IVP - Behind the Books - July 2007 Archives

What Kind of Editor Would You Be?

An ode to the editor has been posted at Salon. As you might imagine, those of us in the biz gravitate toward such praise like dogs to their own vomit. The author of the ode, former editor Gary Kamiya, lays out a nice articulation of the craft we've each aspired to. There's also good information for the to-be-edited: editorial ethics and editorial etiquette are each discussed. But what I like best about the ode are all the things I'm compared to:

Editors are craftsmen, ghosts, psychiatrists, bullies, sparring partners, experts, enablers, ignoramuses, translators, writers, goalies, friends, foremen, wimps, ditch diggers, mind readers, coaches, bomb throwers, muses and spittoons--sometimes all while working on the same piece.

There you have it: the paradox of editing. I am a bully/wimp/sparring partner. I am a bomb thrower and a spittoon. I practice husbandry and midwifery. As one writer told the author, "[Being edited] was great--better than sex!"

You can decide that for yourselves, all you married writers out there, but in the meantime, I think Behind the Books has its first Internet Quiz! It just needs to be written. So tell me: If you were an editor, what kind of editor would you be? Why do you say that?

__craftsman		__ghost		__psychiatrist	__bully


__sparring partner           __expert		__enabler	__ignoramus

__translator		__writer		__goalie	__friend

__foreman	__wimp		__ditch digger	__mind reader

__coach		__bomb thrower	__muse	__spittoon

__other (please specify):

Check all that apply and explain your answer.

Dirty Trick

The Jane Austen Festival in Bath, apparently, has a point it would like to make about the publishing industry. The leader of the festival sent a book proposal called First Impressions to eighteen publishers. The first line was a direct lift from the first line of Pride & Prejudice; the passages that followed were thinly veiled reconstructions of Austen's writings. Read the story here.

Seventeen of the eighteen publishers rejected the proposal without noting the similarities between it and Austen's work; the eighteenth publisher accused the "author" of "plagiarism." The unfortunate seventeen are now under attack by the Jane Austen Festival in Bath; their rejection letters are an indictment on the state of contemporary literature, or somesuch nonsense.

To my knowledge, the Jane Austen Festival in Bath didn't send their faux-proposal to InterVarsity Press, so I have not seen it. I would, however, like to offer my own meager defense of the publishers who rejected the work.

I recognize that in defending the rejection of Jane Austen I am incurring the wrath of her rabid fans, one of whom I live with. So I don't enter into this lightly, but I think it's important to confront the reality of the market: books that are classic are still to one degree or another timebound. They were written in a specific context by people who were shaped by and engaged with the ethos of their era. No matter how profound and timeless some of their insights have proven to be, at a certain point they start to look like quaint anachronisms with no relevance to contemporary society. Jane Austen's ouevre, sadly, fits into this category.

Exhibit A: Here's the first line of the novel proposal: "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife." I see three things fundamentally anachronistic about this opening line:

* Thing number one: Truth is rarely universally acknowledged in this day and age, particularly such sentimental and clearly socially constructed a "truth" as this opening statement.

* Thing number two: "A single man . . . must be in want of a wife" hardly seems a safe assumption these days.

* Thing number three: I for one would be uncomfortable with the idea that one can be "in want of a wife" in the same way that one might be "in possession of a good fortune."

Now please hear me, all you rabid fans of Jane Austen: I am not deriding Pride & Prejudice as a literary work. Trust me, I know whereof I speak: I have dutifully sat through two viewings of the ten-episode production starring Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy. I own (by proxy) that production, which means that before I die I'll probably sit through it again and, let's face it, again. I also own (by proxy) the 2005 Keira Knightly film which communicates very effectively in two hours what took the Colin Firth version six hours; I think they trimmed about four hours of dancing and kept the story intact. I will aver that Pride & Prejudice is a really good story that does, in many ways, transcend its particular setting. But as a new novel it is neither new nor novel, and the editors at those seventeen publishers were right to ascertain that it wouldn't fetch the audience that the original has been able to cultivate over nearly two hundred years.

