Religious publishing was once written off, but today books about spirituality are seized on by publishers and devoured by readers. The market has shrunk, but some writers have never had it so good. The new era of religious writing involves little money - but a good deal of complexity

The Bible is often touted as the world's best-selling book of all time. Around 1.25 million copies are sold in Britain every year and in the US it flies off the shelves even faster than Harry Potter on his broomstick. But what of the rest of the religious publishing industry in Britain? We know that Richard Dawkins improved his bank balance by denouncing religion in The God Delusion, but has this had the effect of boosting sales of religious books? 

In some cases the answer is yes. The alliance of the Dawkins phenomenon with the rise of religious fundamentalism has sharpened the interest of secular publishers, encouraging them to dust off their religion lists and ask how they can capitalise on the trend. For while many acknowledge that the market for most religious books has been in decline for years, they are cheered by a resurgence of interest in spirituality of a certain kind - readers are looking for answers to "the big questions" and over the last few years the search has become more urgent.

Publishers and authors have responded with books that explore the issues. Richard Dawkins is not alone in using the tools of eloquence and erudition to chip away at religion. The journalist Christopher Hitchens, scientist Sam Harris and philosopher Daniel Dennett have all found commercial success this way. But they have not gone unchallenged. Christian authors including John Cornwell, Alister McGrath and, most recently, Tina Beattie have faced them in battle at the tills of Waterstone's.

Cornwell's book Darwin's Angel, a direct response to The God Delusion, has sold 12,000 copies since it was published last September, and is currently being translated into three other languages. "I have to thank Dawkins, of course; he's stirred interest in religion," he says.

As John Cornwell points out, he and Richard Dawkins both had respectable profiles as authors before The God Delusion, and their reputations enabled them to get book deals in the first place. Robin Baird-Smith, publishing director at Continuum, agrees that author profile is important. Bestsellers at Continuum are the Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks and the former Master of the Dominicans, Timothy Radcliffe. "We now look for public personalities who have an interest in religion," says Mr Baird-Smith, citing as examples Baroness (Shirley) Williams and the American writer Norman Mailer, who died recently and whose On God: An Uncommon Conversation is to be published by Continuum in March.

David Moloney, publisher at Hodder and Stoughton's imprint, Hodder Christian Publishing, agrees that if the profile of the author is high enough and the idea is good enough then a book on religion will always sell. "We need to find new ways of looking at an old subject," he explains.

To Alex Wright, senior editor of religion at IB Tauris, success in modern Christian publishing lies not in names but in academia. He agrees that there has been a surge in interest and says that his publishing company has its niche within that.

"We regard religion as an academic subject," he explains. "We look for books that take the broader, grander perspective, stepping out of the narrow world of belief."

However, he adds that it has been harder for companies that publish exclusively religious books. "Christian publishing itself is in the doldrums. The Christian publishing houses have been slow to adapt as their traditional readership gets smaller. They haven't been nimble enough in adjusting to the new demographic."

Christian publishers defend themselves against such accusations, arguing that there is still a market for the kind of books they sell. Tom Longford, founder and managing director at the small Christian imprint Gracewing, has noted a new appetite for spirituality, particularly Benedictine, Carthusian or Franciscan texts. "Some Catholics are coming back to traditional forms of the faith after the experimentation of the last decades," he says. "What the Pope has done with the Old Rite Mass is symbolic of that - people are coming back to tried and tested things."

Mr Baird-Smith, on the other hand, suspects that the traditional religious book market is indeed in decline, but argues that Continuum has adapted. "We focus more on  books which sell in non-religious bookshops because publishers who sell traditional religious books are in deep trouble," he says.

Smaller publishing houses have been forced to merge to bolster themselves against the decline and Continuum was born from just such a union in 1999.

Meanwhile, a recent blow to the British Christian bookselling industry was the takeover of the chain of shops belonging to SPCK (the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge) by the American company, St Stephen the Great, an Orthodox lay charity established in 2004. Many SPCK shops have closed and the remainder will be renamed SSG, although the publishing arm of SPCK, founded in the 1690s, continues to operate as usual.

