IVP - Behind the Books - October 2007 Archives

The editorial "we"

There's a word for it. Last week the A Word a Day e-newsletter from Wordsmith highlighted the word

nosism (NO-siz-em) noun

The use of 'we' in referring to oneself.

[From Latin nos (we).]

Anu Garg writes: As it's often used by editors, it's also known as the "editorial we". It's also called "the royal we" owing to its frequent use by royalty. Mark Twain once said, "Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial 'we'."

Spelling, Grammar and the Making of a Book

Each week in my son's third-grade class they have a spelling pretest on Monday. They have to write down the words for the week before they have studied them or seen them in print. This gives a gauge for the amount of studying in the week ahead before the Friday test. Last Monday one of the lines on the sheet my son brought home was "tell a fone." Ah, yes, this one needed some work, as the teacher's list of course said, "telephone."

Being the child of an editor doesn't make a kid a natural-born speller. As a matter of fact, I'm not particularly a spelling or grammar whiz myself. I did well in those areas at school, but nothing remarkable. Does that surprise you? I find that when people find out that I'm an editor they assume that I am all about grammatical correctness. They may even be fearful about sending me email!

Actually, I am much more interested in the overall flow, the big ideas and an inventive turn of phrase. Some frustrated authors will tell you that, if anything, I undo their proper grammar. In particular I am passionate about prepositions. I feel that they need to be freed from the interior of the sentence to which they belong and allow to land naturally at the end of the sentence they belong to.

So if you find yourself living in terror of that third grade spelling test or eighth grade grammar teacher, give yourself a break. Perfect spelling and grammar don't make great books!

Writing, Talking and Best Practices: An Editor's Diatribe

There are at least two principles in writing a book:

1. Write like you talk.
2. Don’t write like you talk.

Most people can get one or the other right. The challenge—and, on the face of it, the impossible task—is to get both right.

Write Like You Talk
Writing is communicating without the benefit of body language, vocal inflections, and the dynamic of call-and-response. So writing a book is communicating at an obvious disadvantage. Some coping mechanisms that authors fall into include
· writing like a teacher
· writing like a preacher
· writing like a dead person
We write like a teacher when we've read too many books because teachers have forced us to. We start to think books have to be dry and authoritarian and the kind of thing that people endure. And so we write that way, stripping all the passion from our voice, using bigger words than we would ever speak, and intentionally avoiding personal engagement with the reader.

We write like a preacher when we have the sense that our book is our bully pulpit. So every sentence includes a direct quotation of Scripture, every point is broken into three, and every paragraph is ornamented with pious language (“Can I get an amen?”). The reader feels preached at rather than written to; the book becomes, for the reader, a pew—an uncomfortable place.

Some of us think that the best books are those that have outlived their authors, so we write as though we were dead. We use language that is outdated, picture an audience that died alongside our favorite authors, and fail to consider the current felt needs of our readers. How people hear what they need to hear, however, changes over time because people change over time, and when authors confine their writing style to a bygone era, they fail to serve their readers.

The solution is to write like you talk. Don’t use language that you wouldn’t normally use in conversation. Don’t pound the pulpit or bang the Bible. Don’t pretend you’re C. S. Lewis or Martin Luther or the apostle Paul. Be yourself: pick a topic, think about what you’d say about that topic if someone asked you, and then write down what you find yourself saying.

Don't Write Like You Talk
The trouble with writing like you talk, however, is that you talk with your mouth, and you write with your hands. There are necessary adaptations you have to make as you transition.

First off, everybody uses filler language. Some people say “Ummm.” Some people say “Like, totally.” Some people say “Praise God.” That’s the brain buying time while forming a more complete thought. Books, however, have all the time in the world. Filler language has no place in a book; it will grate on a reader. Try to identify your filler language, and edit it out of your writing.

Authors breathe; so do readers. Books don’t. The natural rhythm of speaking will include pauses for a breath, pauses as the direction of the conversation shifts, pauses as the speaker sips from a refreshing beverage. Books do no such thing without the help of the author. And if the book doesn’t breathe, the reader will suffer. Write sentences that end in an appropriate amount of time. Mark the shift of direction with paragraphs, new headings and new chapters. Get to the point of what you’re writing, and then stop. These are editorial functions, but they’re the responsibility of the writer.

