Choosing an audience

After my last post, I decided to advertise myself as a Christian Fantasy/Science Fiction author, but then I read The Art and Craft of Writing Christian Fiction by Jeff Gerke of Marcher Lord Press and I may be back on the fence.

He said we need to choose our audience. You can either write to the church or those outside the church. However, he acknowledges how difficult it is to write to those outside the church, calling the section in Barnes & Noble entitled "Religious Fiction" "death row," because no one outside the church is going to step anywhere near it. I've been through that row a dozen times too many because all it has are Ted Dekker and some Amish Romance books. Ted Dekker is good, and because I'm not that good, I don't have much hope of being on that shelf. Barnes & Noble isn't going to take a chance on shelf space to anything less.

Next along this journey came a blogpost by Bruce Hannigan , who writes supernatural thrillers from a Christian perspective. Another Christian writer not writing to CBA is John Pazdziora.

All of these resources, combined with a recent brainstorming session where my character arc was choosing between living for money or sacrificing for love, has shown me that I don't have to put Christian in front of my genre in order to glorify Christ; and if I want to get to word one with unbelievers, I should just say I acknowledge the supernatural as well as the battle between good and evil in my fiction. I might even add that I enjoy addressing the battles within our soul for happiness and where the supernatural fits in. To say, "I write Christian fiction," while true, prevents them from allowing the story to speak for itself.

Anyone out there with the same dilemma? Do you seek to write content acceptable by God, but without excluding the rest of the world? I'm a Christian that reads secular fiction more than religious fiction because the quality is so much better and because even I don't like to be preached at in my fiction.