Exhibit B: Jane Austen. Keeping in mind that I have not seen the actual faux-proposal ("Back, rabid Jane Austen fans, back!"), and although I'm sure her name wasn't on the proposal, for the sake of intellectual integrity the Jane Austen Festival in Bath would need to manufacture an appropriate doppelganger for her, and so we have to imagine what strengths this faux-Jane Austen would bring to the marketing plan. Consider, then, what a mousy, reclusive and (let us not forget) dead author has to offer a publisher in this technology/celebrity-driven culture. Jane Austen would not know how to deal with a radio interview, whether in person or by telephone. She wouldn't be able to conduct herself from her castle by carriage to the Barnes & Noble for a booksigning without freaking out.

Seriously, picture Jane Austen with one of those Bluetooth things in her ear, plugging dates for public readings into her BlackBerry as she boards the Lear for Hollywood to negotiate the Fox television series deal and the manga version of her collected works. She's lost some of her charm, hasn't she? No, I'm afraid Jane Austen isn't as marketable a person as is Jane Austen the icon, and so she would indeed have a much more difficult time securing a publishing deal. It's not her, it's the market.

So there, Jane Austen Festival in Bath. I quote the prophet Isaiah: "Wash and make yourselves clean. / Take your evil deeds / out of my sight! / Stop doing wrong, / learn to do right!" Enough with your dirty tricks! Leave us poor publishers alone! We've got enough to worry about now that Harry Potter is done and people are back to thinking that books are a quaint anachronism with no relevance to contemporary society.

Be gentle, rabid Jane Austen fans, be gentle . . .

Shelf-Absorbed

Life is growth, right? InterVarsity Press is growing in all sorts of ways, and along the way we're experiencing some growing pains. In the past year we've added over thirteen thousand square feet of storage space, and now we're busy trying to fill it.

Filling new spaces involves making a lot of noise and disrupting a lot of normal procedures. Yesterday the metal shelving that formerly housed our editorial archives and files were dismantled so that they could be re-assembled in the expanded distribution center. That meant that the normally churchmousy editorial department sounded for a day like a kindergarten drum corps rehearsal. Meanwhile the page layout specialists--formerly known as typesetters--have been temporarily relocated from their offices (a large, open, windowed four-workstation palace, really) to the teeny-weeny windowless library, where we typically banish our teeny-weeny undergraduate interns one at a time, and where most of us would go only begrudgingly, say, during a tornado or some other apocalyptic event. Today we were put on notice that any coffee mugs we've left in the kitchen are now homeless, so that the construction crews can tear down one wall and put up another.

But the inconvenience of these growing pains, in another sense, is evidence that we are indeed growing. On the far side of this project we'll have more efficient systems for distributing our books, more space for special meetings, more workstations for new employees, more shelves for more books. In the end we'll even have room for more coffee cups and, more important, more coffee.

In the meantime please forgive us if we ask you to speak up when we talk on the phone; drum corps practice resumes any minute now.

Running from Room to Room

On Monday I was talking with Brenda Salter-McNeil about her revision process. She has been walking through this process at the same time as a close friend who is trying to finish her own book. Brenda pictured herself in one bed laboring to birth her book at the same time her friend is laboring across the room. Brenda's friend, Ruth Haley Barton, is another of our authors, so I came into the story as the midwife running from bed to bed.

I've been pondering this picture since we chatted. Indeed the editor is like a midwife. And it's an honor to have a part in the birth. But the thing is that I've got a whole hospital full of writers in various states. I'm running to the unit where an author is having open heart surgery done on his book, while his neighbor has a stint put in. I'm checking back to the maternity room where the book is birthed but not named! (The titling process can be lengthy.) And then there are the authors still in their homes, offices or writing cabins, not ready to come to the hospital where I await them.

No wonder I'm tired at the end of the day!

And the Winner Is . . .

Al Hsu filed this report from the International Christian Retail Show in Atlanta, Georgia. Al is representing InterVarsity Press as an editor there; his wife, Ellen, is meeting with international publishers as our rights manager. Read more about the trip at Al's personal blog, The Suburban Christian.