People who talk to themselves look weird. If you’re talking, someone should be right there listening, and ideally responding. Authors don’t have the luxury of a real-time audience. The temptation is to supply the voice of the audience—to guess at what they’re thinking as they read, to avoid hurting their feelings unnecessarily. These are good practices in conversation, where you can ask if you’ve guessed correctly or apologize straightaway if you’ve hurt your friend. But what comes across as good relational care in a conversation comes across as equivocating wishy-washiness in writing. An author is providing a resource; as such, an author is a servant, and a servant does not know his master’s business (John 15:15). Get to the point, and set the reader free.

The Best Writers and the Best Books
The best writers are rewriters. Writing is a long process, and the first draft of a book or an article ought never to be considered the final draft. The best writers write with great passion and urgency, with a clear idea of what they want to say and who they want to hear it. But then they read what they’ve written, and they strip away all the waffling and apologies and bullying that have gotten in the way of the message.

The best books have zeal and knowledge, power and discipline. The best books carry the passion of their author without carrying the author’s baggage. The best books provide the reader with content and perspectives that they wouldn’t find elsewhere and didn’t know they needed. The best books empower their readers without overpowering them. The best books are written by authors who are leaders and servants and friends to their readers. The best books are hard to write and sometimes hard to read, but they need to be written, and they need to be read.

There: enough said--er, written.

Vanity Publishing: Extreme Makeover Edition

Vanity publishing. It even sounds a bit sleazy, doesn't it? Paying a "publisher" to print and distribute your work has always had negative connotations in publishing. If a legitimate firm won't produce your book, there must be something wrong with it. Right? Either it is commercially unviable or editorially substandard. It means someone is doing it just to satisfy their vanity.

No more. Vanity publishing has had an extreme makeover.

Our Authors, Ourselves

I have what is, apparently, an annoying habit of referring to authors I work with as "my authors." Just last week somebody called me on it. The phrase strikes some as pompous and presumptuous: I don't own these people--I just rent them. Tee hee.

Flipped around, the phrase doesn't seem to carry as much baggage. "My editor" comes across as roughly parallel to such professional relationships as "my broker" or "my attorney" or "my bookie." The relationship is clearly defined by the phrase: they write something, I edit it.

Not so with "my authors." There's something mildly condescending about the phrase, in the same way that referring to adult children as "my babies" is mildly condescending. It doesn't help matters when I occasionally slip into talk of "my stable" of authors, as though this diverse group of human beings with important and intriguing things to say are simply workhorses that I will use till they are no longer useful. Their dignity is subtly degraded and, rather than being first and foremost human beings, they become mere commodities.

It's a tricky business, because in the publishing industry, authors actually are commodities. (A colleague just let me know that Nelson has an employee whose title is "director of branding, Lucado.") In the word game, as I like to call the book business, two things above all others create a market for books: content and author. The content comes from the author, so our job as editors and more broadly as a publisher is to package the content and, by extension, the author for presentation to the marketplace. The publishing process is subtly degraded: we don't meet, engage people in spirited, thoughtful conversation, then help them craft their thinking into prose that will inform a broader audience; we "acquire," "develop," "market" and "sell" them and their ideas to whatever "consumers" will take a bite.

My wife has a similar language problem to mine: as the supervisor of a counseling program, she sometimes refers to the team of people working for her as "my therapists." The uninitiated hear that and surely wonder, How many therapists does this poor woman need? Frankly, I'd rather have my problem than hers, because my linguistic dilemma makes me look important, whereas her linguistic dilemma makes her look neurotic.

In defense of "my authors," I note that I refer to the people who birthed me as "my parents" ("the people who bore me" is probably technically more correct, but that phrase can be misconstrued, and my mom reads this blog; there, that should remove any doubt as to which member of my household is the neurotic one) and the other people they birthed as "my brother" and "my sister." I don't claim to own them or even possess them, and yet they are "mine" nonetheless. Taken together we are all part of "our family," which is perhaps a better, less transactional, more humane way of thinking of my authors and me. I'm reminded of a piece of dialogue in the now-classic film Sixteen Candles: "We're in the parking lot of my church." "You own a church?"

Anyway, don't take it personally, all you authors out there, when I talk about you as though you're a piece of meat, or when I reduce my editorial feedback to simple phrases such as "TYPE MONKEY TYPE!" Trust me, I'm not dehumanizing you; I'm just playing the word game.

A Pleasant Byproduct of Publishing

A pleasant byproduct of publishing is the relationships that you cultivate. Coworkers, authors, readers, booksellers and vendors become not just links in your network or items on your task list but people you enjoy seeing and hearing from.

