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- 🙏 From pulpit to paperback
🙏 From pulpit to paperback
Devotional books are a trend in Brazil, bursting the bubble of practicing Christians
CULTURE
Will devotional books create devoted readers?

Religion and publishing have never been strangers in Brazil. Home to the world’s largest Catholic population and now the site of the fastest religious shift in modern history — toward Pentecostalism — the country has long been fertile ground for theological literature. But in recent years, religion has drawn great attention within Brazil’s literary landscape and consumer behavior in general.
According to Renato Fleischner, member of the board of directors of the National Union of Book Publishers, annual sales of devotional books in Brazil hit around 3,000,000 copies — and that’s not even counting the significant portion sold within religious communities, which often go untracked by conventional market systems.
The growth over the past decade has been remarkable, Fleischner told The Brazilian Report, even during periods of major turbulence for the publishing industry.
The latest Nielsen yearly assessment of the literary market shows that religious titles accounted for 17% of all book sales in Brazil in 2024, up from 11% in 2006. Roughly 54.4 million print books were sold in the country in 2023 — for comparison’s sake, almost 440 million were sold in France (which has a population more than three times smaller than Brazil’s).
The success of these titles is part of a broader trend: books with spiritual overtones, often rooted in the Bible, are now reaching well beyond churches and Christian bookstores — and into mainstream culture…

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