The Evangelical Christian Publishers Association's (ECPA) retail trends report shows that the top-three book categories for 2004-2005 generated more than 63% of the market share in sales and units: Christian Living, Inspirational and Fiction.

Though this is a continuing trend, this year's Christian Retail Trends Report-recently by ECPA-provides detailed insights from industry experts as to why the trends appear the way they do.

“This year's goal for the Christian Retail Trends Report was to provide Christian retailers and publishers substantially more in-depth analysis compared to just reporting the numbers as in the past,” said Kelly Gallagher, ECPA's vice president of business development. “There is an entire section dedicated to analysis, trends, opportunities and challenges, along with interviews of industry experts examining the trends that the report reveals.”

In addition to the in-depth analysis of the overall industry, the report is broken into specific publishing genres (Fiction, Christian Living, Bibles, Children's, etc.). Each of these sections provides extensive review on a variety of topics including top sellers, publisher market share by units and dollars, binding information, regional sales variation and trends over time, just to name a few.

The report is the result of ECPA's collaboration with Simba Information, a leading authority for market intelligence in the publishing industry, and uses the Sales Tracking Analysis Trends Summary (STATS) P.O.S. data collected from nearly 1,000 Christian retail outlets across the U.S.

Christian retailers can purchase the report for $99. More information is available at www.ecpa.org.

Read the full story in the Oct. 17 edition of Christian Retailing.