IVP - Behind the Books - March 2009 Archives

Let's Start Burning Books! We've Got Kindle(ing) Now!

I accidentally bought a book today. No, a book didn’t get slipped in with my pile of groceries at Jewel or my pile of clothes at American Eagle, I was using a Kindle (The digital book-reading device recently released by Amazon). A relevant topic for someone just starting out in the publishing industry, right? Well, the phrase “with the touch of a button” became ever so real to me today. If I end up in a marketing job in publishing I can just see myself calculating the number of “accidental sales” from Kindle users. We could use that fund to pay for our office parties (yacht gala anyone?).

Anyway, back to my story. I was g-chatting with one of my friends and she asked me if I had read The Shack. I hadn’t, but I pulled up the sample of it on the Kindle and could have easily purchased it for $8.49. Actually, I did purchase it—unintentionally. In my experience of online shopping you get at least three confirmation pages and two warnings before you actually buy something, so Kindle users be warned: if your Kindle asks you to make a purchase, it means business.

After returning the Kindle to its very helpful owner, Andrew Bronson, I went to look up copies of The Shack at my local library. All checked out. The Kindle was looking pretty appealing, but kind of pricey for a college student. The Kindle 2 is selling for $359.00, and I can’t really afford to buy a book every time I read one, so it looks like I’ll still be sticking with the slow, good ol’ fashioned library for now. Except … I forgot about my iPod Touch there for a second. Just by downloading an application I avoid the $359.00 fee. Tempting …

And therein lies the future of book publishing. In fact, the last non-textbook book I bought for myself was probably over a year ago. My book-purchasing hiatus is not due to Kindle but libraries, with which publishers have coexisted peacefully for a while now. Inevitably, though, with the expansion of technology, the print circulation numbers for all publishing companies are going to continue to drop.

This doesn’t need to be a complete disaster, however. Really, inventions like the Kindle are helping to save paper and all that good environmental stuff. Publishing companies just need to continue to adjust as they switch to a more digital world. Change is never easy, though, and it would probably be easier entering a more stable industry upon graduation; I guess I’ll just have to embrace these transitional times and view them as exciting rather than tumultuous.

Nerd Alert

Thanks to my brother-in-law for turning me onto the webcomic XKCD. This particular episode has everything a nerdy book editor would want:

—a poke at e-books

—stick figures

—the illusion of world travel and wild adventure

—a poke at Kindle(tm)

—an homage to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

If you don’t laugh, you’re probably cooler than I am.

Almost There . . .*

A lot of my college experience has involved me telling myself, “You’re almost there”; “Just this one last project”; “Just this one last semester”; “That late night will so be worth it when you’re all done.” Well, with just a few weeks remaining before my graduation, book publishing has given me the ultimate test of patience: the never-ending manuscript.

A few weeks ago I was given a three-hundred-page manuscript and told to, among other things, change the in-text citations to footnotes. I measured my rate (about ten pages an hour) and, now that I am nearing the end, I am clocking in around thirty hours. So what’s the catch? I hit page three hundred about an hour ago, and I’m not done yet.

Right now my footnote count is at 1662. And those little guys take up space, my friends. About thirteen pages of space. Plus, with all the footnotes still to be made in those thirteen pages, I probably won’t really be done until close to page 315.

I realize I am still editing the same amount of text, but this glitch in my measuring system has really tested my patience. And, theoretically, this really could be an infinite task (if I were to start footnoting footnotes). But in the end all I can hope is that my fastidious footnoting will create some sort of containment for this ever-expanding document and help get it into a readable format.

Other than patience, this conglomeration has also taught me the meaning of prioritizing and the (somewhat) negotiable nature of deadlines in publishing. From all my years of school, I’m used to strict deadlines (e.g., one day late and you lose a letter grade). In this sense it looks like school has prepared me for the responsibility of deadlines in the working world, but I also never had self-propagating assignments in class. From working on projects and talking to editors I’m starting to see a little bit more the continuous nature of editing. Mike Gibson, for example, showed me his ten-year plan for the Reformation Commentary on Scripture. Ten years. Forget ten years, I’m glad just to have the next ten minutes planned!

I think if I continue in publishing I’m going to have leave the “You’re almost there!” mentality behind. I like the satisfaction of completing a task, but an editor’s work is definitely all about the journey, especially if your project’s completion date is set ten years in the future.

*Sort of.

A Beginning

I spend a lot of time starting and ending things. I just started college two and a half years ago, and two months from now I will be finished. I just moved into the city, but I’ll be moving out again as soon as my internship ends. I just started working at IVP four weeks ago; seven weeks from now my internship will be over and I will, yet again, be starting something new.

We’ve all been there before, right? None of these beginnings and endings has been or will be overwhelmingly easy. Starting and ending things generally aren’t. I won’t complain too much, though; I accept my life for how it is. I am looking forward, however, to a time post-college when my life hopefully has some routine again.

