Christian Publishing 101: What ECPA Does for Authors and Publishers
Christian publishing can look opaque from the outside. Readers see the finished book on the shelf or in an app, not the network of trade groups, bestseller lists, and award programs working behind it to decide what gets noticed and what doesn’t.
One of the biggest players in that network is the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association, better known as ECPA. It sits at the center of how Christian bestsellers get tracked, how Christian book awards get judged, and increasingly, how authors and publishers get trained.
Stan Jantz, president of ECPA, joined the show to pull back the curtain on what the organization does for authors and publishers. Stan is also an author himself, having co-authored 75 books with Bruce Bickel.
What is the ECPA?
Stan: ECPA is a trade group that represents Christian publishers, both in the US and internationally. It was formed 45 years ago, originally as a place for publishers to network and exchange ideas. Over time, it has also become known for its conferences and its research projects, bringing members the latest information in publishing while helping promote Christian publishing and Christian books more broadly.
How does the ECPA promote Christian books?
Stan: The main way ECPA promotes the authors and publishers in its network is by curating a monthly bestsellers list. With roughly a million titles published every year once you include self-published books, and most of them landing on Amazon, browsers are overwhelmed with choice. So people turn to bestseller lists to see what’s actually selling.
ECPA’s list, published at christianbookexpo.com, is based on real sales data rather than publishers self-reporting. It is curated using data from what used to be called Nielsen BookScan (Nielsen also runs SoundScan for music. BookScan has since been sold to a company called NPD, though it kept the BookScan name). BookScan gathers point-of-sale data from hundreds of retailers, from Amazon to Barnes & Noble to independent bookstores, to determine what is genuinely selling.
That data is broken into separate lists: an overall top 50, a top 25 in nonfiction and in fiction, plus juvenile and Bible categories. The lists show readers what people are buying across both the Christian and broader book markets and help them decide what to read next.
ECPA also runs two award programs annually, including the Christian Book Award for nonfiction, and the Christy Award for fiction. Winners get promoted through social media, giving Christian books recognition not just for sales but for literary excellence, judged by panels who read and score the entries. Sales and literary excellence capture two different things, and that combination is one of the best ways ECPA can raise awareness for Christian books. As someone who still writes books himself, Stan says he uses both the bestseller list and the award lists the same way any reader would, to see what’s worth picking up next.
Thomas: Not every bestselling book deserves a literary award, and not every award-winning book is a bestseller. Those are two different pieces of data. It’s worth noting there are two kinds of bestseller lists: algorithmic and curated. What ECPA does is closer to what the panels at the New York Times or USA Today do. They look at the sales data, but they also apply human judgment rather than just reporting the raw numbers.
Christian Bestseller Lists Are Curated, Not Algorithmic
Stan: One correction: the direct site for the Christian bestsellers list and the award-winning books is christianbookexpo.com, not the general ECPA site. Everything we’re discussing lives there, including a sales awards section for books that have sold 500,000 or a million copies over their lifetime. It’s a great resource for authors, letting you see both what critics and judges consider the best books and what’s actually selling. Often those are different things, and together they give a good window into what people are reading.
Thomas: The alternative to the curated list is the algorithmic approach Amazon uses. But since Amazon updates hourly, its list is easy to game. Get a group of friends to buy your book at 2 AM on a Sunday, and you can screenshot yourself as a bestseller for an hour, even though that’s not the same as sustained sales.
Human curation asks harder questions: how long was this a bestseller, is this a fluke, or are real numbers moving? The New York Times list can be gamed too, and famously has been, but it’s much harder to fool and more trustworthy as a result.
How does the ECPA educate authors and publishers?
Stan: Direct education is newer for us, and it began when we took on the Christy Award, which will mark its 20th year next year. The award is named for the novel Christy by Katherine Marshall, which celebrated its 50th anniversary of publication last year. It was both a bestseller and a well-written book, a standard for the genre ever since.
