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IVP's Top Ten of 2011

Before 2011 becomes too distant of a memory, we thought it would be fun to take a look back at the most memorable IVP happenings of 2011. All in all it was an eventful year, and we look forward with anticipation to what 2012 has in store.

1) Snowpocalypse!

We started out the year with over two feet of snow falling in the Chicago area on February 1. IVP's offices were closed for a day while we let the snow plows dig us out. It wasn't fun to drive in, but when the sun finally came out it sure was pretty. Check out some other pictures of Chicago during the blizzard.

2) WildGoose Festival

In June IVP's Likewise Books sponsored the first Wild Goose Festival in Shakori Hills, NC. Likewise authors like Shane Claiborne, Mark Scandrette, Julie Clawson, Sean Gladding and Margot Starbuck were on hand for a festival of justice, spirituality, music and art. Missed it this year? Check out the video for some highlights, and don't forget to register for Wild Goose 2012 today to save your spot!

3) Release of the Reformation Commentary on Scripture

In July we released the highly anticipated new series, the Reformation Commentary on Scripture to critical acclaim. Mark Noll called it a "major publishing event" and Richard Mouw said it was "a godsend." Find out more about the series and learn how you can save 40% when you sign up today!

4) Remembering John Stott

On July 27, 2011 the world lost a true saint when John Stott passed into the presence of the Lord at the age of 90. His life and legacy were remembered at services around the world. He will be greatly missed.

5) Richard Foster eBook Sales Take Off

One week in August the ebook edition of Richard Foster's new Sanctuary of the Soul sold more copies on Amazon.com than the print edition! It's the first time an IVP ebook overtook the print edition, and we believe it's an exciting indication of things to come in 2012.

6) Andy Root's Popular Post

In September professor and author Andy Root wrote a post on our Online Pulpit blog postulating that "all pastoral ministry has gone the way of youth ministry." The post generated multiple thoughtful and enthusiastic comments on the importance of bringing theology back into ministry. We hope you will continue this conversation in 2012.

7) Award-Winning Covers

   

In October the 60th Annual Chicago Book Clinic Book and Media Show presented InterVarsity Press with four book design awards. Congratulations to our stellar designer Cindy Kiple for her beautiful cover and interior designs and to Jim Erhart for excellence in the manufacturing process. Covers honored included Clouds of Witnesses, Opening to God, Contemplative Vision and Defending Constantine.

8) Anti-Trafficking Tour with Daniel Walker

In October Daniel Walker, author of God in Brothel, partnered with Compassion International and Hagar International to tour the country and shed new light on the grim realities of enforced prostitution and the status of rescue efforts around the globe. Sharing from his own experience as an undercover investigator who has rescued hundreds of women and children from the sex industry, Daniel touched the hearts and opened the eyes of hundreds of attendees.

As a result of the tour:

• Nearly 100 vulnerable children were sponsored through Compassion to prevent future human trafficking
• Hagar collected hundreds of emails from attendees who were interested in joining the fight against human trafficking
• Daniel received important media coverage to advance the awareness of this grave worldwide injustice

9) IVP Wins Recycling Award

In November IVP received the Commercial Recycling Award from the Village of Westmont for its successful commitment to improving the environment by recycling. It was an honor to be recognized at the November 7 Westmont Village Board Meeting as "the best and most improved big business recycler."

We've taken specific steps to institute an environmental stewardship program by educating and informing our team on how to be responsible with natural resources. In 2010, we recycled twelve thousand pounds of paper, and we allow the public to drop off paper in recycling dumpsters in our parking lot.

"We are committed to protecting the environment and to the responsible use of natural resources. Our employees are to be commended for their diligence," says Anne Gerth, IVP's director of production and fulfillment.

10) Biblica Acquisition

In December we acquired Biblica Books, the book-publishing arm of Biblica Worldwide and obtained 170 current and nearly 30 new Biblica Books titles. This includes Operation World, the definitive global prayer guide that's now in its seventh edition. "With this acquisition, IVP becomes an even stronger publisher for biblical and missions-oriented resources. We are grateful for this expansion opportunity," says IVP Publisher Bob Fryling.

You can browse all the Biblica books available on the new tab on our website.

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What about you? As you look back on the year, what were the big life-shaping events you won't forget? And what are you looking forward to in 2012?

Preview Our Books at Scribd!

We want you to know, without doubt, that the book you buy is the book you need.

