What's the question?

Some of the questions people may ask you, politely, when they find out you are a writer: Do you write under your own name? What sort of books do you write? What are they about? If you happen to write thrillers, say, you can confide, reasonably, that your write thrillers, or murder mysteries or whatever, and a pleasant and undemanding conversation may follow. Other genres may be less conversational. I have recently written a novel in which the theme is 'belief''. 'Oh, really?' says your conversationalist, looking over your shoulder in the hope that there is someone more promising to talk to.

So how do you sell a book about belief? The Guardian a few weeks ago (June 26) carried an article by Stephen Moss that deserves a repeat:

The humourist Alan Coren once complained to his agent that his books weren't selling. There were only three subjects guaranteed to shift copies, the agent told him - golf, cats and Nazis. Coren called his next book Golfing for Cats and put a swastika on the cover. But this publishing holy trinity is no longer enough: the new hot topic is God.
Sales in the US for Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything have been phenomenal. The book, published just seven weeks ago, is already in its 11th printing, and Hitchens has been commissioned to compile a companion volume, The Portable Atheist.
God Is Not Great was published in the UK by Atlantic Books a fortnight ago, with the somewhat more considered subtitle The Case Against Religion. It sold 4,000 in hardback in its first week, and stands at number six in the Amazon bestsellers chart. "It's a hell of a good start," says Atlantic's sales director, Daniel Scott. "I think we're likely to end up with sales of 35,000 to 40,000. It's starting to be talked of as 'the Hitchens God book', and when that kind of shorthand takes hold, the sky is the limit."
Hitchens has some way to go to match Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, which last year chalked up sales of half a million in the US and 300,000 in the UK. It used to be just the Bible that sold in vast quantities; now the anti-Bible bibles are doing the same. Why? "There remains a lot of faith and belief," says Scott, "but people find it increasingly hard to marry organised religion with their own view of the world and want a more intellectual, contemporary take on the subject."
The God (and anti-God) market is expanding fast. Current titles on Amazon include The Case for a Creator, God's Politics, Conversations With God and Searching for God Knows What. The philosopher Daniel Dennett last year published Breaking the Spell; AC Grayling chipped in with Against All Gods; and Pope Benedict is leading the counter-attack on the militant atheists by bringing out a book most weeks.
The last time tracts about religion did this well was probably the Reformation. My own effort, How I Found God and Lost Weight on Life's 18th Hole, will be out shortly. Look for the picture of a cute tabby on the cover. Next to the portrait of Hitler.

My own modest novel, Beyond Reason (Solidus Press), has not yet caught up in sales with Hitchens or Dawkins. But I am hoping that God, if there is a God, will accept that at least I am being fair, and see that it gets space on a heavenly bookshelf. Do you believe or not? That is the question. Paul Schnidler, an American critic, wrote this of the book: 'The phrase "can't put it down" is frequently bandied about, but I used it here without reservation because it is literally true. Once I picked up this novel, I dev0ted full time to it... Well-written, fast paced, entertaining and, like his other works, endearingly eccentric. If you are interested in a good novel that doesn't read just like every other novel, and some thoughtful chatter about the state of religion, wrapped into an entertaining package, you'll like Beyond Reason.' So there.