Award weekend in Nashville, held on the campus of Lipscomb University, spans two full days. The first is Publishers University, roughly 24 hours of intensive programming packed into about 42 seminars for publishing professionals, covering everything publishers do: acquiring books, editing, marketing, production, design, and reader engagement, including the digital side of the business. A bridge event connects that to a second day built for authors, called The Art of Writing.
This year’s bridge speaker was Donald Miller, who rose to prominence with Blue Like Jazz around 20 to 25 years ago and has since built a marketing system called StoryBrand. He’s one of those rare speakers who can relate equally well to publishers and to authors, and he spoke for an hour-long segment to both audiences at once.
The Art of Writing day itself then ran three more sessions just for authors, including a panel called “Mythbusters,” built around the question of what authors assume publishers are looking for and whether that assumption actually holds up. The panel included authors Charles Martin, Karla Laureano, and Joanne Bischoff, who has moved back and forth between self-publishing and traditional publishing, and it was moderated by an editor from Howard Publishing.
What publishing myths does the ECPA try to dispel?
Stan: One myth is that publishers only care about an author’s platform. Platform helps, but especially in fiction, what publishers are increasingly looking for is whether you can actually write. That’s why we call the event The Art of Writing. Writing is a craft, and craftsmanship takes work, study, and practice, not just raw talent. Becoming a student of the craft matters more than the myth suggests.
Another myth is that authors shouldn’t self-promote, that it’s the publisher’s job. It’s often not said out loud, but plenty of authors quietly assume they can let the publisher handle that side entirely. In reality, there’s an aspect of bringing a book to public attention that the author has to attend to directly.
Podcasting is one example of something any author can do to build awareness, as long as it’s genuinely interesting enough that people want to listen.
The Art of Writing leads directly into the Christy Award Gala that evening, an open event for nominated authors, publishers, and anyone who wants to attend.
Unlike a general writers’ conference, it draws mostly professional authors, whether traditionally or successfully self-published, alongside plenty of established writers’ conferences that run throughout the year.
This year’s emcee was Cynthia Ruchti, who is deeply involved with the American Christian Fiction Writers Association (ACFW), which runs its own well-regarded conference each September. Her role bridged ECPA’s trade-organization work with the wider community of writers’ conferences.
Thomas: You started streaming the awards this year, too.
Stan: We did. One of our nominated authors, Sarah Ella, lives in Phoenix, and we’d only connected with her a few months earlier. She’s become something of a social media star for us, a genuinely great writer who has done a young adult fantasy series with Thomas Nelson, and she streamed the ceremony herself. It reached a lot of people who couldn’t attend in person, including some authors who were nominated but not there. We’re still trying to get better at that.
We’ve noticed that fiction writers support each other far more than nonfiction writers do. Nonfiction authors tend to work in isolation, often around a job or a church role. Fiction writers stick together, encourage each other, and promote each other’s work. It’s wonderful to see.
Thomas: I’ve seen the same thing on my other podcast, Novel Marketing. My co-host, James L. Rubart, was nominated for a Christy this year and couldn’t attend, so he watched the livestream from home. When he won, he wasn’t there to give an acceptance speech, but it worked out.
How has the ECPA adapted to indie authors?
Thomas: There’s been a real rise in indie authors since ECPA was founded 20 years ago. How has ECPA adapted to that?
Stan: Our membership is still composed of traditional publishers, and the line between traditional and hybrid or self-publishing comes down to money. A traditional publisher never takes a dime from the author. Once a publishing house, self-publishing house, or service asks the author for money, it’s no longer a traditional publisher by our definition.
That said, authors need to be careful, since some hybrid publishers won’t touch editorial or improve the book at all unless the author pays for it, yet they will publish it regardless. Authors are still expected to market their own books either way, and there’s a cost attached to that too, but the moment any money changes hands from author to publisher, the relationship has shifted into hybrid territory by ECPA’s definition.
It’s never been easier to self-publish, whether through CreateSpace, Lightning Source, or similar services. My advice to authors going that route is to invest in a professional editor rather than assuming you’re your own best editor. A professional will do more than line-edit or copyedit. They’ll engage with the concept of the book itself, pushing on structure and substance the way a traditional publisher’s editorial team would, and that investment makes it a genuinely better book, worth every dollar it costs.
