IVP - Behind the Books - September 2007 Archives

Dear John Milton, I Wish Your Paradise Would Get Lost

To be an editor is, at least in part, to be a destroyer of dreams. One of my first responsibilities at InterVarsity Press was to oversee (and, let’s face it, overlook) the “slush pile”—unsolicited solicitations from would-be IVP authors, ranging from apologetic young scholars trying to publish before they perish to would-be apostles thinking they’ve just written the next Bible. To lick the envelope that contains the form letter informing these author-wannabes that they’ve been rejected for publication is to step into a long and storied stream of publishing history.

Lisa Cockrel, an editor at Brazos Press, turned me on to an article David Oshinsky wrote for the New York Times recounting his experience mining the archives of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., and finding letters politely or frankly rejecting some of the great minds and literary works of the twentieth century. Those folks had it down to an art form—their letters were virtually Pulitzer prizeworthy; you knew from reading the well-crafted rejection that your writing wasn’t up to snuff.

Nevertheless, the rejection-I-mean-review process of a publishing house is almost unavoidably, in Oshinsky’s words, “wildly subjective, reflecting the quirks and biases of the reviewer.” The challenge facing the editor is obvious, if you have the stomach to put yourself in his or her shoes: with space, in our case, for about ninety new books a year, and with upwards of 1,500 proposals plunking down annually in the in-box, and with dozens of competing publishers simultaneously vying for the attention of a fickle reading public that is reading statistically fewer and fewer books, the stakes are high and the prospects are dim.

That being said, editors are not completely heartless. There’s a reason we’re here, I’m told: We have generally good instincts about what makes for good writing that people will read. As Oshinsky readily avers, “Even in the rejection files, where negativity reigned, the great bulk of the reader’s reports seemed fair-minded and persuasive. Put simply, a rejected manuscript usually appeared to deserve its fate.” Beyond that, editors will even try to maintain a big-picture view of the author behind each proposal; sometimes it’s a matter of timing, sometimes it’s a matter of mismatch. For Knopf, “cultivating fresh talent was a process in which doors must remain open, . . . the next manuscript might well be the charm.”

So for all you writers out there who can’t stand the thought that some heartless philistine such as myself is passing judgment on your brilliant prose, cut me some slack, Jack Kerouac: there are sixteen editors just like me out there who felt perfectly justified in rejecting Anne Frank.

Linda Rich, where are you?

I work in the editorial department of InterVarsity Press doing many things, and one of those things is answering permission requests.

Anyway, I was noticing again today that I receive many emails from folks who are interested in discovering the whereabouts of Linda Rich, a singer/songwriter whose records we released in the '70s under the long-defunct label of IVR, InterVarsity Records. I can still find these records on eBay every time I look, and there seems to be an online community interested in finding out where Linda is and what she’s up to.

Unfortunately, we do not have current information about her, as we've lost touch with her over the years. So I wanted to put out a call to Linda Rich on this blog: where are you? Many fans would love to know! What are you doing? Are you still singing and writing songs? Are you a stockbroker? Are you a veterinarian? Are you in the Merchant Marines? Inquiring minds want to know!

Is Christian publishing a business, a ministry or both?

The previous post got enough comments musing along these lines that I thought it deserved a post of its own. Is Christian publishing a business or a ministry? Some hybrid of both? Neither? Let me answer this way. I don't think anybody goes into Christian publishing for "business reasons." Book publishing is a low-margin industry. If you want to make a lot of money in business, you wouldn't pick books. You'd go into electronics or technology or financial services. (Once several colleagues were discussing how administrative assistants at a financial services firm make double or triple what they do in book publishing. I observed, "Well, that makes sense. We make books. They make money.")

Basically everybody who works in Christian publishing does so for ministry reasons. We care about ideas, we are passionate about the gospel, we want to change lives through Christian literature. That being said, we all quickly learn that financial concerns and marketplace issues necessarily impact everything we do, from acquisitions and design to marketing and distribution. We are thrilled to be in the work of publishing and distributing Christian books and resources, but because it's a commercial enterprise, the bottom-line realities mean that if the books don't sell and have marketplace viability, their ministry effectiveness is decreased.

IVP's publisher, Bob Fryling, has often quoted a saying that "Book publishing is like shooting a gun in the air and hoping a duck flies by." Publishing professionals have long said that publishing is mostly a matter of throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks. You publish a bunch of books, and there may be no rhyme or reason as to why some books catch on, sell well and are profitable, while other books--which may be just as good in terms of editorial content and ministry value--don't find an audience and end up going quickly out of print. It's a mystery.

So publishers do what they can to minimize unknown risk factors and publish books that are more likely to work for them. If a particular kind of book succeeds, we'll do more like it. If readers respond well to a particular author, we'll ask for a follow-up. But if a book bombs, we're not likely to do more books like that or from that author.