Most of my Facebook friends, I've noticed, are people I've encountered through my work as an editor; you can argue that "Facebook friend" is not a real category of friendship, but I think that's only because as a culture we've not lived online long enough to define what virtual friendship really is. In any event, those friends I've made through my industry have their own potential beyond mere social utility; they become people I can count on seeing when I travel to an unfamiliar place, people whose private reflections often seem to follow the same orbit as mine, people with whom I can commisserate and celebrate as the occasion allows.

One of my authors, in an odd but welcome kind of boundary-blurring, came to see me in a play at my church. As a result she's seen where I worship and gotten a sense of what I'm like outside the office. Another author I'm working with, as it turns out, used to work at my church. Finding that out has changed the dynamic of our working relationship; he's the first author I've worked with to find and make use of my home phone number, which means he's the only one to have heard my highly unprofessional answering machine message.

Some of the authors I've worked with I've gone on to work with again and again, changing our relationship from what could have been merely contractual and transactional to something living and dynamic. I celebrated with Lynne Baab, author of three IVP Books and a LifeGuide Bible study, when she left the United States to take a teaching position in New Zealand. I told her to keep an ear out for Neil Finn and his band Crowded House, who have made some of my favorite music of all time. Since moving she's sent me a number of articles about the comings and goings of the band, and today introduced me to Liam Finn, son of Neil and rising star in pop music from Down Under. Since then I've heard from another new friend (who works for another publisher) how much she's enjoying one of Lynne's books. It's a small world after all.

I guess I'm feeling sentimental today, what with all the pleasant surprises I've received recently from these various corners of my profession and with the forthcoming opportunity to see some such friends at a conference later this week. Thomas Merton, who is known best as a cloistered monk, broke from our preconceptions of such a calling to challenge his readers to "not flee to solitude from the community. Find God first in the community,then He will lead you to solitude." Our best experiences of solitude--even as we write, edit or even simply read--are set, Merton would suggest, against a backdrop with relationships in place, serving as the body of Christ for one another. I'm glad for the happy paradox that the otherwise solitary nature of my work--reading, writing and editing--has generated such pleasant byproducts.

Who are the bestselling Christian authors?

Here's a follow-up to a previous post, in case anybody is wondering exactly who are the bestselling Christian authors. According to the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association, the top 50 bestselling Christian authors are the following (as of September 2007, in alphabetical order):

Alcorn, Randy C.
Alexander, Shaun
Arterburn, Stephen
Beers, Ron
Bell, Rob
Blackaby, Henry T.
Brunstetter, Wanda E.
Chapman, Gary
Cloud, Henry
Colbert, Don
Collins, Brandilyn
Dekker, Ted
DeMoss, Nancy Leigh
Dungy, Tony
Eggerichs, Emerson
Eldredge, John
Ethridge, Shannon
Feldhahn, Shaunti
Gregory, David
Hagee, John
Heavilin, Marilyn
Henderson, Dee
Hybels, Bill
Jakes, T. D.
Jeremiah, David
Kilgore, Kay Wheeler
Kingsbury, Karen
LaHaye, Tim
Lewis, Beverly
Lucado, Max
MacArthur, John
McGraw, Robin
Meyer, Joyce
Miller, Donald
Moore, Beth
Oke, Janette
Omartian, Stormie
Osteen, Joel
Piper, Don
Rice, Helen Steiner
Rivers, Francine
Rosenberg, Joel C.
Shepherd, Sheri Rose
Strobel, Lee
Warren, Rick
Weaver, Joanna
Wick, Lori
Yancey, Philip

If you're curious, here are IVP's top selling general trade books (for the month of July 2007):

1. Knowing God, J. I. Packer
2. Too Busy Not to Pray, Bill Hybels
3. Finding God in the Questions, Timothy Johnson
4. The Dawkins Delusion, Alister McGrath and Joanna Collicutt McGrath
5. Evil and the Justice of God, N. T. Wright
6. The Universe Next Door, James W. Sire
7. Jesus and the Hip-Hop Prophets, John Teter and Alex Gee
8. Basic Christianity, John Stott
9. A Mind for God, James Emery White
10. Praying, J. I. Packer and Carolyn Nystrom

Other books that routinely show up in our top sellers, depending on the month, include Dallas Willard's Hearing God, N. T. Wright's The Challenge of Jesus, Eugene Peterson's A Long Obedience in the Same Direction, Gary Haugen's Good News About Injustice, Adele Calhoun's Spiritual Disciplines Handbook and Bill Hybels's Who You Are When No One's Looking. (Our online bestsellers list looks somewhat different because it calculates books, booklets and Bible study guides all together in terms of net units.)