That’s why, for several years, we have been using Amazon Search Inside and Google Preview to allow you to view as much as 20% of any book. Now, we are pleased to share large, uncut excerpts and extras from our newest books for free download at Scribd (see www.scribd.com/intervarsitypress).

At Scribd, you will find a growing number of PDF excerpts of our latest titles that include

• full color covers
• tables of contents
• short description pages with helpful links
• full chapter picked by the editor

Books from authors like Ruth Haley Barton, Sean Gladding, Dallas Willard, Alister McGrath and N. T. Wright are all available for preview. And we plan to release at least four new titles a month from IVP Academic, IVP Books, Likewise and Formatio—all simultaneous to or even before the release of the print edition.

We have also posted our entire collection of catalogs.

Don’t see a book you’d like to preview? Contact us and we will do our best to post it quickly. Have more questions about a book? Try a link from the description page at the beginning of the PDF at Scribd or check IVP Online.

We hope that this will be a valuable service to you as you dig deeply into your faith—and, we hope, into InterVarsity Press books!

See the Movie; Don't Wait for the Book

Some of our books have been turned into movies! Well, not really, but we’ve created videos to profile a number of our books. They’re all viewable from our website, but many of them are also available on YouTube. Here’s the top ten, according to the number of times they’ve been viewed on that site as of this morning. Check them out to get a feel for the books and their authors.

1. Evil and the Justice of God

2. Basic Christianity, 50th Anniversary Edition

3. Just Courage

4. Culture Making

5. The Dawkins Delusion

6 (Tie). Misquoting Truth

6 (Tie). Strengthen the Soul of Your Leadership

8. Fabricating Jesus

9. Too Busy Not to Pray, 10th Anniversary Edition

10. Gracism

There are plenty others, along with videos related to the books but not posted by us, including James Choung’s two-part video describing his True Story. So if you find yourself thinking, I wonder what Love Is an Orientation author Andrew Marin’s voice sounds like, truck on over to YouTube and wonder no more.  

IVP on YouTube

A number of videos about new and forthcoming IVP books are now available on YouTube. Here’s a preview of Ben Lowe’s upcoming Green Revolution:

You can also find videos about Andy Crouch’s Culture Making, Leighton Ford’s The Attentive Life, Ruth Haley Barton’s Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership, Albert Haase’s Coming Home to Your True Self, Gary Haugen’s Just Courage and much more. Check them out!

P.S. If you like the little clay globe on the front cover of Culture Making, check out this video of what someone does with it.

Free shipping on IVP books, and other IVP news

Here’s a Christmas shopping special for IVP fans everywhere. Now through December 15, get free shipping on orders of $25 or more (US addresses only). Check out our Christmas gift guide for some suggestions and ideas.

And let me highlight a few IVP books that have been lauded recently. Publishers Weekly named Andy Crouch’s Culture Making as one of the best religion books of 2008. PW also gave starred reviews to Living Gently in a Violent World by Stanley Hauerwas and Jean Vanier and A Community Called Taize by Jason Santos. And PW also ran a brief profile of Hauerwas. Here’s an excerpt:

For his newest book, Living Gently in a Violent World (IVP, Nov.; PW starred review, Oct. 13), he teamed up with Jean Vanier, founder of L’Arche, a network of homes where people with and without mental disabilities live together as family. “Tenderness and gentleness characterize the life and work of Jean Vanier,” Hauerwas writes. But is Hauerwas himself gentle?

“Most people think I’m fairly confrontational,” he says. This is classic understatement: try finding a description of Hauerwas that doesn’t mention his colorful vocabulary, his feisty personality, his lifelong war against warmongers. “But my father—who was a bricklayer, and I was raised a bricklayer—was a very gentle man, and on the whole, I would like to think I’m very much like my father.”

Gentleness pervades life at L’Arche, where the pace slows to accommodate the weakest members. Vanier’s community-based approach appears simple, but “it has levels that, if we let it work on us, would transform our lives in ways we hardly want to imagine.” Still, Hauerwas cautions, “It’s very important never to romanticize L’Arche. This is hard work. It’s never without struggle.”

The Hauerwas/Vanier book is part of the new series Resources for Reconciliation, developed in partnership with the Duke Center for Reconciliation. (See this YouTube video about the Center and the series.) I was at Duke last month for some launch events with Vanier and Hauerwas. It was neat to see the two interact, and their book serves as an accessible entry point into their thinking.

Four Hs, One Bible

Not surprisingly based on my profession—both in the sense of what I do and what I believe—some of the best books, according to my rubric of four Hs—“hard to read, humble, humorous and human,” are consolidated in the Bible.

