IVP - Behind the Books

"I'd Like to Thank . . ."

As the new year begins, it’s awards season—and while we don’t want to blow our own horn, get ready for a trumpet solo.

First, Christianity Today has just announced the 2010 Christianity Today Book Awards. Their judges reviewed 472 books from seventy-two publishers and came up with twelve winners—four from IVP, more than any other publisher!

God Is Great, God Is Good, edited by William Lane Craig and Chad Meister, won in Apologetics/Evangelism.

Deep Church by Jim Belcher won in The Church/Pastoral Leadership.

Longing for God by Richard Foster and Gayle D. Beebe won in Spirituality.

The New Shape of World Christianity by Mark A. Noll won in Missions/Global Affairs.

Following close behind are the honors coming from Leadership Journal—The Golden Canon Leadership Book Awards. Four IVP books made their list of the ten most valuable books for church leaders from 2009, again outdistancing any other single publisher.

Longing for God by Richard Foster and Gayle D. Beebe was on their very short list of books for The Leader’s Inner Life.

Deep Church by Jim Belcher was the best of the best for The Leader’s Outer Life.

Love Is an Orientation by Andrew Marin and The Next Evangelicalism by Soong-Chan Rah were both on the short list for The Leader’s Outer Life as well.

Finally, Byron Borger of Hearts & Minds gave his award for Book of the Decade. The Fabric of Faithfulness by Steven Garber took home the bacon. Read Byron’s heartfelt and thoughtful comment on this very influential book.

(Boy, my lips are sore.)

Evangelicals and Race

We just got back from InterVarsity’s Urbana 09 Student Missions Convention in St. Louis, where 45% of the over 16,000 attendees were non-white. So David Van Biema’s article in the current issue of Time magazine about evangelicals and race is, well, timely.

The article highlights the perennial questions about how segregated Sunday morning worship is, and focuses on one church that is trying to do something about it. In the process, Van Biema quotes three IVP authors. The church, perhaps surprisingly, is Willow Creek, founded by Bill Hybels (Too Busy Not to Pray, Who You Are When No One’s Looking and Making Life Work). Remarkably, in ten years Willow has shifted from being almost entirely white to being 20% minority.

The article notes that the person who got Hybels started down this path was IVP author Alvin Bibbs (Crazy Enough to Care), who was on staff at Willow at the time and gave Hybels a copy of Michael Emerson’s Divided by Faith. Van Biema also quotes the reaction of David Anderson, founder of the multicultural Bridgeway Community Church in Columbia, Md. and author of IVP’s Gracism, who said, “I bet they’ve done it faster and better than anyone else with a church that large starting off as all white.”

Such topics have been an interest of IVP for decades with dozens of books on the subject. For evangelicals as a whole, challenges definitely remain in this realm but such change is encouraging and offers hope and a model for others to emulate.

Letter to a soon-to-be-published author

[Today’s Behind the Books post comes from the blog of Andy Crouch, author of Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling. Here Andy offers a first-time author some sage advice about what matters and what doesn’t when your first book enters the world. To read more from Andy or find out more about Culture Making, visit culture-making.com]

My friend Adam McHugh, whose first (very good) book is about to be published, wrote me asking if I had any advice. He was going through the roller coaster of excitement, nervousness, anxiety, and eagerness of a first-time author. It’s a common experience (and not just for authors), and with his permission I thought I’d share what I wrote in reply.

Well, first of all, congratulations! Enjoy opening the first box of books—it’s pretty fun.

It is good to keep in mind Mark Twain’s admittedly harsh dictum, “Most books come into the world with all the fanfare of a stillborn child.” The truth is that unlike, say, your wedding day, there will be a great and utter lack of excitement about your book the day it is published. And the day after. And most days after that. Believe me. My book has done well, perhaps embarrassingly so, and the truth is it just is not that big a deal. Considering that “doing well” in these latter days means that maybe 25,000 people read a book over the course of its first year—that would be 0.01% of the American population—it’s not surprising that it just doesn’t rise to the level of a big event for anyone except the author. (The foregoing does not apply, at least not entirely, if you are Bill Clinton, Dan Brown, or Donald Miller. But you are not, so no worries!)

What Absolutely Does Not Matter and Should Be Ignored If At All Possible is the Amazon rank of your book. It means nothing. (There are whole Web pages documenting this.) If your book is doing well enough for the Amazon rank to provide any meaningful information (say, less than 250 or so) you will know that anyway, because people will be calling to say they saw you on Oprah. If it is among the vast majority of books, including very good, solidly selling, important, and influential books, the number will fluctuate maddeningly and inscrutably, providing you with periodic endorphin rushes that will get you hooked but will tell you nothing about the success, let alone the worth, of the book. So I recommend never checking it. But of course you will. At least know that you’re basically just feeding your endorphin needs, nothing else.

What will be a big deal, hopefully, over the coming months, are individual letters, emails, conversations and even (we hope!) reviews from grateful readers. This is what makes it worth doing, in my opinion—the amazing chance to meet people for whom your words were genuinely, even dramatically, helpful. And then further down the road, to hear stories about people who actually created something or started something or persevered in something because you wrote the book. But of course by definition, all these truly worthwhile outcomes will happen months or years from the date of publication. We authors play a long game, which is a very good thing.

