Bethany House

About Bethany House

Bethany House is an American Christian publisher based in Bloomington, Minnesota, credited with helping to turn Christian fiction into a major market through Janette Oke's pioneer romances.

It began as the book publishing division of Bethany Fellowship International, a missionary organisation, and for a time traded as Bethany Fellowship Publishers; profits from the books funded the Fellowship's missionary work. Its founding date is unclear. Wikipedia gives 1966, but Gary Johnson is recorded as leading the house from 1960 to 2008, and a 2005 Historical Novel Society profile said it had been publishing for over fifty years.

Fiction arrived in 1979 with Oke's first novel, Love Comes Softly. Oke went on to write seven more books in that series and dozens of other novels for Bethany. Carol Johnson, who joined as editorial director in 1978, championed Oke's manuscript and later acquired Beverly Lewis's The Shunning, which launched the Amish fiction boom. Other Bethany authors include Lynn Austin, Dee Henderson, Julie Klassen, Tracie Peterson and Lauraine Snelling.

In December 2002 Baker Book House of Grand Rapids, Michigan, signed a letter of intent to buy the publishing division, with about 1,200 backlist titles, so that Bethany Fellowship could concentrate on missionary training. The sale went through in 2003, and Bethany House continues as an imprint of Baker Publishing Group, with editorial staff still in Bloomington.