it won much favor from Peretti fans, who find that it lacks what attracted them to his writing in the first place. Spokesmen for Nelson / Word did not return World’s calls seeking comment. . . .

Judging by the buzz at past conventions, conversations with practically anyone at this year’s CBA convention—authors, editors, marketers, booksellers—will uncover a host of frustrations, bitter experiences, and disillusionment. Most of the individuals committed to the industry still have a strong sense of Christian vocation and hope to publish books of genuine value. But if past conventions are a guide, insiders will swap tales of ruthless competition, ghostwriting in high places, and regrets about things they believe they had to do. . . .

[Now back to the original book about self-publishing}

A few years ago I had the opportunity to spend some time with an acquisitions editor for some of the biggest publishers in Christian publishing over the last twenty years. She frankly told me that she struggled with promising new authors the moon when she knew that the publishers allowed her to sign them on only to fill empty spots in the catalog. All the marketing dollars were spent on the big names and once the catalog was replaced with the next season’s catalog, the new author’s books were taken out of print and forgotten about. It is sad that Christian publishing has come to the point of using new authors as filler, but it is reality, so we might as well get used to it. . . .

I’d like to add one more compelling reason to self-publish. The more commercial and worldly the Christian publishing industry becomes, the harder it will be to get more controversial topics published. Certainly, my two books on the dangers of multi-level marketing in the church (Consumed by Success and All That Glitters Is Not God) were controversial enough that I didn’t even waste my time trying to go the royalty route. But other examples would include John Paulk’s book Not Afraid to Change: The Remarkable Story of How One Man Overcame Homosexuality. While a successful agent tried for a full year to sell his manuscript to the larger Christian publishing houses, it was finally obvious that the topic was just a little too controversial for the mainstream Christian publishing industry. . . .