Starting a new job is especially difficult, so I hope the next job I start goes as smoothly as my transition to IVP. Everyone here is super welcoming (it’s not creepy at all that they all know my name, and I know about five of theirs). I have a really good supervisor and a well-networked coworker, Al, who, after I had been working for about two days, got a copy of my favorite book signed by my favorite author.

My impression of the publishing world so far—to borrow from the upstart theory of intelligent design—is that it’s irreducibly complex. A book, from the outside, looks pretty simple. It’s got a cover and some pages with words on them. From the inside, a book looks like countless read-throughs, several meetings, numerous emails and phone calls, and that’s all before it even gets to production and distribution. Needless to say, I have a lot keeping me busy at IVP and still have a lot to learn.

Do I like being part of the complex process that results in a book? Yes. Do I think I could continue doing this for a long time? I don’t know. That’s what these next few weeks and blog posts will be about. So, as I start this blog, that of course will end all too quickly, I’m just going to enjoy life for its transient nature and hopefully give some readers a glimpse of the publishing world through the eyes of an intern.

Introducing the New Intern

Publishing is hard work. We make it look so simple, I know: pretty little books with clever little sentences all strung together, effortlessly circumnavigating the globe and known universe to greet their audiences with a chipper “Hello!” and a promise of great reward. You want copies of The Hermeneutical Spiral and Circles of Belonging to hop in a box together and travel the thousands of miles from our distribution center to your church’s library? No problem: just point and click.

Blogging is hard work too—so hard that this blog has needed three of us to maintain it, with occasional outside support from authors, coworkers and, now, an intern. One of the nice things about authors is that they enjoy writing and are passionate about at least the subject of their book, so it’s often not all that difficult for them to come up with five- to eight-hundred words to share with our readers. One of the nice things about coworkers is that they can fill in the blanks of our understanding about our industry, so their occasional foray into blogging helps to fill out the content of Behind the Books. And one of the nice things about interns is that you can make them do pretty much anything you want.

That’s not the only nice thing about interns, of course, and it’s far from the only nice thing about our current intern, Michelle Read. Michelle, a senior at Hope College majoring in English, has busied herself for a few weeks now with writing reviews of draft manuscripts, proofreading catalog copy, filing paperwork, archiving reprints, brainstorming book titles and any number of other tasks essential to the publishing process. She’s learning a fair bit along the way and processing what she’s learning whenever she can gather together some free time and space. And now we’ve figured out a way to commandeer that free time and space: we’re going to make her blog her way through her internship.

Check in here regularly over the course of spring 2009 for updates on what Michelle is learning and how she’s adjusting to life in the big city, life in an office building, life in an industry. If you’ve been wondering what life behind the books is really like, if you’ve been curious how IVP keeps generating so many addenda and errata, if you’ve suspected that Andy’s unedited thoughts are too well-formed to have not undergone editorial scrutiny, if you’ve worried just how far and deep the strangeness and dimness at IVP extends—here’s your chance. We’re not paying her, so she’s not gonna lie for us.

When a Christian and an Atheist Collaborate

Just in from the printer is our new book Deepest Differences: A Christian-Atheist Dialogue, by Jim Sire and Carl Peraino. Jim and Carl were in a neighborhood book club together, and then a conversation about the death of Kurt Vonnegut provided the spark for this book. This snippet from the preface provides the behind-the-scenes background, and it also gives a pretty good sense of the flavor of the book:

[Jim] suggested that Vonnegut had, perhaps unwittingly, given an argument for the existence of God. Carl protested. Jim rejoined. Some eighty emails later, both had been surprised and frustrated with the recalcitrance of the other. Neither had changed his mind. Each thought that at least some of his own arguments were good. So why did they not persuade?

Their closing essays in the book attempt to answer this question, but astute readers will be able to write their own final chapter to the book.

Some readers, Jim thinks, will be persuaded to change their mind; reason and the Spirit of God will have done their work. Carl will say that every change of mind, and there may be some, simply illustrates the causal nexus of the universe doing its thing.

And these may well be the best acknowledgments I’ve ever seen in juxtaposition:

Finally, Jim thanks God for giving him a long life with and a mind fascinated by the mysteries of God and his universe. Carl feels fortunate that he emerged into sentience in a relatively benign environment via the concatenation of innumerable chance events spanning millions of years of evolution.

Who Needs a Publisher?

Sally Craft, our director of digital publishing, forwarded this link to a fascinating blog story on how one author ultimately created a bestseller by starting with an informational website. It’s a month or so old now (so ancient in the online world!), but still worth reading I think.

Sally says: “It’s a case where an author used social media to successfully connect with an audience for her book … . A key factor, I think, is that the author took initiative well before the publisher was involved. This is not something that a publisher could do for a title as
successfully as the author.”