The headline shows up in a Christian writers Facebook group before you see it anywhere else: “Restructuring at Christianbook is Roiling the Religion Book Market.” Someone’s tagged your small press’s editor in the comments, half-joking, half-not: should we be worried? You click through to the actual article on your phone, standing in your kitchen with coffee going cold, and read words like “warehouse closure,” “125 jobs,” and “publishers still wait for answers” about a company you’d never thought to worry about, because it had simply always been there.
You don’t sell through Christianbook. Your books are print-on-demand through KDP and IngramSpark, nothing wholesale, nothing warehoused. But your stomach drops anyway, and it takes you a minute to name why: the actual infrastructure that gets a Christian book from your hard drive into a reader’s hands feels less solid than you’d let yourself believe, and this is just the piece of it that happened to make the news today.
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What Actually Happened at Christianbook
Here’s what’s actually verifiable, past the comment-thread speculation. Christianbook, the online Christian retail and catalog company that’s been the third-biggest sales account for many religion publishers behind only Amazon and Ingram, was sold this spring to P52, a company backed by the private equity firm Riverside Partners. Publishers Weekly reported that P52 bought Christianbook’s critical assets, including the website and its existing inventory, without assuming the previous ownership’s debts, including money owed to publishers.
That distinction is the whole story. Several publishers told Publishers Weekly they hadn’t been paid since winter, and one said the new owners implied that continuing to do business with Christianbook going forward would mean giving up any claim to what they were already owed. The company closed its Peabody, Massachusetts warehouse, cutting roughly 125 jobs, and a follow-up report confirmed fulfillment moved to a Staples-run facility in Nashville, with a WARN notice eliminating another 50 corporate positions. New executive chairman Marc Jourlait says the company is now paying every bill it incurs and wants to rebuild trust “over time.” A permanent CEO search is underway. Former CEO Jason Schwartz stays on the board, out of the operating role.
Christianbook is still operating. A company several publishers structured real revenue around just proved it could change hands and shed its obligations while some of the people it owed money to are still waiting. If you had inventory on consignment there, or a wholesale account, reread that contract this week: what it actually says about termination and returns, in your own reading, before you take a company email’s word for it.
This Isn’t the First Time the Ground Moved
In 1983, the Christian Booksellers Association counted 3,290 member bookstores and 605 publishers doing roughly a billion dollars in combined business. Christian retailers controlled something close to 80% of all Christian book sales that year. By 2005, CBA membership had dropped to 2,256. By 2016, it had halved again. In 2019, the CBA shut down entirely. Family Christian Stores, once the largest Christian retail chain in the country, liquidated all 240 of its locations in 2017. Fewer than 1,000 Christian bookstores remain nationwide today, counting Catholic and church bookshops, and physical Christian retail now accounts for no more than 20% of Christian book sales.
Sit with that trajectory for a second before reaching for the reassurance. Forty-three years of a shrinking channel is a real loss. A lot of careful, patient work by a lot of bookstore owners went under somewhere in that decline, and that deserves to be named honestly before anyone reaches for the silver lining. The same forty-three years also hold something else true at the same time: authors kept writing, and readers kept finding Christian books through every collapse along the way. Christianbook was never the foundation. It’s one more piece of an infrastructure that’s been eroding since before most working authors today started writing, and the writing itself is what outlasted every earlier piece of it.
Where the Tree Actually Gets Planted
Jeremiah names the actual choice underneath a moment like this, and he doesn’t soften it: “Cursed is the man who trusts in man and makes flesh his strength, whose heart turns away from the Lord… Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord. He is like a tree planted by water, that sends out its roots by the stream, and does not fear when heat comes, for its leaves remain green, and is not anxious in the year of drought, for it does not cease to bear fruit” (Jeremiah 17:5,7-8).
Read that plainly. Relying on a distributor to move your books is ordinary stewardship, the same as using a bank or a mail carrier. The warning here is narrower and sharper than “don’t use retail channels.” It’s about where your actual root system runs. A tree planted by a stream doesn’t panic when a drought hits the surrounding fields, because its roots were never drawing from the weather in the first place. They were drawing from the water that doesn’t dry up with the season.
Christianbook’s payables trouble is exactly the kind of drought Jeremiah is naming, and it’s a real one: financially costly, verifiably unfair to the publishers still owed money. Denying that it hurts isn’t faith. It’s avoidance wearing a Bible verse. What the passage actually asks is where your leaves stay green regardless: whether your sense that your writing still matters, that your calling still holds, depends on any single company’s balance sheet. If it does, this month is a hard but honest wake-up call. If it doesn’t, this month is still hard for the people directly affected, and it still isn’t a referendum on you.
What to Actually Do With This
Panic produces bad decisions faster than almost anything else in publishing. Slow down and do the ordinary, unglamorous things instead.
If you have a real business relationship with Christianbook, get it in writing this week. Know exactly what you’re owed. Read what your current contract actually says about termination and consignment returns yourself, and don’t sign anything new, including a request to waive prior claims, until you have. CWS’s publishing services exist partly for exactly this kind of moment: a second, unhurried set of eyes on a contract question before you agree to something under pressure.
Don’t rebuild your whole strategy around one retailer’s stability, including the ones that feel unshakeable right now. Building a distribution stack across multiple platforms instead of one has always been good practice. Now you have a dated, specific example of what happens when you didn’t.
Own the relationship no retailer can restructure out from under you. Whatever happens to any single distribution channel, an email list you built and control directly doesn’t answer to a private equity acquisition. It’s the most practical version of planting your roots somewhere the drought can’t reach.
Reread your own platform terms this week, while the reminder is still fresh. The self-publishing platforms you already use can change their terms too, and most authors only read the fine print after something’s already gone wrong.
Closing the Tab, Cold Coffee and All
Go back to that Facebook thread, if you still have it open. Somebody in the comments is probably speculating about what happens next: whether P52 turns it around, whether more publishers walk away and the channel shrinks further still. You don’t have to have an answer to that today, and neither does anyone else in the thread, however confidently they’re typing.
What you actually have today is the same manuscript you had yesterday, and the same reader you’re writing it for. That’s the choice Jeremiah described a few thousand years before anyone had a wholesale account to worry about: where your roots are actually running. Reheat the coffee, and check the contract if you have one to check. Then close the tab and go write the next honest page. The news is real, and the people it’s hurting deserve to be prayed for by name if you know them. It just was never the thing your calling was standing on.