People of the Book
A Blog about Book Publishing from a Catholic Perspective

A writer named Liz Dubelman has made a word-music-picture-animation media creation named Vid Lit that is — well — it’s original, and hard to describe. Dubelman calls it a “music video about stories” and proudly quotes others who term it “a compelling new form of entertainment.” I’m interested in it because publishers and writers have begun to use it to promote books. You might want to bypass the VidLit homepage and go here for Dubelman’s explanation of Vid Lits.

Audio books currently come in three forms: cassette tapes, CDs, and MP3 downloads that you play on your iPod or other portable player. This fall, there will be a fourth package — a stand-alone audio player, smaller than a deck of cards, preloaded with an audio book, with a pair of ear-bud headphones and a lanyard. It’s called the Playaway, and it will be manufactured by a company called Findaway World. The company is now partnering with publishers. Playaway books scheduled for its October launch include C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and The Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren. Playaways aren’t exactly cheap. Publishers Weekly reports that the books will cost $34.99.

The Anchoress is hearing from people who love Rumer Godden’s novel In This House of Brede. Says one happy reader, “I am a lapsed RC, but the book was still full of meaning and wonder. Its hard for me to describe, but just reading the book brought me such a sense of peace and joy.â€?

Think again if you think that the distribution side of the publishing business is boring. Large companies, many of them publishers themselves, are avidly seeking the distribution business of small publishers. Competition is intense. Prices are falling. A good distribution deal can save money for small publishers and give them more efficient distribution of their books, yet a bad decision can erode control of their brands and compromise their marketing. Publishing consultant Mike Shatzkin sorts out the many facets of distribution here. Some measured advice:

The best strategy for any distributed publisher, which most are and will be, is to keep contracts and commitments as short as possible because competitive pressure is likely to keep prices falling for some time to come. When looking for a distributor, a publisher should try to shop the market as broadly as possible and maintain touch with the ones they like but don’t pick, because they’ll still be there when the next contract is up. And all publishers should do their best to own as many buyer relationships as possible, even if a distributor has primary responsibility for sales.

The new Compendium to the Catechism, released a few weeks ago in Italian, will be published in the U.S. in October by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The art in the book is of special interest. The book contains fourteen masterpieces of sacred art. Publishers of the book will be required to include these images in their editions, and to place them in the same position with respect to the text. In an introduction to the compendium, Pope Benedict XVI said this about the importance of imagery in catechesis:

“Images are also a preaching of the Gospel. Artists in every age have offered the principal facts of the mystery of salvation to the contemplation and wonder of believers by presenting them in the splendour of colour and in the perfection of beauty. It is an indication of how today more than ever, in a culture of images, a sacred image can express much more than what can be said in words, and be an extremely effective and dynamic way of communicating the Gospel message.”

We’ve talked about the Long Tail on this blog as a publishing paradigm that just might change our business. If the concept is unfamiliar to you, check out my post on the subject a few weeks ago, and follow the link to Chris Anderson’s article about it in Wired magazine. Briefly, the Long Tail is a way of thinking about commerce in an online world when shelf space is unlimited. Think Amazon. It’s all out there. There’s an audience for everything, and if people can find what they want, and if the price is right, publishers can make more money from the many books with a small audience than they can with elusive bestsellers.

For the Long Tail to work, people need to be able to find the items that interest then from among the massive variety of products available. Chris Anderson of Wired magazine, who coined the term The Long Tail, calls them “filters.” Good filters separate the good from the bad. They point you toward the material that stirs your interest or meets your need. A book review is a filter. So is the editor at the publishing company who decides what books to publish.

But the nature of filters is changing as publishing moves into the Long Tail world of abundance and infinite choice. Editors will become less important as gatekeepers in a world where just about anything can be published and put up for sale all over the world. What Anderson calls “post-filters” will become more important. Post-filters are entities that select what’s good from among the many products available. As Anderson puts it:

But in Long Tail markets, where distribution is cheap and shelf space is plentiful, the safe bet is to assume that everything is eventually going to be available. The role of filter then shifts from gatekeeper to advisor. Rather than predicting taste, post-filters such as Google measure it. Rather than lumping consumers into pre-determined demographic and psychographic categories, post-filters such as Amazon’s custom recommendations treat them like individuals who reveal their likes and dislikes through their behavior. Rather than keeping things off the market, post-filters such as MP3 blogs create a markets for things that are already available by stimulating demand for them.