The other big deal will be the opportunities, whether few or many, that come to speak to groups and find that for some strange reason, they actually listen to you now that you have published a book, even though you are basically saying the same things you said before you published a book and basically have the same gifts and limitations you did before you published a book. It is a truly mysterious thing, and in many ways a bit absurd, but you will find yourself with an additional quantum of cultural power. I knew about this in the abstract when I wrote Culture Making (the importance of concrete cultural artifacts rather than disembodied ideas) but I must confess I still find myself surprised at how true it is.

So, as with all events that confer additional power and also expose insecurities and fears, this is mostly an opportunity to deepen your own prayer life, entrusting both the elation (assuming there is any—see first few paragraphs above) and the deflation to God. I have found John Wesley’s Covenant Prayer to be incredibly useful in turbulent times like these.

Oh, one other thing: I highly recommend never responding to critical comments (in reviews, blog posts, comment threads, etc.) online. I have done so a handful of times and regretted it every time. You are very unlikely to be able to respond to criticism in a constructive way in the heat of the online moment, and once the moment has passed you will realize it is faintly ridiculous to respond to things that were written after half a moment’s thought and most likely not even based on the slightest serious engagement with what you have written. You’ve had the great privilege of being able to spend a great deal of time shaping and polishing your ideas, then interacting with editors and early readers to refine them further. Why throw that all away with a hastily (and probably angrily/nervously/defensively/imprudently) composed reply? And furthermore, a hastily composed reply that, unlike your carefully written book, will be instantly accessible via a Google search for your name for ever and ever? I highly recommend simply taking online criticism as a chance to pray John Wesley’s Covenant Prayer again.

I hope these thoughts are in some way helpful! Godspeed and I hope to see you somewhere in person soon!

Yes, We Do Have Books for Your Kindle!

Several loyal readers have asked us recently if we offer digital versions of our books.

Our answers are “Yes” and “Almost.”

First, the “Yes”

Already there are more than 200 InterVarsity Press books available for Amazon.com’s Kindle. You can visit the Kindle store and search for “InterVarsity Press” to see their listing. Or you can download our list as either a PDF or an XLS document. To pique your interest, here are the top 10 IVP downloads for the Kindle since January 2009:

Bad Bible Reading Habits

Reading and studying the Bible is as central as it gets for evangelical spiritual practice. Despite this, evangelicals are often incredibly inept at it. They rip verses out of context, impose twenty-first-century ideas and sensibilities on ancient texts, read poetry and imagery literally, or simply skim read—all of which distort and twist the sacred text they claim to revere.

In Memoriam: Marie Little

There are only a few legends in contemporary Christian publishing. Paul Little was certainly one. His books How to Give Away Your Faith and Know Why You Believe (which Christianity Today includes in a list of the fifty most influential books in modern evangelicalism) have sold consistently since their release in the late 1960s and early 1970s. His work with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and the Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization helped to set a course for ministry and discipleship for the global village. Countless evangelists and apologists working today point to Paul as a major influence. His premature death in 1975 didn't so much cut short his influence as anchor it, so that his timeless insights into the resonance of the gospel forever reflect the tone and spirit of a missionary to the Vietnam era, a twenty-year stretch that watched hope and defiance give way slowly to disillusionment.

Unlike some of my colleagues in InterVarsity, I never encountered Paul, but I had lots of interactions with his wife. Paul's books have never been out of print, in part because Marie was so fastidious in her efforts to keep them current, to run them through the gauntlet of a seemingly ever-increasing critique of Christianity from the outside. Just last year she and I corresponded repeatedly about re-releasing the lesser-known but still seminal Know What You Believe, and her carefully edited collection of his insights into Know[ing] Who You Believe. Not only did she keep all these books strategic over three-plus decades, she kept herself current with the ongoing discussion of how Christian faith contends with intellectual integrity and articulates itself to a generation effectively inoculated against Christian culture.

It must be tough to be married to a legend--even tougher to be a legend's widow. Beyond Paul's writings, he innovated outreach to international students and proclamation evangelism on Spring Break initiatives and the like. Marie was right there with him, helping to shape the nature and scope of their ministry. After his death Marie became intimately involved at Willow Creek Community Church, the architect of the seeker-sensitive paradigm in church ministry; there she helped countless women and men get a practical foothold in disciplines that support growth in love of God and neighbor. Even at her retirement community she's been a force to be reckoned with. Still, her chief ministry since Paul's death was as a sort of archivist of his name and canon, a role that demands a remarkable humility and a love that is stronger than death.

Last year Marie came to visit the Press. Well into her eighties, she had weak eyes and ears but a charisma that immediately won over her audience and a commitment to the gospel that wowed the room. People still talk about it now and then. Marie earned her own legendary status that day among the many people here who weren't even born when Paul died, people who don't even know how much the Littles have influenced the practice of their faith.

I will miss the occasional phone call from Marie, inquiring sheepishly about the ongoing impact of those books she'd so painstakingly stewarded for the second half of her life, chatting casually about the challenges of getting older and the joy of discipling her peers and understudies, ending each call with the sort of salutation that would sound contrived and cliched if you weren't convinced by her life that she believed it wholeheartedly: "God is good, my friend."