Walk Through the Bible founder Bruce Wilkinson may not have been a total unknown when he wrote The Prayer of Jabez, but the little book's nine million sales were certainly helped by marketing creativity. The list of spin-offs include three children's versions, The Prayer of Jabez Journal, The Prayer of Jabez Devotional for Children, The Prayer of Jabez Devotional for Adults, The Prayer of Jabez Bible Study, The Prayer of Jabez for Women, a 90-minute audio version, a video, the musical companion The Prayer of Jabez Music … A Worship Experience, backpacks, jewellery, Christmas ornaments, vanilla-scented candles, mouse pads, and even a framed painting of Jabez. After refusing a proposal for Jabez candy bars, licensing agent Leslie Nunn Reed told the Los Angeles Times, “We want to be careful about not over-commercializing this.”
Mobilizing church members to spread the word and sell books has been a key part of the marketing process for the publishers of Jabez and other recent spiritual blockbusters. This process has been studied and finetuned by Greg Stielstra, who leads the marketing team at Zondervan, a subsidiary of Harper Collins. The term “pyromarketing” has been coined to explain the process of lighting small sparks in the dry tinder of receptive congregations and then gradually fanning the flames into a growing blaze. Stielstra has worked with Philip Yancey, Lee Strobel, Jim Cymbala, Drs. Henry Cloud and John Townsend, Joni Eareckson Tada, Billy Graham, Dan Quayle, Oliver North, Dr. C. Everett Koop and Rosa Parks, and is not shy about his accomplishments with pyromarketing. In an online blog he claimed that he could take a quilting book promoted “to one-tenth of one percent of left-handed quilters,” and land it on the non-fiction bestsellers list.
The extent of Stielstra's involvement with the book is unclear, but the principles of pyromarketing were clearly at work with Rick Warren's The Purpose-Driven Life. With sales approaching 25 million copies, it has been described as the bestselling nonfiction hardback book in history. Warren has acknowledged the message of the book is not new, but it was an ideal fit for pyromarketing. Warren's previous book The Purpose-Driven Church and his credibility as the pastor of one of America's fastest growing churches gave his new book a receptive audience among some 30,000 pastors. Typical blockbusters use media blitzes to capitalize on name recognition or current events, but The Purpose-Driven Life was launched with no advertising to speak of. As with other pyromarketed books, the sales began very slowly, built to an impressive crescendo and are still going.
“The success of The Purpose-Driven Life or The Passion of the Christ remains puzzling to many,” says Stielstra, “but not to those who know their secret. What do these remarkable success stories have in common? They each used pyromarketing.”
The Left Behind series also combined skillful storytelling and compelling themes. Created by bestselling evangelical author Tim Lahaye and written by Jerry Jenkins, the books in the series sold 75 million copies, shattered all previous Christian fiction sales records, exploded onto the secular bestsellers lists and generated $650-million U.S. in sales that more than doubled the staff and revenue of Tyndale House Publishers. LaHaye and Jenkins masterfully expanded the literal dispensational reading of a few dozen verses of scripture into thousands of pages of detailed edge-of-your-seat narrative complete with plane crashes, assassinations, pestilence and United Nations conspiracy plots. The themes of judgment on godless governments and permissive societies seemed to strike powerful chords with Christians and unbelievers alike.
According to a 2004 American Association of Publishers study, the :Left Behind series and The Da Vinci Code rebuttal books accounted for a significant portion of the 36.8 per cent increase in the sale of Christian books in 2003, a year during which the sales performance of most other trade book segments were flat or negative. Some may object to either or both of those titles being lumped into the category of Christian books, but their economic impact is certainly undeniable.
