IVP - Strangely Dim - Stuff About Books Archives

Is 2029 to Publishers What 2012 Was to Mayans?!?!?

A note to Likewise authors from the Washington Post: "Word of mouth has long been the holy grail of book marketing." Tell all your friends.

But for goodness' sake, don't tell them in person or over the phone. Send them an e-mail with a URL for your book page; group-message them on Facebook with an embedded link; blog about it; tweet about it. Display it, don't say it. The mouth has gone digital.

My friend Mr. Steve turned me on to this report from BookExpo America, only the latest industry-wide hand-wringing to take place among publishers in light of an economic downturn and a technological shift to a paperless (surely that doesn't mean bookless?) society. According to some, including authors of recently printed and bound and pricey books about information longing to be free, publishing is not moving inevitably into extinction, but it does desperately need a facelift and a tummy tuck.

The world may end, according to the Mayans, in 2012, but on the off chance it doesn't, the printed book may vanish by 2029. In its place will be digital content that transcends particular platforms such as the Kindle, let alone paper and ink. That digital content, we're invited to presume, will emerge 140 characters at a time, as Twitter and Facebook and other social networking locales become greenhouses for long-form content.

If I may borrow from Battlestar Galactica, all this has happened before and will happen again. It's not so much ideas and art that live and die; it's the media through which those ideas and art are conveyed, and the architects and profiteers of those media. Such has been the dilemma of news, which is experiencing a shift from newsprint to something else as we speak, and music, which has provided its own moribund soundtrack for the past few decades as the corporate giants of the recording industry shrink while indie music on Myspace grows. Again from the Post:

The music industry, broadly defined--which includes bands, fans, concerts, recordings, iPods, etc.--is thriving, [Wired editor Chris Anderson] said. It is only the major labels, with their foolish attempt to cling to the CD model, that crashed.

Trust me, those of us in the "major labels" of book publishing (even us minor leaguers) are strategically stroking our beards and scratching our heads over this. But again, dear authors, you're not off the hook. If Facebook and Twitter are the breeding grounds of the new literati (and not of the new illiterati, as their naysayers might suggest), then writers need to figure out what art looks like in those media, how ideas there germinate and sprout and blossom and flourish, and what shape such a fully evolved idea ought to take. If we're going to publish in new ways, we need truly new stuff to publish.

So there you go. Your twenty-year mission, authors, should you choose to accept it, is to change the way we absorb, engage and convey fully conceived ideas. As for us publishers, our twenty-year mission is to figure out how to make money off of it, and of you. So say we all.

Contact Papers

One of the things about becoming an author is that your intersection with the world expands. No longer are you known only by people you've met, you're now known by people you've not met. And every so often those unmet readers introduce themselves to you.

I've met a variety of people through the Internet, some of whom introduce themselves to me as being fans of my writing. Go figure. I'm occasionally interrupted, for example, by an instant message from an undergraduate student in Wisconsin who tells me I remind her of Donald Miller. She's always writing funny stuff like that. And while in Miami one week I met a guy, quite serendipitously, who's read "everything [I've] ever written." We talked together and prayed together, and we've since continued our conversation through the World Wide Web.

I'm starting to think that books are, more than anything, springboards to a more particular, more meaningful conversation. For someone who makes his living in the publishing industry, I actually hold a relatively low view of books--not low in the sense that I think they're silly or meaningless but in the sense that they, like a "low church," are at their best when they close the gap between the inherent mystique of the thing and the lived worldview of its constituency.

Books, regardless of their particular depth or shallowness, can function as icebreakers that give people entry into one another's lives. From there we can move to weightier, more existential conversations--the newly discovered past abuse of a loved one and its impact on an adult relationship; the suspicion that God is calling someone to a dramatic shift in their life's trajectory; the nagging perplexity of a God who seems appealing and a religious system that seems oppressive. The best books carry content that's worth reading, but they go further by inviting the reader to go further--into an idea and into community. The best books, then, allow that there is a universe beyond them, and they seek to make meaningful contact.

The Sins of the Author Are Visited on the Editor

Sometimes when you edit a book, particularly a book of nonfiction and especially a book of Christian nonfiction, you get the feeling that the author has been spying on you. Call me a megalomaniac, but I had that experience today. What follows is a lightly edited pair of paragraphs from a draft manuscript for an as-yet unscheduled, untitled book:

I am an ENFP. If you know the Myers-Briggs personality types, you know that the ENFP is the easily distractible, often zany, poor at follow-through, overly dramatic personality type who speaks in run-on sentences and is apparently personified in the character Ariel from Disney's The Little Mermaid, which is weird because my college Spanish teacher suggested I take the name Ariel since words that begin with the "s" sound are nonexistent in Spanish and ... See what I mean?