Read Chris Anderson’s post about filters on his Long Tail blog. And then think about what will be the new filters for Catholics interested in good books.

A nice stat: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince sold more copies in one day than The DaVinci Code sold in one year. Yes, this number is from the UK, but it must be similar in the US. Harry’s numbers are indeed staggering: 10 million copies of the book were sold in its first 24 hours.

Jesuit scholastic Mark Mossa offers a long and book-studded post about the importance of traditional devotions in the lives of young Catholics. Young people desire a sense of the transcendent, and are drawn to contemplation and devotional forms of prayer, he says. But too many Catholics betray “a knee-jerk fear of anything traditional.”

We have legitimate resources in our tradition to respond to that desire, and we should offer them to young–and not so young–Catholics, not in the service of any ideology, but in the service of God.

Mossa describes himself as “not the most pious Catholic” who nevertheless enjoys Eucharistic adoration and recommends it to others. His advice on the contentious matter of devotion seems pastorally sound:

the rich devotions of our tradition should be offered and encouraged, but not insisted upon; but also approached with the necessary prudence, while not discouraged because of the possibility of excess (that’s like never taking a drink because you might perhaps one day get drunk).

       Mingo poured another bowl of cereal. “Do you get to choose what you give up for Lent? I mean, does it have to be eggs, or dessert, like that?”

       “Oh, it can be much worse,” Sister Joe told him. “Me, I’m trying to give up thinking I could run the world better than the people in charge.”

       Raleigh, who shared this opinion, shook his head. “But what if you’re right, why shouldn’t you think so? That’s false humility.”

       “Certainly it is,” she agreed. “That’s why giving up eggs is a breeze, compared; why do you think pride is the worst sin in Hell, Mr. Hays? Believe me, gluttony, lust, sloth, they’re dog poop compared to pride.”

Handling Sin

Michael Dubruiel and Amy Welborn are Catholic publishing’s Power Couple. Both are prolific authors. In their day jobs, Michael is a senior book editor at Our Sunday Visitor. His wife Amy is the doyenne of Catholic bloggers at Open Book and general editor of the Loyola Classics. Both have just published new books. Amy’s is Here. Now. A Catholic Guide to the Good Life. Michael’s is How to Get the Most Out of the Eucharist.

Both books are very good. Michael claims that “Amy and I both believe we have written two books that speak to the angst that daily appears all over the Catholic blogdom.” That in itself would be reason enough to buy them, and Michael is making a fine offer on his blog: buy both within the next 30 days and the profits will go to a worthy charity. Take him up on it.

In secular book publishing, women have overtaken men on the bestseller lists. A study of New York Times bestsellers shows that half the best selling titles of 2005 were written by women, compared to 18 percent a generation ago.

But this is definitely not the case in Catholic publishing, as you will see if you click on the bestseller links in the sidebar. Two of the top 25 books on the Amazon list were written by women (women co-authored two others). Men wrote all of the B&N.com hits, and they wrote 16 of the 20 books on the CBPA hard and softcover bestseller lists.

Why is this? Most Catholic books are purchased by women. Do Catholic women trust men more than women for spiritual guidance? Maybe this is just a time when the bestseller lists are dominated by books by the old pope and the new pope. But I don’t think so. I’ve edited as many books by women as by men over the years. Women are as talented as men as writers. But I think that men have had much greater success in Catholic publishing for a long time. I’m genuinely perplexed by this. Any ideas?

Our reading group took on Mr. Blue last night. Myles Connolly’s parable of a St. Francis figure in modern-day America is something of breather between two heavyweight classics: Wise Blood last month and The End of the Affair next. But Mr. Blue stirred up some serious discussion of what it means to be a Christian. Mr. Blue is totally consumed by a radical, romantic faith. He embraces poverty, spends his time with the down-and-out, and lives with a passionate exuberance. He is followed around by the sober, practical narrator, who is both attracted by Blue’s zeal and repelled by it. One member of the group remarked that she saw the free-spirited Blue and the skeptical narrator as two sides of the author’s personality. She read the novel as Myles Connolly’s argument with himself. How far should I go into this Catholic thing? How “practical” should I be? This insight was the key to a fine discussion. We’ve all had this conversation.

The reading skills of 9-year-olds have been improving for a generation, and the rate of improvement increased dramatically in the past five years, according to a federal governemnt report released last week. The typical 9-year-old reads more each day than a typical 17-year-old. Much of this reading is for school. 25 percent of elementary school children read more than 20 pages a day in school and for homework, double the percentage in 1984.

