IVP - Behind the Books - August 2008 Archives

Upcoming Invite08: Soul Care for Leaders retreat/conference

Yesterday I caught up with Mindy Caliguire, founder of Soul Care, a spiritual formation ministry serving church leaders. She's the author of IVP's series of Soul Care Resources, including two new volumes, Simplicity and Soul Searching, that just came out this summer.

I'm a workshop leader at Soul Care's upcoming Invite08: Soul Care for Leaders one-day retreat/conference to be held at Willow Creek this October. I'll be doing a workshop on spiritual formation in the suburbs. Here's the description:

Suburbia can be a challenging environment for a healthy spiritual life. How does the geography and sociology of the suburban landscape affect our relationships with God and others? This workshop will explore the cultural forces at work in suburbia and how Christian spirituality and practices can counteract suburban tendencies. The workshop will also help church leaders contextualize their ministries to connect with suburban seekers.

IVP's publisher, Bob Fryling, is also doing a workshop on "spiritual coherence and leaders," which will be a preview of his forthcoming book on spirituality and leadership. The event should be especially helpful for pastors and ministry leaders (whether church staff or volunteers) who find themselves responsible for people's spiritual health but may feel like their own souls lack spiritual vitality. If you're in the Chicagoland area (or close enough in the Midwest to drive in for the weekend), I invite you to Invite08!

Here's the info:

Invite08: Soul Care for Leaders

Saturday, October 25, 2008

As church leaders, we need to listen to and care for our souls. Most of us are responsible for the care of others, too. Do you truly know how it’s done? Are you making time for it? Join us as we seek God to learn what it means to work whole-heartedly for His purpose.

Gather with others in our area to enjoy worship, retreat, conversations, reflection and learning.

WHEN: Saturday, October 25, 2008 9am - 4pm

WHERE: Room 100 at Willow Creek Community Church, 67 E. Algonquin Road, South Barrington, IL 60102

COST: $35 until Oct 1, $45 after that. Cost includes casual pizza lunch

Anticipating a blessed day with you,

Invite08 Leadership Team
Mindy Caliguire, Soul Care
Dan Lovaglia, Willow Creek
Doug & Marilyn Stewart, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship

Merton on Blurbs

I don't want you to think we are anti-endorsement. We are very grateful for the kind words that are attributed to our books. Nevertheless, since I read it just yesterday, I can't resist quoting a bit from Thomas Merton's A Vow of Conversation.

I am surfeited with words and typescript and print. Surfeited to the point of utter nausea. Surfeited above all with letters. This is so bad that it amounts to a sickness, like the obsessive gluttony of the rich woman in Theodoret who was eating thirty chickens a day until some hermit cured her and brought her to the state where she only ate three. . . .

One place to begin is perhaps in the area of letters. All I know is that when I respond to another request asking for a blurb, I feel like a drunk and incontinent man falling into bed with another woman in spite of himself, and the awful thing is that I can't stop.

The Best Blog Post Ever!!!

My Gen X sister--perhaps because she lives in Washington, D.C., where everyone has an agenda and works the angles (I saw Legally Blonde 2, so I know what life in D.C. is like)--has a healthy skepticism about words of commendation of any kind. So I was not surprised by the New York Times article she turned me on to this week, about the seedy backroom politics of book endorsements. You can read the article here.

Endorsements are uncomfortable. One of the authors I've worked with had a standing policy of not endorsing books until the moment when we sent his book out for endorsements. It reminded me of my standing policy in college not to date my friends, which one friend reminded me of when I asked another friend out. I was, to quote Garry Trudeau quoting William Shakespeare, "hoisted by my own petard."

Endorsements are solicited for any number of reasons but are guided by one agenda: the broader dissemination of the book. To that extent endorsements (and by extension, endorsers) are commodities and are necessarily treated as such. Too many endorsements and the reader glazes over, and the impact of each is lessened. Not enough endorsements, or endorsements by reviewers of dubious consequence, and the book struggles to distinguish itself among the hundreds of thousands of other new books on the market.

But despite the commodification of the practice, endorsing books is still a human activity and thus has some self-correcting attributes to it. The endorser's name is attached to his or her words of commendation, and so regardless of motive, the reputation of an endorser is to one degree or another linked to the fate of each endorsed book. It's also more evident than many endorsers realize whether they've actually read the book or are simply indulging a friend or extending their own brand. Readers, we've come to discover, aren't stupid. Convince enough readers that you'll endorse anything on paper regardless of what it says, and your supply of endorsements will quickly exceed its demand.

In a perfect world, a writer--particularly an unknown writer--will experience endorsements as the affirmation of his or her forerunners and peers that this book merits reading. Endorsements are a way of welcoming an author into the guild or otherwise celebrating their craft. In this respect such a welcome can come from the author's close friends but also from complete strangers, because the community of publishing is large enough that we can't possibly know everybody.

I got a call right around Christmas morning from Jason Santos, the author of the forthcoming A Community Called Taizé, that the brothers whose community he was chronicling had invited Archbishop Desmond Tutu to write him a foreword, and that the Archbishop had accepted the invitation. Jason's journey as an author wasn't quite complete at that point--his book won't be in print for another couple of months--but the journey into the community of authors that began with his professor suggesting we publish him led him ultimately across the world to one of the great voices of our age. It takes a village to sell a book, but every once in a while a book can create a community.

Write-Brained World

I got a panicked e-mail today from an anxious author. You wouldn't recognize the panic by looking at the e-mail--nothing in all-caps, no frazzled smiley faces, internally consistent spelling and punctuation--but I knew that at the other end of the Internet that connects our computers sat an author who was at her wit's end, grasping at whatever straws I might hold out to her. "Can you please help me understand how I can write as an extrovert?"