There are numerous aspects of this personality type which make us very poor tyrants. Namely, we are too obsessed with being liked. Add to this the fact that I am a nine on the Enneagram (another personality measuring tool based on your chief sin), and dictatorial leadership becomes nearly impossible. The nine on the Enneagram struggles with sloth, or the need to avoid. In other words, that sound the car is making will probably go away if you just stop listening to it and those complaints about your supervisee will work themselves out eventually if you pretend they don't exist. Nines on the Enneagram have given us such memorable leaders as Dan Quayle and Gerald Ford. No, not the guy who mass-produced the automobile; the U.S. president Rolling Stone magazine called the most forgettable since Millard Fillmore (Millard who?).

I am an ENFP and a nine on the Enneagram who ignores noises in the vain hope that they'll resolve themselves and is mildly obsessed with being liked. The only thing about these paragraphs that I don't identify with myself is the stuff about Spanish class and The Little Mermaid. I think perhaps my phone has been bugged.

It's one thing when something you read that reminds you of yourself is objectively positive--for example, "ENFPs can make friends with pretty much anyone." Ah, that's nice. But that's not what this author is doing here. My dear author is being confessional, and he's implicating me in his confession. How dare he?!?

That's a hidden value of confession, I think. It has a corporate aspect to it that is often overlooked--sometimes even on purpose. When people hear statements that cut a little too close to the bone, they often quickly distance themselves from it: "You're right. I like being liked as much as anyone, but you're crazy about it. You should lighten up." The degree to which a personal confession takes on a corporate life, however, is the degree to which it is prophetic.

I'm reminded of Isaiah's confession in the presence of the Lord seated on the throne: "Woe unto me! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips." If I had been within earshot of Isaiah, I most likely would have said something equally pious such as "Hold the phone, Isaiah! Speak for yourself!" But he was right, and there's no sense denying it once it's out there. Behold the power of confession: it opens the door for a community to better understand itself and its need for the grace and mercy of God.

Confession also, of course, alerts the community to the reality of God's grace and mercy, which is a nice side effect. At my church we offer a corporate prayer of confession, followed by a time of silent confession, followed by the passing of the Lord's peace. We wind up being the hands of Jesus for each other, speaking the words of Jesus to each other--"Peace be with you"--in the immediate wake of our acknowledging our failings in the company of one another. Behold the power of a community of faith: in case you forget, you're reminded that God is love, and sins are forgiven.

This Month's Donkey Congress: The Shack

Yesterday a group of us associated with Likewise Books met over lunch in our bimonthly Donkey Congress to discuss the runaway bestselling novel/theological treatise The Shack. We didn't publish it, but we read it anyway, because we're not particularly provincial. Anyway, I could write a summary of the nature and tone of our discussion, but I don't have to, because my friend Al Hsu already did. You can read his very thoughtful post over at his blog.

The thing about group discussions is that every one is different, even if they all involve the same book. I actually attended another discussion about The Shack earlier this week populated not by publishing professionals such as myself but by people involved in lay or vocational ministry. The conversation was slightly different and perhaps less critical theologically than the in-office Donkey Congress, but again people saw great potential in a book that Eugene Peterson called this generation's Pilgrim's Progress, Al Hsu called this generation's Disappointment with God and I'll call, I guess, this millennium's Confessions. Or this month's The Secret. Take your pick.

Our next Donkey Congress will be in late October, where we'll discuss the forthcoming book by Shane Claiborne and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, Becoming the Answer to Our Prayers. If you're interested in hosting a Donkey Congress in your very own time zone, give us a shout.

The Books I Could Bring

From the time I was four up into my college years, my family and I spent at least one week of every summer with my grandparents at a cottage in a small town in Canada. We swam, we read, we went for long walks in the mornings, we read, we slept, we read, we ate good food, we read, we played games. And we read. Being avid booklovers, our whole family could often be seen sitting in the cottage's "living room" (which was also the "dining room"), each buried in a different book. I still remember the excitement of packing for that vacation each year, and in particular deciding which books to take with me. Usually I just took them all.

I'm feeling that same childlike excitement about a cottage vacation coming up in August. This time my family and I will be in Michigan (the cottage in Canada is no longer available), but I am anticipating a similar restful rhythm of sleeping, eating, walking and--mostly--reading. So I thought I'd give you a peek at a few of the books on my short list for vacation. And since my sister and I will be driving rather than flying, I'll have plenty of room for ten or twenty extra books, just in case. In no particular order, here they are:

1. Two books by Naomi Shihab Nye (who's a favorite of mine already): Her newest book of poems and short prose, called Honeybee, and a book of essays (to inspire me toward my grad-school aspirations in creative nonfiction), Never in a Hurry. The title alone tells me I need to read this one in particular, since my life feels like it could, unfortunately, be aptly titled Always in a Hurry.