The curmudgeons at The Economist mark the Harry Potter launch weekend by reminding us that books with a 10 million-copy first printing are rare in the publishing business. The success of the new Potter book is “an oddity in an industry that is growing slowly and rarely sees bumper profits.” The Economist summarizes familiar ills: the industry’s reliance on blockbusters, the fact that retailers can return unsold books, steep discounts to powerful retailers that squeeze profits, congolomorate owners growing impatient with mediocre results. Thanks for the reminder, guys.

But all the interest this weekend in Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince is another reminder of the enduring cultural power of books. Harry Potter is a bigger deal than the biggest movies (which usually begin as books too), and Harry’s popularity is going to last longer than the opening weekend. It turns out that Half Blood Price is a dark, morally serious tale – something that will endure for a while. Maybe Notre Dame professor John O’Callaghan was on to something in his essay “Harry Potter, Catholic Boy,” which remarks on the Christian symbolism in the earlier Potter books. O’Callaghan’s conclusion: “Hogwarts is not a school of sorcery and the occult mastery of nature. It is a school of virtue, a community of inquiry in pursuit of wisdom, an academy of philosophy.”

“My wish is to stare down a big league pitcher just as he is going into his windup, make him think you know something he doesn’t know. I wish for a chance to look at a sky so blue that it hurts your eyes to look at it, to feel the tingle in your arms as you connect with the ball, to run the bases, to stretch a double into a triple, and to flop face first into third and wrap your arms around the bag. That’s my wish.”
Field of Dreams

Amy Welborn at Open Book points us toward a very insightful appreciation of The Habit of Being, the great collection of Flannery O’Connor’s letters. The essay she found, by Jonathan Yardley, is appropriately titled “The Writer Who Was Full of Grace.” Yardley says that The Habit of Being is “a great American book by one of the greatest American writers.” Amy, who knows O’Connor’s work well, also supplies links to resources that will be especially helpful to people who are just getting started reading O’Connor. It’s well worth the effort.

One of Amy’s readers found this blog, which seems to consist entirely of quotes from O’Connor. One of them is this famous story about O’Connor’s defense of the eucharist at a New York dinner party:

I was once, five or six years ago, taken by some friends to have dinner with Mary McCarthy and her husband, Mr. Broadwater. (She just wrote that book, “A Charmed Life.”) She departed the Church at the age of 15 and is a Big Intellectual. We went at eight and at one, I hadn’t opened my mouth once, there being nothing for me in such company to say. . . . Having me there was like having a dog present who had been trained to say a few words but overcome with inadequacy had forgotten them.

Well, toward morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. Mrs. Broadwater said when she was a child and received the host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, He being the most portable person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one. I then said, in a very shaky voice, Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.

That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable.

Blog marketing, free downloads, websites, viral publicity — these are some of the ways that publishers and authors are using the internet to market their books, according to a piece in today’s Wall Street Journal Online. The article is full of interesting ideas. Let’s hear from you if you’ve tried any of them.

One of my favorite quotes from St. Ignatius is this:

Love consists in sharing
What one has
And what one is
With those one loves.

I like the phrasing of it. I like the way it succinctly ties life and work together. I like the activist sentiment. Love is “sharing,” not just a feeling. Love means doing things.

I think this a good way to look at our work as Catholic book publishers, bookseller, authors. An e-mail I received recently from a friend who works in Catholic publishing caused me to think about this. Maybe you’ll find it helpful too. Here’s what he said:

I’ve come to believe that the real task for religious publishers to the masses is to be able to somehow awaken the blessedness that is very much present and eager to come alive in the people we encounter. I think that involves first expecting it to be there (many–I originally said most–religious leaders have a very dim view of the people they serve and it comes across loud and clear), not judging where people are at in terms of their faith or religious practice, but assuming they are doing the best they can and want to do better, and finally finding the ways to ask them “How you doin?” in such ways that they will see what we offer as a golden opportunity rather than yet another time when they don’t measure up to what a “good Catholic” ought to be. Thus, I believe a big part of our success as Catholic publishers will be when very good people realize and act out of deep goodness, love, and generosity and tone down any residue of feeling that we are the ones who have to make people good and holy. Maybe you don’t suffer from that temptation, but I sure do and when it creeps into my writing or publishing anything I write or produce falls flat. Think of the difference between a treatise on grace and how it works versus how many lives have been lit up by the song, Amazing Grace.

