c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Look around the magazine racks at your local Wal-Mart, Barnes & Noble or Rite Aid and you may see some new titles amid the regulars.

Charisma, a magazine principally aimed at Pentecostal Christians, this summer launched a concerted effort to cross over into the general market, following in the footsteps of Christian music and books that have made the leap from religious to secular shelves.

And it’s not alone: Precious Times, a quarterly publication for African-American Christian women, entered Barnes & Noble in April. Around the same time, NavPress Periodicals started placing its Pray! and Discipleship Journal magazines in stores like Borders.

“As a publisher we would like to get our message out to a broader and broader audience,” Stephen Strang, publisher of Charisma magazine, said in an interview. “There’s a new receptivity.”

Ron Sklon, a New York-based newsstand consultant, advised Florida-based Strang Communications to make the move. In September, Strang will launch two other titles, Vida Cristiana, Charisma magazine’s Spanish language-format, and New Man, a men’s magazine, in the general market.

“We’ve been trying to encourage other Christian magazines to give it a try because we think the more titles there are, the better off we would be,” Sklon said.

So far, some are heeding the call to venture beyond Christian retailers while others are taking a wait-and-see attitude. Still others have been there all along.

Christianity Today International has nine of its 11 magazines on some general market newstands, such as Borders and Barnes & Noble, said Carol Thompson, vice president of circulation and marketing.

“We’re not out on the general newsstand as (it) relates to supermarkets, the Wal-Marts,” she said. “We’re back to exploring that, actually … at the encouragement of Strang.”

Though their presence is “modest,” some CTI publications have been in the general market for at least 15 years, she said.

“We’ve always carried religious periodicals,” said Mary Ellen Keating, a spokeswoman for Barnes & Noble, in an e-mailed response to questions about publications on its newsstands. Though she wouldn’t divulge sales information, she said, “There is interest, which is why we are selling them.”

Karen Burk, a spokeswoman for Wal-Mart, said the inclusion of Charisma in about 250 of its more than 3,000 stores fits into her company’s attempts to satisfy customers. Other inspirational magazines carried by some Wal-Mart stores include Guideposts, Moment and Gospel Today.

“What decides whether we’re going to carry it or not is whether it’s something we think the majority of our customers in that community are wanting us to have on our shelves,” she said.

NavPress Periodicals, a division of The Navigators, an evangelical organization, switched from two distributors to 18 last spring in an effort to “get into more outlets outside the Christian marketplace,” said Dave Wilson, director of operations. He said their presence in the secular market is “still fairly embryonic” but growing.

“I think there always has been an interest in it,” he said. “I just don’t think that there’s been access to it.”

Unlike Charisma, which delivered about 50,000 of each of its summer issues to 197 general-market retail chains, NavPress and CTI aren’t ready to make that kind of a commitment, which includes significant printing costs and the risk that not all the publications will sell.

“We’re taking additional risk with distributing to a wider variety of markets, but we’re trying to do it on a reasoned basis,” Wilson said.

CTI has about 60,000 copies of all of its titles on newstands _ Christian and secular _ at any given time, Thompson said.

Charisma’s efforts to tap the secular market are fairly unusual, said Doug Trouten, executive director of the Evangelical Press Association, which is based outside Minneapolis.

“I would say it represents a significant step for retailing of Christian magazines,” he said.

But, Trouten said, the mainstream market appears ready.

“The general market success of products like the `Left Behind’ books, the Mel Gibson `Passion of the Christ’ movie, have been enough to catch the attention of major market distributors and to help them realize that this is a market sector worth doing business with,” he said.

BigTop Newstand Services, a division of the Independent Press Association, has distributed Discipleship Journal, Sojourners magazine and Christian Networks Journal along with Mother Jones and other independent magazines in the last couple of years.

Spiritual publications, including the Jewish magazines Moment and Tikkun, comprise about 10 percent of their 80 accounts, said Andy Myers, a junior account executive at the San Francisco-based distributor.

“From our point of view, we’re having success with some of our Christian titles,” Myers said. “There’s definitely interest out there.”

But the move to the general market isn’t for every religious publication.

World magazine discontinued its placement on mainstream market newsstands last January after several years, said Debra Meissner, director of marketing and circulation.

The weekly magazine _ which publishes more often than many of the other religious periodicals in the general market _ only sold about 1 percent of its average weekly subscription circulation on newsstands.

Meissner says she doesn’t personally see many religious magazines on secular shelves, but she hopes someday it will be a profitable option for her company. Like Strang, she says that’s a place she wants her magazine to be.

“We think it’s important for Christian news to be right out there with secular magazines,” she said. “Our hat’s off to them.”

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Editors: Search the RNS photo Web site at https://religionnews.com for a photo of Strang and a Charisma magazine cover.