CBA Marketplace publishes monthly best-seller lists for clothbound nonfiction, paperback nonfiction, fiction, mass-market paperbacks, children’s books, Bibles, music, and videos. A gift books list is published periodically.
The best-seller lists (except the music list) are compiled monthly from computerized sales reports from a large sampling of Christian retail stores. These stores include large and small, urban and small-town, and chain and independent stores from all parts of the country. The music list is compiled from Christian SoundScan-reporting stores.
Fiction and nonfiction, both cloth and paper, are tracked separately, and a mass-market paperback list was initiated in 1996.
The Bibles list is subdivided into four separate lists including: study, specialty, youth and children’s Bibles (complete translations or paraphrases of the entire Bible or New Testament packaged for children or youth), and best-selling translations. The children’s product lists track children’s Bible story books (which contain stories based on the Bible, but not the entire Bible), general children’s books, and youth books.
All the lists reflect product that is actually purchased by consumers in Christian retail stores; they don’t include stock that’s still on the shelves or is sold through other outlets, such as book clubs or general-market stores. The lists are the most widely used in the industry and are distributed by the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association to more than 400 other media each month, including Publishers Weekly, Christian Retailing, and the USA Radio Network. They are also available via CBA Faxtext at (719) 272-3596, extension 292.