The popularization of the Bible entered a new phase in 2003, when Thomas Nelson created the BibleZine. Wayne Hastings described a meeting in which a young editor, who had conducted numerous focus groups and online surveys, presented the idea. “She brought in a variety of teen-girl magazines and threw them out on the table,” he recalled. “And then she threw a black bonded-leather Bible on the table and said, ‘Which would you rather read if you were sixteen years old?’ ” The result was “Revolve,” a New Testament that looked indistinguishable from a glossy girls’ magazine. The 2007 edition features cover lines like “Guys Speak Their Minds” and “Do U Rush to Crush?” Inside, the Gospels are surrounded by quizzes, photos of beaming teen-agers, and sidebars offering Bible-themed beauty secrets:
Have you ever had a white stain appear underneath the arms of your favorite dark blouse? Don’t freak out. You can quickly give deodorant spots the boot. Just grab a spare toothbrush, dampen with a little water and liquid soap, and gently scrub until the stain fades away. As you wash away the stain, praise God for cleansing us from all the wrong things we have done. (1 John 1:9)
“Revolve” was immediately popular with teen-agers. “They weren’t embarrassed anymore,” Hastings said. “They could carry it around school, and nobody was going to ask them what in the world it is.” Nelson quickly followed up with other titles, including “Refuel,” for boys; “Blossom,” for tweens; “Real,” for the “vibrant urban crowd” (it comes bundled with a CD of Christian rap); and “Divine Health,” which has notes by the author of the best-selling diet book “What Would Jesus Eat?” To date, Nelson has sold well over a million BibleZines.
The success of the BibleZine was all the more notable for occurring in a commercial field already crowded with products and with savvy marketing ideas. This year’s annual trade show of the Christian Booksellers’ Association, in Denver, brought such innovations as “The Outdoor Bible,” printed on indestructible plastic sheets that fold up like maps, and “The Story,” which features selections from the Bible arranged in chronological order, like a novel. There is a “Men of Integrity” Bible and a “Woman, Thou Art Loosed!” Bible. For kids, there’s “The Super Heroes Bible: The Questfor Good Over Evil” and “Psalty’s Kids Bible,” featuring “Psalty, the famous singing songbook.” The “Soul Surfer Bible” has notes by Bethany Hamilton, who lost an arm to a shark in 2003. “2:52 Boys Bible: The Ultimate Manual” promises “gross and gory Bible stuff.” In the “Rainbow Study Bible,” each verse is color-coded by theme. “The Promise Bible” prints every one of God’s promises in boldface. And “The Personal Promise Bible” is custom-printed with the owner’s name (“The LORD is Daniel’s shepherd”), home town (“Woe to you, Brooklyn! Woe to you, New York!”), and spouse’s name (“Gina’s two breasts are like two fawns”).
There is also a renaissance in the field of audio Bibles. This category has long been dominated by stentorian readings by prominent ministers, and by such famous believers as Charlton Heston, Johnny Cash, and James Earl Jones. The latest audio versions, by contrast, are sophisticated dramatizations that feature sound effects, original music, and large professional casts. In Denver, Zondervan showcased “The Bible Experience,” featuring just about every black actor in Hollywood, from Denzel Washington to Garrett Morris, and starring Blair Underwood as Jesus and Samuel L. Jackson as God. The publisher of Zondervan, Scott Bolinder, spoke with excitement about the possibilities for distributing the book on iTunes. “A person hears about it, says, ‘I don’t know, I’m not parting with thirty-four dollars. But I’ll try the Book of Revelation for a dollar-ninety-nine,’ ” he said. Thomas Nelson is already working on a rival version, in which Jim Caviezel reprises the title role in “The Passion of the Christ.” Jason Alexander, of “Seinfeld,” is signed on for an unspecified Old Testament character.
It is easy to ascribe a cynical motive to publishers’ embrace of commercial trends. Tim Jordan, of B. & H., concedes, “You do get some folks that say you shouldn’t treat the Bible as a fashion accessory or a throwaway.” Nonetheless, he feels that, from the point of view of a serious religious publisher, fashion can’t be ignored as a way of reaching new audiences. The point, he says, is “to expose as many people as you can, because we believe that it’s God’s word, we believe that it’s life-changing, and we don’t take that lightly.”