2. Amazing Grace by Kathleen Norris. I've owned this one for a while now and never read it. I'm excited about what she's trying to do in this book--to name things in a new way, and explore of the power and limits of language.

3. Same Kind of Different as Me by Ron Hall, Denver Moore and Lynn Vincent. This is a true story about the friendship formed between two men who come from completely different backgrounds, economic statuses and perspectives. They each write alternating chapters, so their own voices come through. I'm hoping it will help me get outside my own suburban world and see the reality of other people's existence--as well as the beauty of each person made in God's image.

4. And now for a little fiction: The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri. I saw the movie of this and thought it was a little flat; characters and emotions were underdeveloped. I suspected, as I always do, that I'd like the book better. My sister just read the book and loved it for Lahiri's beautiful writing. So she's passed it on to me. Also, if you haven't seen the book--it's got a beautiful cover.

5. Also in the fiction genre, The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai. I just saw this one at Barnes & Noble this week, and it's gotten great reviews, including a starred review from Amazon. It takes place in India in the 1980s and is centered around a retired judge, his orphaned granddaughter, his cook and the cook's son (who lives in Manhattan). I'm attracted to it both for the range of themes it seems to cover (personal relationships, politics, modernization, economics) and, again, for perspective on the lives of people who live in cultures far different from the one I know.

On top of those, there's The Secret Life of Bees, Population 485, Left to Tell, maybe some Buechner or Mary Oliver, The Wild Iris . . . there are so many to choose from. Most likely, I won't even get through half of these. But most likely, you'll know which ones I did read, as I'm sure any of the books I've mentioned will spark many Strangely Dim-worthy thoughts and questions.

On the Great Cloud

You have these moments, every once in a while, when you discover that what you thought was just another ordinary moment is actually something closer to momentous. I had such a moment this morning, when I interviewed an author for an IVP office meeting and, mid-question, realized that this particular author, over the past half-century, has helped to define much of what American evangelicalism has become.

Marie Little is a petite, unassuming ninety-year-old woman with poor eyesight and even poorer hearing. She lost her husband, Paul, in a car accident thirty-three years ago. Since then she's regularly revised and updated his writing to keep it fresh and relevant in a changing publishing climate. Last month IVP Books rereleased two of Paul's books--Know Why You Believe and How to Give Away Your Faith--alongside two books we recently acquired from another publisher: Know Who and Know What You Believe. Marie came to the office for an interview and a reception.

Paul's writing was an extension of his work for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, addressing the core issues he encountered as he spoke to and, more important, listened to college students. There's great footage of Paul interacting directly with students in the video on our website. These college students had sharp intellects and a sixties-era suspicion of all things inherited, particularly the church. Paul honored their skepticism and their intellect, and very effectively turned them again and again toward Jesus, the author and perfecter of their faith. He would go on to write books such as the million-selling How to Give Away Your Faith and Know Why You Believe, one of Christianity Today's fifty books that have influenced evangelicals the most. He would also help to shape the Western church's approach to missions and evangelism through Urbana student mission conferences and the Lausanne Conference, and to teach evangelism to budding pastors and ministers at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

Marie was no slouch herself, having spent four years in China in the midst of its Communist upheaval, having started a campus Christian fellowship under the skeptical supervision of a dubious university president, having sought out and nurtured international students as they struggled to make a home in an alien environment. Nor has she been a slouch in the thirty-plus years since Paul's death, both in her writing and revising, and in her ministry to laypeople and leaders at her church and neighbors at her retirement home.

I had four questions to ask Marie during the interview, three of which I dumped in favor of more fascinating topics. The question I kept was this: What is the ongoing task of Christian publishing? She responded with a heartfelt appeal to keep the Word of God central as a point of magnificent connection: the Bible reminds us throughout, and centrally in Christ, that

The LORD your God is with you,
he is mighty to save.
He will take great delight in you,
he will quiet you with his love,
he will rejoice over you with singing. (Zephaniah 3:17)

Lately I've found myself in a lot of direct interactions with the elderly, and it's only when I'm particularly alert--and even then at best midway through the conversation and more often long after the encounter--that I realize how much history is contained in a single person: how much each set of eyes, however weak, has seen; how much each set of ears, however compromised, has heard. I tend to make much of the up and comers, those authors and thinkers and doers who will define the church out in front of us. But today at least I was reawakened to a healthy respect for those who came before me and whose sweat and anguish contributed to the faith that's been handed down to me.

Highly Unusual

This almost never happens: IVP Books is looking for reader input about the cover design for Just Courage, a forthcoming book by Gary Haugen. You can vote for your favorite here.