Ellen and I attended the CBA/ECPA Christian Book Awards ceremony last night, which is the Christian publishing world's equivalent of the Oscars or Emmys. InterVarsity Press had three finalists: Praying by J. I. Packer and Carolyn Nystrom in the Inspiration & Gift category, The IVP Atlas of Bible History in the Bible Reference & Study category, and Finding God Beyond Harvard by Kelly Monroe Kullberg in the Christian Life category. I was particularly excited about Kelly's book being a finalist because I was the project editor for that book, and the other books in the category were by folks like Philip Yancey, Bill Hybels, Larry Crabb and John Piper. Quite the competition, and it's an honor just to be in the running.

And we were thrilled to find out that one of our books won in its category! The winners are:

Bibles: Archaeological Study Bible NIV (Zondervan)
Bible Reference & Study: The IVP Atlas of Bible History by Paul Lawrence (InterVarsity Press)
Children & Youth: Sexy Girls by Hayley DiMarco (Revell/Baker)
Inspiration & Gift: Pearls of Great Price by Joni Eareckson Tada (Zondervan)
Christian Life: What Jesus Demands from the World by John Piper (Crossway)
Fiction: When Crickets Cry by Charles Martin (Thomas Nelson)
ECPA Christian Book of the Year: Ever After by Karen Kingsbury (Zondervan)

(Last year a 900-page dictionary of theological interpretation won the book of the year, and they changed the rules so that any of the finalists in any of the six categories could be book of the year. Sales numbers are now weighed as one of the factors in determining the overall winner. Which is why a theological dictionary did not win this year.)

In addition, Packer & Nystrom's Praying also won a Logos Book Award from the Logos Bookstores chain in the Devotional/Spirituality category. Congrats to the authors!

All's Quiet in the Western Suburbs

Every July an eerie silence settles over InterVarsity Press's corporate compound in the Western Suburbs of Chicago. You could set your watch to it--if your watch reported time in monthly increments rather than second by second.

The blame can be cast in a variety of directions. Maybe everyone is being quiet out of respect for the accountants conducting our annual financial audit, which follows the end of our fiscal year in June. Maybe July is the vacation month of choice here, so that people can cash in on their newly replenished vacation time or recover from their year of editorial exertion. Maybe people are simply traveling as representatives of the Press at industry events such as the International Christian Retail Show or ministry events such as the Emergent Midwest Gathering. Or maybe the summer heat has sucked any remaining vestiges of extroversion out of our editorial staff.

Me, I like a little noise in my life--a fact that doesn't really harmonize well with my chosen profession. Editors edit, which requires concentration, which according to conventional wisdom requires silence. Not so with me: I whistle while I work, much to the perturbation of my coworkers. I listen to my tunes on iTunes. I keep my door wide open so that I can say hi when people walk by. July--the quietest of all editorial months--can become a bit oppressive for me as a consequence.

But then again, there are times when I do close my door because I've become overwhelmed by sensory overload. There are times when I can't sleep because the sounds of the day have become the noises echoing in my head. There are times when I need silence.

Adele Calhoun writes of silence in her wonderful Spiritual Disciplines Handbook:

Jesus told his disciples, "I have much more to say to you, more than you can now bear" (John 16:12). It is [the] Holy Spirit's job to keep the inner process of revelation underway. But in order for the Spirit to do his job, we need to cooperate and put ourselves in a place to deeply and reflectively listen.

Silence really does serve its purpose: to free up mental space, to calm our bodies down, to prepare us to receive. So every once in a while I like to allow silence to interrupt my sonic playground, in the same way that I welcome the sounds of people occasionally interrupting my times of silence. That, I think, is what St. Ambrose was doing under Augustine's scrutiny in The Confessions--finding the proper balance between welcoming God and welcoming others. Sometimes I use Augustine's observation of his practice as a "Do Not Disturb" sign on my doorframe:

When he was reading, his eye glided over the pages, and his heart searched out the meaning; however, his voice and tongue were at rest. Often when we had come to see him, for no man was forbidden to enter, . . . we saw him reading to himself in this way, and never otherwise. Seeing that he sat silently for so long--for who dares to intrude on one so intent?--we were inclined to depart.

This July I hope to receive the silence around here as a gift rather than as an oppression, but trust me: I'll happily welcome the interruptions as they come, because I enjoy a visit just as much as I enjoy the silence.