In the middle of the summer, Nelson Bible’s marketing team assembled at the company’s offices, in Nashville, for a fall strategy meeting. The staff members radiated the efficient good cheer of marketing professionals everywhere. Rodney Hatfield, his thick hair mostly gray, sat at a corner of the conference-room table while Scott Schwertly, the marketing director, got things rolling. “If we’re going to start with the ‘Family Foundations’ Bible, let’s go ahead and pull out the five-by-five matrix for that title,” Schwertly said. The matrix is a chart of twenty-five squares; an axis along the top identifies “Target Audiences/Needs,” such as “Churches/Pastors,” and an axis down the side shows “What you will do to reach them.”
An unusual challenge of Bible marketing is that there is no living author to do promotion. As a result, endorsements by well-known pastors become crucial. These are often the only names that will go on the cover. Hatfield asked about targeting the pastors David Jeremiah and Rick Warren: “Maybe there’s even a customized version of this that they can brand for their ministry.” The megachurch movement has created attractive possibilities for Bible marketers. A single recommendation from the pulpit of the right pastor can mean ten thousand potential sales.
With the book’s marketing budget set at sixty thousand dollars, ads in mainstream publications were out of the question, but Kelly Holt, a marketing specialist, presented ideas for a campaign to run in several Christian magazines, including SpiritLed Woman, MOMSense, and Rev!, a magazine for pastors. Holt said, “The imagery would be the tired family at Disney World who’s waiting in line all sweaty and nasty, and the tagline would be, like, ‘There’s a better way to spend quality time together.’ ” In addition to the Christian press, Nelson has the advantage of being able to place ads for its own products in its BibleZines. Ads for Christian horror novels and a reality show about missionaries ran in “Refuel.”
Next, the meeting proceeded to the “Grace for the Moment Daily Bible.” The marketing budget for this was only about half that of “Family Foundations,” because Nelson was counting on Max Lucado’s name to do most of the selling. The marketing group had explored giveaways on Christian radio stations and a collaboration with DaySpring, a Christian greeting-card company owned by Hallmark, for a line of Max Lucado cards. The group also discussed promotingthe book when Lucado made appearances at Women of Faith, a travelling ministry that holds two-day “spiritual spas” attracting as many as twenty thousand paying worshippers. The largest chunk of the budget was going toward consumer ads, targeting both men and women, in Christian magazines. “I need some feedback,” another marketing specialist said. She held up a print ad—a white orchid on a satiny black background—that had been created to run in “Redefine,” a new BibleZine for baby boomers.
Hatfield made a suggestion: “I guess what it doesn’t say enough of is ‘Max Lucado.’ ”
“That should be huge,” Jennifer Willingham, a publicist, said dryly. “Drop out your image: white sheet of paper and ‘Max Lucado Bible.’ ”
Although Bible sales in America have been robust for the past decade, the business is still fraught with anxieties. For one thing, Bibles are expensive to produce—two to four times the cost of a typical hardcover book—and retail at prices that often leave a very small profit margin. (“The Family Foundations Study Bible” lists at $39.99 for the hardcover and $59.99 for the bonded-leather edition.) The expense begins with the page count: most Bibles are nearly two thousand pages long. Publishers must often commission custom fonts that are thin enough to keep the Bible compact and dark enough to read, but not so dark that they bleed through the thin (and expensive) paper. Internal design is complicated, too, with footnotes, study notes, center-column references, charts, maps, and illustrations. Leather covers add to the outlay. Gilding, a labor-intensive process, can be simulated with a spray stain, but costs remain high. Thomas Nelson stitches most of its bindings, though other publishers have moved toward glue. Red-letter Bibles require two-color printing. Tabs, ribbons, and boxes add to the cost.