That's a tricky business, isn't it? There's hardly anything that appears more introverted than writing, particularly when that writing is directed not to an individual (as in a letter or an e-mail) but to a faceless, anonymous mass of readers (as in a book). Making use of common jargon or shared memories is a dubious proposition when there's no immediate or even direct confirmation that the message was received, that the joke was got. So the concept of writing for an as-yet-potential audience is highly abstract and consequently highly ungratifying to many extroverts.

And then there's the discipline of writing, described at least once as "easy . . . all you have to do is open a vein." A compelling percentage of writers who write about writing are notoriously, self-referentially martyrous, delighting in the ironic juxtaposition of being deeply vulnerable from the comfort of their faux-leather office chair. Writing is relished for the pain it causes such people, even as the laptop into which the person is writing is reassuringly warming his or her lap.

Extroverts are not opposed to martyrdom in principle, so long as they have some company. But writing is ultimately a solitary experience. One pencil per hand, one voice per book, one subject per sentence. Writing requires so much mental presence on the part of the author that other people--even people the writer loves--are sometimes reduced by the mere act of writing to either potential readers or potential distractions.

Ah, there's the rub: how does a person who abhors a relational vacuum crank out 50,000, 5,000, 500 or even 50 internally consistent words in a relational vacuum? I'm not being rhetorical, I'm really asking. Where are my extroverted writers at? What advice can you offer?

I Don't Want the Money, I Just Want the Stuff

I suppose it's flattering to know that what you do for a living can influence some people's decision about what to do for a living. I'd like to think it's a well-edited idea that triggers some unsuspecting reader's openness to the call of God on their lives. But as often as not, it's the perks, as playfully confessed by Mike Hickerson, associate director of the Emerging Scholars Network:

The first time I ever considered joining InterVarsity staff was when I discovered that staff received a discount on IVP books.

The enticement of cheap literature didn't seal the deal for Mike, but it apparently got him thinking. Read the whole piece here.

In the early days of InterVarsity's campus ministry, every field staffer got a copy of every IVP book. Of course, back then there were only about a hundred staff and we published maybe twenty to twenty-five books a year. There are now over a hundred books published every year, and over a thousand staff with ever-dwindling free time for reading. The times, they have been a changin'.

InterVarsity staff do still get a tasty discount and an occasional box of free stuff, however, so if that's what motivates you to "establish and advance . . . witnessing communities of students and faculty who follow Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord," more power to you. Send your resume here.

How publishers make publishing decisions

Kevin O'Brien, director of Bibles and reference for Tyndale, has a great blog post about the decision processes involved in Christian publishing. In his case, for Bibles, "I often not only ask myself whether or not we at Tyndale can produce a Bible but also whether or not we should produce that same Bible." He gives an example of a wide-margin, single-column Bible. It's something that people have requested and has ministry value, but it faced challenges:

The problem is that the economics on a project like this have made it very difficult to create. The Notemaker's Bible in the first edition of the NLT was exactly the kind of product that we are talking about. It was developed before I came to Tyndale, but from all the reviews I have seen, the team's efforts to get it right paid off. But there was a problem. Big one. It sat on store shelves. And sat. To be fair there could be a lot of reasons for this. Maybe our price was wrong, maybe the cover or the title were just a bit off. Maybe the timing was just wrong. I'm honestly not sure.

The issue here is not one of whether or not the product is worthy, but whether or not it's viable. There's a lot that goes into the creation of a Bible. Things like the time and money invested in design, typesetting, proofreading, manufacturing, warehousing, freight (and yes that one keeps going up), how long the print run will be, which market segment is likely to stock that kind of a Bible, what the returns rate and average discount that channel receives and a whole lot of other issues as well, things like whether or not "the market" will support the product (i.e., is there a sufficient demand).

It's a complex business to publish a Bible with a lot of variables and a lot of difficult decisions to be made. Print runs are a great example. Increase the print run and the cost of goods per unit goes down. This means it's easier for us to be competitive in retail and sale pricing. It's also a huge risk because you can sit on a lot of inventory for a long time if the product doesn't work. And those are dollars that you can't put into other projects. Which means that not only does the business potentially suffer, but so does ministry because opportunities may not be able to be pursued.

We face the same kinds of questions and challenges in IVP's publishing program. We turn down lots of perfectly good book proposals because for whatever reason, they are not likely to be financially viable, and thus it wouldn't be good stewardship of our time and resources to publish them. We often pass on a proposal because it overlaps too much with other books already on the market. For example, there are thousands of general books on prayer, or basic introductions to apologetics, or books on leadership. Unless the author has an amazingly new and fresh angle or a significant high-profile platform, the book is likely to get lost in the mix.

It's not merely a matter of whether a book makes a significant contribution to its field. It's also whether the book is likely to find enough readers to be economically viable. These days both the editorial content and the marketing potential are key components of the equation. IVP's bias is generally still to emphasize editorial content, because if a book has great content but weak marketing possibilities, we can usually work on improving the marketability. But if a book has great marketability but weak content, there's comparatively less we can do to make the editorial content stronger. It's easier to tell a potential author, "Work on your platform," than it is to say, "Write a better book! Get better ideas!"

(Of course, many publishers and authors enlist ghostwriters and book doctors for exactly this reason - an author might be prominent and likely to sell books, but can't write worth a darn or has nothing new to say. So ghosters collaborate with the personality to make a salable book. But that's generally not the kind of publishing IVP does.)

At any rate, what makes for the best book is when all the publishing stars align. You have the right author writing on the right topic, aligned with the right publisher that can find the right intended audience. It doesn't happen all the time, but when it does, we rejoice.