I think of it like curation in a museum. A pile of dinosaur bones on their own draws no interest, but build an exhibit around them, a backdrop, context, information, and an audio guide, and suddenly people come to marvel at it. A book is the same: a pile of words won’t get read unless it’s been properly edited and curated, and that includes marketing. There are more books than ever, which makes standing out harder, but it’s also a world of opportunity that didn’t used to exist.
Thomas: Do you have plans to add a membership level for independently published authors?
Stan: We’ve talked about it but haven’t yet. There are already two groups serving that space, including the Christian Small Press Association on our side, and the Independent Book Publishers Association (IBPA) on the secular side.
At a high-level meeting we host each year for publisher presidents and vice presidents, we invited IBPA’s president, Angela Bull, to speak. IBPA has about 3,000 members, many of them individual self-published authors, though they do have publishing thresholds to join. Readers can find them at ibpa-online.org. Our secular counterpart on the publisher side is the Association of American Publishers (AAP), and like ECPA, it doesn’t currently include hybrid publishers in its membership either, though that could change as the industry keeps evolving.
One of the biggest changes underway is audio. Listening to books now mirrors the rise of podcast listening, since busy, commuting audiences can absorb content through their phones. Audio is publishing’s fastest-growing segment, currently around 10% of the market and projected to reach 20% within a few years, growing at roughly 25% a year.
What is the fastest growing segment of publishing?
Thomas: I couldn’t agree more. A couple of years ago I listened to 100 audiobooks and read zero ebooks and zero paper books. If a book isn’t available in audio, I won’t read it. My life is busy enough that I listen while working out, driving, or around the house, which effectively turns my car into a library, and I can listen at high speed.
Audiobooks only really took off once we got past what I’d call the awkward adolescence of the compact disc. CDs beat cassettes for music quality, but as a book format they were actually worse: a cassette could hold two or three hours of audio per side, while a CD topped out around 60 to 70 minutes depending on the format. Worse, a CD couldn’t remember where you left off, the way you could pull a cassette out of the car, drop it in a Walkman, and pick up right where you’d stopped. Because CDs held so little audio, books released on CD often had to be abridged just to fit, and abridging, while sometimes useful for nonfiction, took the magic out of a lot of fiction.
Smartphones fixed all of that. Now we carry not one book but a hundred, downloadable in a couple of taps, and the cost of delivering an audiobook dropped dramatically once publishers no longer needed to manufacture a dozen CDs per title. Audiobooks used to cost around $30.00, which is why people borrowed them from the library instead of buying them. With Audible, people now expect to pay more like $10.00 to $15.00.
Stan: The quality of narration has improved too. I look for particular narrators the way a lot of audio fans do. Find a reader you like, and you’ll seek out other books just because of who’s narrating them.
Thomas: I remember Huckleberry Finn narrated by Elijah Wood, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court narrated by the actor who played Ron Swanson on Parks and Recreation, whose no-nonsense delivery fit the character perfectly. Beyond celebrity narrators, someone like Michael Kramer builds a following of his own. I find myself looking up whatever epic fantasy he’s narrated most recently.
A good narrator gives a book another way to be discovered, since a listener who’s never heard of the author may take a chance on the book just because they trust the narrator.
Stan: And an audio listen often leads to buying the physical book, especially in nonfiction. I’m listening to Brené Brown’s Dare to Lead right now, narrated by Brown herself, and I’ll end up buying the print edition because I can’t underline an audiobook. F
iction is different. Once I’ve listened, I’m usually done with it. Nonfiction pulls me back to print.
Stan: Millennials, by and large, prefer print to ebooks. The theory I’ve heard is that they grew up on Harry Potter, and you never saw a kid carrying around a digital copy of it. They carried that big volume under their arm proudly. There’s also a broader pull toward physical objects, since so much of life is already digital. That’s part of why we run an award program called Top Shelf Cover Design, recognizing great covers, because even in a tiny thumbnail on Amazon, good design matters. People respond to beauty in the physical object itself, so print isn’t going anywhere.