There is also concern that Bible publishers, for all their marketing ingenuity, have outsmarted themselves. Tim Jordan said, “There’s been research that has shown that half the people who come into a Christian bookstore intending to buy a Bible, with money in their pocket, leave without one, because they get overwhelmed.”
In an auditorium at the Christian Booksellers’ Association show this summer, Nelson’s Wayne Hastings, a dapper man, nearly bald with a trim mustache, took the stage for a seminar on this issue. For half an hour, he laid out his company’s new research into customers’ “felt needs.” According to Nelson’s findings, people don’t come into a store looking for a specific translation—the criterion by which most retailers arrange their Bible shelves—but, rather, to meet a need. More than sixty per cent of Bibles are purchased as gifts. Others are bought by people with scenarios in mind: I’ll study it before breakfast; I’ll read it on the bus. Hastings’s message was that booksellers need to orient their displays to this need. “Are you willing to break some paradigms?” he asked. Behind a curtain, his company had set up a prototype for the Bible department of tomorrow. It consisted of color-coded shelves and packaging, organized not by translation but according to Nelson’s six felt needs. Nelson says that ninety-five per cent of retailers have responded positively, but the reaction from other publishers has been lukewarm. Zondervan wants to stick with a translation-based system, which, perhaps not coincidentally, benefits its popular New International Version. Tyndale and B. & H. accept the felt-need premise but are quibbling over the specific categories, and are skeptical about the feasibility of industry-wide color-coding. Tim Jordan said, “You’re not going to go to all the potato-chip companies and tell these people, ‘You’ve got to change your packaging to reflect some common color for the potato-chip aisle.’ I don’t think Frito-Lay is going to go for that.”
The most obvious solution would be fewer choices, but, given the enthusiasm that consumers have shown for a diversified market and the investment that publishers have made in satisfying this demand, that’s out of the question. The situation worries some people. Phyllis Tickle, a former religion editor of Publishers Weekly and the author of popular prayer books, told me, “There’s a certain scandal to what’s happened to Bible publishing over the last fifteen years.” Tickle is contributing to a new Bible paraphrase for Nelson called “The Voice,” which is intended for the progressive emergent church, so she is not entirely opposed to modern repackaging. The problem, as she sees it, is that “instead of demanding that the believer, the reader, the seeker step out from the culture and become more Christian, more enclosed within ecclesial definition, we’re saying, ‘You stay in the culture and we’ll come to you.’ And, therefore, how are we going to separate out the culturally transient and trashy from the eternal?” The consumerist culture in which BibleZines and the like participate is, to Tickle, “entirely antithetical to the traditional Christian understanding of meekness and self-denial and love and compassion.” In Tickle’s view, reimagining the Bible according to the latest trends is not merely a question of surmounting a language barrier. It involves violating “something close to moral or spiritual barriers.”
Of course, Tickle is questioning an industry trend, not publishers’ sincerity. “I have yet to meet the first head of house that wasn’t in it with some sense of calling as surely as a clergyman is,” she said. Sitting in the Zondervan suite during the Christian Booksellers’ Association show, Paul Caminiti, the head of the company’s Bible division, cited an appropriately Biblical parallel, a story from the Book of Acts about Philip the Evangelist and a man known as the Ethiopian eunuch. The Ethiopian eunuch “was really the chief financial officer for the Persian empire,” he said. “He was a brilliant man. He was probably the Alan Greenspan of his day. But he has a text Bible—and he has been to Jerusalem, so he is one of these people who is spiritually intrigued—but he can’t make head or tail of it. And it’s not because he isn’t smart. So God sends Philip alongside.” According to the Bible story, Philip ran up to the Ethiopian’s chariot and, in the King James Version, asked, “Understandest thou what thou readest?” The Ethiopian answered, “How can I, except some man should guide me?” Philip, Caminiti explained, “provides just a little bit of color commentary, and the light comes on.” After listening to Philip’s explication of the passage, the Ethiopian orders his chariot to stop by some water so that Philip can baptize him. “And that’s what we’re doing,” Caminiti concluded. “We’re coming alongside the text and providing some color commentary. And some color covers.” 
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