2006 Occult Authors Market

The blockbuster success of Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code" has made a huge impact on the acquisition choices of most publishers. There are more books coming out this year related to the Knights Templar then I ever recall seeing before. There's also a surge in Gnosticism, Kabbalah and Alternative Christianity titles.

Academic presses, on the other hand, are publishing an increasing number of pagan histories. As an example, AltaMira Press, an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield, recently announced its Pagan Studies Series (see Links).

Prospective occult authors for the more commercial houses (like Llewellyn, Weiser and Capall Bann) will be able to draw from an increasingly growing number of scholarly books on the histories of magic(k) and occulture than ever before.

Here's a snippet of my interview with Starhawk:

"CAELUM: Do you have a sense of where the future lies for pagan publishing?

STARHAWK: I think that there's a great hunger in people for things about magic, but it's more palatable for them as fiction rather than non-fiction. We see it with the success of the Harry Potter books, and the Da Vinci Code. The market is wide open for fiction and children's fiction and fantasy books.

CAELUM: You're well known as an activist. Do you have any idea why there isn't more of a public outcry with what's been happening over the last 6 years or so? Why, do you think, is there such apathy?

STARHAWK: I don't really see the apathy, because most of the people that I know are involved in doing lots of different things. I just came back from New Orleans, and I see so many people, especially young people, engaged in the worst sorts of work: like cleaning out homes that have become toxic with waste. Work that no one else would do, these kids are doing.
But to answer your question, I think that people need 3 things to get involved. They need outrage, a sense of hope, and someone to tell them what they can do that's effective."

You can read more of this interview, as well as other leaders in pagan publishing in the 2006 Occult Authors Market.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.