With outlets for their books becoming more restricted, publishers are faced with the problem of persuading high street shops to stock them. Tina Beattie, whose The New Atheists was published in October 2007, says the book is stocked only in the very largest stores. "The big chains have stitched up the market and are driven by profit and secular market values," says Dr Beattie. "There's a huge market for esoteric mind, body and soul books or books about new age religion or child abuse, but not for traditional Christianity."

Sian Jones, buyer of religious titles for Waterstone's, is unable to say how many Christian books are sold on the company's "Mind, Body and Spirit" shelves, but denies that it is harder for the more obscure publishers to get their books into Waterstone's. "We stock books from publishers of all sizes, and are happy to consider books from smaller publishers. Books are considered on merit and not from where they come from," she says. "Our bestseller this year so far has been The Dawkins Delusion? by Alister McGrath, although the Pope does feature in our top 10."

If the high-street shops sell few books with a religious theme, Tesco and Asda are even more choosy. Dawkins is there, as is so-called Mis Lit - memoirs of unhappy childhoods, which more often than not have been spent in religious institutions. Fr Michael Seed's Nobody's Child, sold in Asda, is a rare variation in that it relates the story of an abusive childhood in a secular setting with the writer finding redemption through faith. But most books on religion fail to reach the supermarket shelves.

Worse still, publishers and authors alike complain that the secular press is very unwilling to review books about religion.

However, Claire Armitstead, literary editor at The Guardian, protests that she printed reviews of three religious books last month: God's Undertaker: has science buried God? by John Lennox, A Secular Age by Charles Taylor and Robert Alter's new translation of the Psalms, "looking at them as literature as much as religious texts".

But Ms Armitstead admits: "We probably don't review more than five or six religious books a year, so you have hit on an uncharacteristic time. As editor of the pages I did ask myself whether it was too much to do two the same week, which isn't a question I would ask if they were, say, history books."

However, despite these obstacles, a note of optimism is sounded by the small publishing houses, which all agree that the advent of the internet has opened up markets previously unavailable to them. "Thanks to Amazon we're no longer at the mercy of those bookshops who are sniffy about Christianity," says Brendan Walsh, editorial director at Darton, Longman and Todd, although he adds that Amazon demands huge discounts from publishers. For example, the cover price for Darwin's Angel is £10.99, but on Amazon it is selling at £7.69.

So can one get rich in religious publishing? It depends who you ask, but the answer is generally no. It also depends, yet again, on the profile of the author. For academic books, publishers often offer no advance on royalties. For books aimed at a more general readership a British religious publisher might offer from £500 to £2,000 for an author with a track record. This rises to around £10,000 for a really famous name, and an advance of up to £20,000 might be offered to a professional writer for the official biography of Rowan Williams - due from Hodder next summer.

Brendan Walsh says that DLT offers authors 7.5 per cent of the retail price of a book and an advance of around half the sum that would be earned on the first print run. "Given our modest runs the sort of advance we can offer isn't going to pay for a kitchen extension but you could probably buy a decent sofa," he says. Tina Beattie agrees, saying that both authors and publishers work for love, not money, and that many, like herself, do it as a sideline to their main job.

One author who has done extremely well in the last couple of years is Christopher Jamison, Abbot of Worth, whose book Finding Sanctuary was pegged to the TV series The Monastery. Finding Sanctuary broke all the rules for religious publishing: it is the only book on Christianity that Weidenfeld and Nicolson has ever published. Amazon made an advance order of 1,000 copies, 40,000 were sold in Britain in the first year, it's been translated into dozens of languages and Waterstone's included it in its "three for the price of two" offer.

"The key is to get yourself a large, secular publisher because they have serious marketing power," says Abbot Jamison. "And get yourself on TV," he adds as an afterthought. "If you want to sell lots of copies you have to target the audience that says ‘I'm spiritual but not religious'. You let them see how religion can inform their spirituality in new ways."

On the whole, the outlook for 2008 is good and there are new opportunities for religious publishers to find new readerships and explore Christianity in fresh ways. A word of warning, however, is sounded by Mr Walsh, who foresees dangers ahead for publishers too keen to improve their profit margins.

"The temptation is simply to produce books that defend Christianity and fight back against secular aggression," he says. "We need to get away from the incredibly dangerous game of drawing artificial lines in our culture, as if every baby that comes into the world is going to grow up to be a little God-botherer or a little secularist, a person of faith or a person of reason."