Predictions that digital would replace print were overstated. In fact, digital’s share of total book sales has flattened, and even dipped slightly, over the past couple of years.
Ebooks vs. print: who prefers what?
Thomas: Print and ebooks each have real advantages, and they tend to appeal to different readers. Ebooks are especially popular with older readers, since the average Kindle reader is around 65, largely because of the large-print feature. That removes the hassle of reading glasses. It’s a better experience for fiction especially.
Nonfiction is trickier on an ebook, since readers tend to flip around and highlight rather than read start to finish, which is a nonlinear way of engaging with a book, and paper still handles that better.
The Bible is the clearest example. Sometimes you read it start to finish, but usually you’re looking something up, and trying to find a specific verse on a Kindle is a real hassle compared to an iPhone, an iPad, or an actual paper Bible you can just flip open.
Stan: Bible apps like YouVersion solve part of that, since you can jump straight to the verse you need, but you’re only getting that one verse in isolation.
Even so, we’re in a golden age of reading, no question. It’s a challenge for publishers and authors to get discovered and find traction, but as a reader, there’s never been a better time: a book in print, audio, or digital, delivered the moment you want it. With a Kindle, you can have a book in 30 seconds, something nobody would have imagined possible 20 years ago. If you’re a writer, it’s a great time to be creating, even if getting heard is harder given how many titles are competing for attention.
What about church bookstores?
Thomas: Another trend worth watching is the church as bookstore. A lot of big churches now have a coffee shop and a bookstore built right into the lobby, so on your way to the sanctuary you walk through a small retail space, often staffed by an actual person selling books. Unlike a general bookstore, the selection is small and highly curated, often chosen personally by the church staff or the senior pastor.
That’s reshaping the industry because the decision-makers are shifting. A pastor recommending a book used to be simply valuable. Now it’s enormously valuable, because that same pastor can also put the book on the shelf of his own church bookstore, where thousands of congregants walk past it every single Sunday on their way into the service. That’s a genuinely powerful position to hold in the industry.
What is the Christian Book Expo?
Stan: The name comes from a book gathering in Dallas roughly a decade ago, a get-together for publishers and authors that we’ve kept the name from ever since, frankly out of habit more than strategy. We’ve actually already bought the URL for “Read Good Books,” and we think that name might resonate more with readers going forward than “Expo” does. Whatever it’s called, the site shows what’s selling, what’s been awarded, and the latest across the different book categories: nonfiction, fiction, juvenile, and Bibles.
We’d like to bring this closer to where readers actually are, and for Christians, one of the best places to reach them is the church. Over the next year or two we’re working to connect directly with pastors, since they can be a major influence on what people read, especially in nonfiction, and we want to make the whole resource more accessible to everyone, not just industry insiders. It’s updated every month, and the list currently posted just went up a couple of days ago and covers November.
What have you written?
My books with Bruce Bickel are on Amazon under my name. Not all 75 are still in print, but a good number are. We’ve written exclusively in nonfiction, taking difficult theological concepts and making them accessible.
I grew up in a family that owned and operated a chain of Christian retail bookstores, then worked for publishing houses, and I’ve now been with ECPA while writing for the past 20 years. Getting to spend a career this close to books, first from behind the counter and now from inside the industry that makes them, has been a privilege I don’t take for granted.
I love books and writers, and everything we do is in service of the people who create them, because without writers, books don’t exist.
I think a new generation of writers is emerging, and memoir has become a powerful way of expressing truth through experience. Millennials, especially, don’t want to be told something. They want to be shown it. The old approach of laying out the Christian life in three easy steps probably was never the right one, even though publishing leaned on it for years. What’s replacing it is a more honest look at what it means to live as a Christian in a difficult world, and where God is at work in that. I try to read widely, and I’m encouraged by how much of what’s coming out of Christian publishing now feels more real and more authentic than what we’ve seen in a long time.
I have written an autobiography, and I would like someone who has a love of Yahshua, and Christian values to publish my book. I am a few chapters from finishing my book. Those that have read it tell me I need to publish it. I would like to do that before my time on earth is done.