Gary Haugen is the president of International Justice Mission, a human rights agency that does battle against the sex trade and exposes slave-labor practices throughout the world, out of a Christian conviction about the God-given dignity of human beings. You can learn more about IJM here.

Cover design is normally a pretty cloistered process. The designer works in relative solitude, reading through the manuscript and coming up with a few possible creative concepts for how the book's central ideas might be conveyed visually. The designer has to reconcile several complex factors in the process of designing a cover, including who the anticipated audience is, where they might reasonably be expected to run across the book, and what images, colors and other visual elements will compel the potential reader to look more closely.

The clock is always ticking, of course, and eventually the designer must show her work to a select group of industry professionals--experts in marketing and selling books, for example, and the editor or editors most familiar with the book, the author and the subject. These folks scratch their heads, stroke their chins, squint and stare from far off and close up as they consider how the proposed covers will appear in ads, online and on the bookshelf. Feel free to pity the poor designer; hardly anyone's work is so broadly and carefully scrutinized.

This work almost always takes place behind the scenes because it's so important to the success of a book, and because the capacity for people's preferences and prejudices about fonts, colors, pictures and shapes to subvert their objectivity is frustratingly high. The only controlled environment, the conventional wisdom goes, for objective decision making about cover design is a conference room in a corporate office somewhere, peopled by professionals who are self-correcting and correcting each other when the occasional slide into personal preference starts to show itself.

Why in the world, then, is IVP Books pulling back the curtain on Gary Haugen's new book? The main reason, perhaps, is that we want everyone to read it. The work of the International Justice Mission cuts across demographics and niche markets precisely because it is an international work that serves the cause of justice, and we each are called to be concerned for justice in the world God has placed us in.

That doesn't mean that we don't want everyone to read all our other books, nor does it mean that we think our other books are less important than this one. What it means is simply that since justice is the responsibility of each of us, we're open in this instance to give each of us a voice.

So stop hanging around here; get over to Behind the Books and vote!

On Books

Friend and coworker Ellen Hsu tagged me in her family blog last week, so, inspired by her, I'm offering you a look inside some of my reading preferences. As you can see, for some of the questions I had a hard time limiting myself to just one book.

1. One book that changed your life: Good News About Injustice by Gary Haugen (published by InterVarsity Press!). I read this after I returned from Cambodia in 2005. It reveals so clearly how deeply God's heart beats for justice, and it did a lot to further my thinking about the roles I can play in fighting injustice. Also Prayer: Does It Make Any Difference? by Philip Yancey. I read this at a point when I was wrestling with why we pray. And, while Yancey doesn't offer easy answers or really many answers at all, his words and reflections and questions and honesty deepened both my desire to pray and my faith that prayer is essential and does, in fact, make a difference--more than we often know.

2. One book that you have read more than once: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. Is it any wonder why? It's amazing.

3. One book you would want on a desert island: The Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard, which I haven't actually read yet because I haven't had the quiet and space and uninterrupted time a desert island would afford to process what's in it. And I'd take Fred Van Dyke's teaching notes from the class he taught on the book a few years ago at my church.

4. Two books that made you laugh: David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. Nobody has characters quite like Dickens. Also, the Mitford books by Jan Karon. I'm currently reading the second book, prompted by others I know who read the books and loved them, and by Lauren Winner's confession that the Mitford books played a role in her conversion from Judaism to Christianity. Maybe you have to have grown up in a small town as a pastor's kid like I did to really appreciate the Mitford books in your twenties, but whatever the reason--I just really like them. The quirky characters (some of whom will remind you of people you know!) and the trueness of small-town life and ministry that Karon has captured make me laugh.

5. One book that made you cry: Well, I don't know if I actually cried, but if I didn't I must have been close: When Broken Glass Floats: Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge by Chanrithy Him. I read this before my first trip to Cambodia in 2005. It's hard to believe what some people have endured in their lifetime.

6. One book you wish you'd written: Girl Meets God by Lauren Winner. I love her writing style, the way the book is organized, her thought processes and the way she weaves together the different experiences of her life. And one more: The Words Under the Words, a collection of poetry by Naomi Shihab Nye. I'd love to write poetry like what's in this book.

7. Two books you are currently reading: A Light in the Window by Jan Karon (see #4) and Likewise's very own Life After Church by Brian Sanders, in preparation for our Likewise Donkey Congress on February 14. Stay tuned.

8. One book you've been meaning to read: Searching for God Knows What by Donald Miller. And about fifty others. But that's one that's at the top of the list right now.

Now it's your turn! Lindsay? Keith? Doug and Julie? Post your own answers on your blog, or leave us a comment about books you've read.