That the best books are hard to read is confirmed by King Josiah, who when read the books of Moses by his royal secretary, "ripped his robes in dismay" and ordered his court to "pray to GOD for me and what's left of Israel and Judah. Find out what we must do in response to what is written in this book" (2 Chronicles 34:19-20).

Humility pervades the scriptures, of course—not necessarily in the foreground, as a fair number of folks display precious little humility. But those cases generally serve as a kind of cautionary tale reinforcing the axioms that bubble up now and again: “Pride goes before a fall,” “Humble yourself in the sight of the Lord, and he shall lift you up,” and whatnot.

Beyond that, the Bible displays a savvy use of humor. The first laugh in the Bible is recorded in the book of Genesis, when old and childless Sarah overhears God promising her husband a son. She laughed out of bitterness, denying it to God's face when he called her on it. But the last laugh was on her, when soon enough she found herself groaning through childbirth and bearing a son, whom she named, appropriately enough, Isaac, or "Laughter." It's a perfect story, and it's just a scene. Plenty more where that came from.

And of course, it all comes together in the very humanness of the book—despite its divine origins. Much like its Messiah, the Bible shows divinity and humanity commingled in the best sense, so that in learning about God we learn something about ourselves, and in learning about ourselves, we learn something about God.

So there. You want to read something good, give the Bible a shot. And then, of course, dig around in the IVP catalog, if I do say so myself.

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.

For the Publisher Who Has Everything

Still shopping for the perfect Christmas gift for that special someone--the public face of your publishing house, the person who signs your checks, the person you have to cajole in order to get your pet projects approved, the person you have to answer to when your pet projects stain the carpet? Look no further than this spam e-mail I received today to find a gift for the publisher who has everything:

Hi David, a number of executives have engaged us to paint oil portraits of their CEO or Founders and I thought your company might like to have one too. It's a great way to recognize the CEO or Founder, it's a wonderful surprise, and always well received. It can be placed in your reception area, conference room or their home. We work discretely--photos are all we need. We can even paint the company's original location or existing building in the background.

My favorite part of this e-mail is the tag line at the end of the signature: "Mail back to decline further." I still haven't figured out what the company hopes to accomplish by encouraging people to more aggressively reject them (I suspect they're ultimately just trolling for live addresses to add to their database), but it's a phrase that resonates with me, since this week I've been putting the editorial equivalent of a lump of coal in the stockings of several would-be authors.

Part of the editorial gig is to review and often reject people's book proposals, and despite the spirit of the season, rejection waits for no man or woman. We reject proposals, for the most part, for very simple reasons: maybe it addresses a subject that's already been addressed, maybe the subject matter is too narrow a topic to justify the allocation of limited resources to produce and market it, maybe it doesn't dig deep enough into the issue, maybe the author doesn't have enough of a platform to draw an audience.

I'm always tempted to keep writing when I reject a proposal: to convince the author that I'm right, to minimize the emotional impact of the rejection. But generally a rejection from a publisher is mostly about the publisher, not about the author.

In a very real sense, every book proposal is like a gift for the publisher who has everything. InterVarsity Press, for example, has sixty years of publishing behind us, and our job is to acquire and publish books that make sense within that long tradition--not books that entrench us in some doctrinaire foxhole and not books that send us way out on a theological limb, but books that fit us as we continue to contribute to the evangelical conversation.

These are core questions of publishing identity: who we are, where we've come from, where we find ourselves in the current cultural context, where we see ourselves headed. To answer these questions is to say yes to some books but necessarily to say no to many. It's as simple as that; to decline further is often simply to belabor the point.

Still, I'm given pause by the language of publishing decisions: rejection is such a harsh word, and no matter how you slice it, declining to publish a book is a rejection. It's a little like unwrapping a gift from that special someone, harumphing and shouting derisively, "Pass!" I'm reminded of a Dilbert comic strip I saw early in my career: the evil Dogbert has taken on the job of evaluating manuscripts, and is taking considerable glee in writing rejection letters: "I hated your manuscript so much that I've now started to hate you." That's taking "decline further" to an inappropriate extreme, I think.

So please, if you've received a rejection letter from us this year, be assured that we don't hate you. It really is not you--it's us.

On the other hand, if you do find a book contract from us under your Christmas tree, please don't exchange it! Receive it with joy and the following benediction:

May your days be merry and bright
And may you get off your butt and write.