The books in the table below represent the top 100 bestselling Christian books of 2010. It is based on unit sales for the twelve months ending December 31, 2010.

We created these lists from a proprietary database we have assembled at Thomas Nelson. It is based on various point-of-sale systems from multiple sales channels.

Last week Amazon.com, Walmart.com, and Target.com embarked in an online price war over the pre-sale of new hardcover, bestselling books. While the retail price for these books is typically $25–35, all three of these retailers are selling them for between $8.98 and $9.00.

I am endlessly surprised by what works and what doesn’t, especially when it comes to publishing. I experience this first-hand when it comes to my blog.

Sometimes I write a post and think, This is going to get huge traffic. Then I post it and watch in disbelief as people collectively shrug their shoulders and ignore it.

A few weeks ago, Publishers Weekly published their list of hardcover bestsellers for 2008. They included all hardcover books that sold more than 100,000 copies. There were 155 fiction titles that made the cut and 119 non-fiction titles. I read through the lists, highlighting the ones that could be considered “Christian,” since I run a Christian publishing company.

Interestingly, only one Christian book made the fiction list—Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana by Anne Rice. Knopf published it, and it sold 112,000 units. (There may be others on the list, but I didn’t recognize them. If so, they were published by general trade publishers.)

Publishers Weekly just published its list of the bestselling books of 2008. John Grisham’s Appeal earned the #1 slot for hardcover fiction. Randy Pausch’s The Last Lecture [affiliate link] took the top slot in hardcover non-fiction.

My post, Too Many Books, Too Few Shelves, raised a lot of great questions about how we determine what we publish at Thomas Nelson. Therefore, I would like to address a persistent issue that was raised in the comments section of that post.

If we can’t stop the presses, we should at least slow them down. U.S. publishers produced almost 300,000 new titles last year, a number that Sara Nelson of Publishers Weekly referred to as “a ridiculous number.”

With bookstore sales rising a modest 3.6% in the last five years, we have more and more books competing for what amounts to the same exact shelf space. Clearly, something is wrong.