B&H Publishing Group aims to capture the attention of Latin American pastors by releasing the Diccionario Bíblico ilustrado Colman this month, five years after publishing the best-selling English edition, Holman Illustrated Bible Dictionary.

"This is our biggest release in the last year," said Jim Cook, B&H vice president of international sales. "What we've found is that the pastors want to have more than one Bible dictionary. They want ours to complement what they already have."

The English version, runner-up to an Evangelical Christian Publishers Association Gold Medallion Award, first published in 1992 and revised in 2003, has lifetime sales of more than 1 million copies, and "we anticipate it will be a best-seller in Spanish," Lauralin Innis, international marketing specialist at B&H Publishing Group, told Christian Retailing. She pointed to robust pre-orders that have already sent the book to its second printing in August, two months prior to its release.

"There are several other Bible dictionaries in the Hispanic market, but this one has more information and delves deeper into topics than the others do," Innis said. "It's more complete than the other dictionaries available in the market. We've found that people who buy dictionaries like to own all of them as a way to cross-reference information."

The nearly 1,700-page volume culminates four years of painstaking translation and fact-checking. "We wanted to make sure all the articles and entries were relevant to the Spanish-speaking market, so that took more time to write and edit additional entries," Innis said.

Read more in the Oct. 13 issue of Christian Retailing.

• Prev
• Next