As a result, every publisher tends to develop its own brand identity and constituency. Some publishers have a strong core identity as conservative or Reformed or charismatic or devotional or academic or whatever. Some have a track record with biographies or self-help or biblical studies or fiction. All this leads publishers to continue to acquire and publish books in those veins, and readers come to know them for those kinds of books.

In terms of the development of the Christian publishing industry as a whole, this means that it has become increasingly difficult for new, first-time, unknown authors to get published, because on the whole, publishing a book by an established author is less risky and more likely to find an audience and be profitable than publishing a book by an unknown. This fuels the bestseller mentality, the search for big-name A-list authors, and squeezes out many good books by thoughtful authors. (It also weeds out a lot of lousy books by writers who might have noble ministry intentions but have bad writing, bad content or both.)

All this is to say that Christian publishers do what they can to publish missionally edifying Christian books with the best potential for ministry value within their particular business constraints and parameters. It's not an either/or; it's a both/and, necessarily so. It's a dialectical tension, or a paradox, like God being three in one or Jesus being fully God and fully human. We could similarly say that ideally, Christian publishers should be fully ministry and fully business at the same time. Working out the implications of all that is tricky, and leads to all sorts of interesting discussions when our publishing committee meets to decide what books we publish or don't publish.

What's interesting to me is that the market has shifted. Thirty years ago, IVP's editorial director Jim Sire could publish books by Hans Rookmaaker or about existentialism or Kierkegaard and they would sell just fine, primarily because there were a lot fewer Christian books and publishers out there. So the market sustained niche books and they worked in the general trade. But now, there's much more competition (some 200,000 books published in the English language each year, with at least five or six thousand directly published by Christian publishers), so those kinds of books don't tend to make as much of a splash.

We publish a lot of books that are not going to see huge commercial returns because we want to serve an underserved market or publish on an important issue or topic. We might do a book for Asian American women, or a survey of the literature of Second Temple Judaism, or something else that is by its nature for a very niche audience. Fortunately, as Chris Anderson has detailed in The Long Tail, online technology and infinite virtual shelf space means that such niche books can be financially viable, as long as people can hear about them and find them. So we are not quite as bound by the bestseller demands of the marketplace now as we might have been before the advent of Amazon and Google.

I'll leave it to others to develop a full-blown theology of Christian publishing (which would necessarily require analysis and intersection with the role of the parachurch, marketplace ministry, Christian understandings of commerce and economics and all the rest). The best I can say at this point is that in the daily trenches of working out our praxis, we in Christian publishing are doing our best to be faithful to the gospel and the mission and ministry of Christian literature through the commercial resources and business structures available to us.

On authors, agents and advances

Mark Taylor, president of Tyndale House Publishers, recently posted this lament about authors, agents and royalty advances in the Christian publishing market:

Many of us have experienced this. An agent brings us a proposal from an author who has published successfully with another house. Or maybe it’s an author we ourselves have already published. And the agent gives us a song and dance about how successful this project (which hasn’t even been written) will be. And then the agent subtly lets us know that other houses are competing for this deal. Our mouths salivate. We want this project. The agent might even hint at how much advance will be required to bring home the deal.

We sharpen our pencils. How many copies will we have to sell in order to earn out the advance? We grimace. We don’t think we can sell that many copies. So we figure out how painful the write-off will be if we don’t sell that many copies. Even with a big write-off, will the project still be profitable?

We put together our proposal and send it to the agent. We’ve stretched as far as we can stretch because we want this deal. Then the agent comes back to tell us that the offer wasn’t high enough. There are other offers that are bigger. But we want this deal—so we stretch even higher. Sometimes we run through all of the normal warning signs and make an offer that makes no sense at all. After all, we want this deal!

So we get the deal. We pay the advance. The manuscript comes in. We begin to wonder why we paid so much for this average manuscript. We edit it and market it and sell it and process the returns. And at the end of the day we take a huge write-off. If we’re lucky, the book earns a net contribution to overheads. But in most of these scenarios, the book generates a loss even apart from overheads.

What's interesting about this is that high-flying auctions and advances has been true of New York general market publishing for decades, but it has not been the case in Christian publishing until relatively recently, perhaps the last ten or fifteen years or so. And as a result, good books (with less "commercial potential") get squeezed out of the market and displaced from bookstore shelves to make way for high-profile books that publishers need to sell a boatload of to break even on.

This is not to say that agents are all bad, or that advances are all inflated. More than anything, it's a cautionary tale to publishers about bidding on new book proposals. The reality is that the vast majority of books are only going to sell a few thousand copies and thus only warrant advances of a few thousand dollars.

We're fortunate that relatively few IVP books crash and burn. Almost every book is at least profitable, and some do well. IVP is not a big-name bestseller-type publisher. Our latest theological dictionary or spiritual formation text is not going to burn up the charts. But we hope every IVP book makes some contribution to the kingdom and to thoughtful evangelical Christian discourse that is more influential than can be measured in sales figures or royalty dollars.