Our best product is blessedness and the good news is that there’s an endless supply of it. The more we can help people experience their own blessedness, their own goodness even in the midst of the darkness of their lives, the more success we will have.

Did Pope Benedict XVI condemn the Harry Potter novels? Not exactly. Blogger Jimmy Akin has the whole story.

Author and blogger Matthew Lickona has a thoughtful post on Paul Elie’s wonderful book The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage. Read Elie’s book. Also take a look at Lickona’s new book Swimming with Scapulars: True Confessions of a Young Catholic.

This week marks the tenth anniversary of the arrival of Amazon.com, the company that proved that the internet could be good for business. You can see Amazon’s original homepage here, as it appeared on July 16, 1995. The “earth’s biggest bookstore” claim is taken for granted now. Amazon is the paradigm of the “long tail” retailer. Shelf space is infinite. Everything can be stocked, found, and sold. It can be sold at a discount and shipped to you free if you buy $25 worth of books. It’s an irresistible package.

Amazon has 49 million active customers and nearly $7 billion in sales (not all from books). And yet its profits are falling and its stock price languishes. The same internet that made Amazon possible spawns competitors who put relentless pressure on profitability.

But internet bookselling is here to stay. It’s particularly valuable for Catholic publishers, who struggle to get attention in bookstores. So happy birthday, Amazon.

This week marks the tenth anniversary of the launching of Amazon.com. It declared itself the “Earth’s Biggest Bookstore” on its original homepage, which you can see here, as it appeared on July 16, 1995. The “biggest bookstore” claim is taken for granted now. Amazon is the paradigm of the “long tail” retailer. Shelf space is infinite. Everything can be listed, found, and sold. And it can be sold at a discount and sent to you free if you buy $25 worth of books. An irresistible package.

All hail Amazon! It has 49 million active customers and $6.92 billion in sales (not all from books) but . . . profits are falling and the stock price is a fraction of what it was five years ago. The same internet that made Amazon possible spawns competitors and drives prices down, eroding profitability. Many bookbuyers need to hold the book in their hands before they buy. Many people will look at a book on Amazon, and then buy it at their favorite bookstore.

Nevertheless, Amazon.com is a genuine innovation. It extends the reach of Catholic publishers, and we’re glad to wish it a happy tenth birthday.

Publishers, booksellers, and authors have been glumly watching the rapid increase in used book sales, facilitated by the internet. Now, the online bookseller Alibris is making a bold move to expand used book sales. The e-tailer will buy used copies of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince for $5. Customers can send their copies to Alibris free with a shipping label that can be printed from the company’s web site. Alibris will then offer the used copies for sale for $9 or $10. The offer begins Thursday, two days before Half-Blood’s official publication day. If this experiment succeeds, many thousands of cheap copies of Half-Blood in good condition will be available while the book is still in the early weeks of its release.

Bybacks are standard procedure in the world of textbooks, but they have not been tried yet in trade publishing. It’s an experiment that the publishing community will no doubt be watching carefully. Customers love used books. Publishers wish they would buy new copies instead.

I’m going to come clean. I’m both a publisher who wants people to buy new books, and a reader who buys used books over the internet. I feel a little guilty when surf over to Alibris, but I like saving money. I feel virtuous when I buy new books at my favorite bookstores, but I often wonder whether I should indulge myself this way so often. So there it is. I’m a conflicted man.

Where do you stand on the used book question? Do you buy used books yourself?

Looking for a good book? How about a good book every week for the next twenty years? Consider buying the entire Penguin Classics library from Amazon.com. Amazon is offering all 1082 books in the collection for a mere $7989, a saving of $5325 from the list price. The books weigh 700 pounds, would tower 828 feet if you stacked them up, and include 500,000 pages. Is this just a stunt? Think it over, says one reader on Amazon. Many people spend this kind of money on their libraries. “These books are going for about two years of gasoline.”

Two attractive new books provide a fresh experience of daily prayer based on the two great traditions of Catholic spirituality. From Liturgical Press comes Benedictine Daily Prayer: A Short Breviary, a new liturgy of the hours edited by Maxwell E. Johnson. The book is a complete breviary designed for use by lay people as well as Benedictine monks and oblates. From Loyola Press comes Hearts on Fire: Praying with Jesuits, a compilation of prayers by Jesuits arranged according to the four “weeks” of St. Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises.

Here’s a melancholy thought to start the work week. The DaVinci Code, Dan Brown’s appalling thriller, is the religious book most widely read by Catholics. This news comes from a survey of religious bestsellers by the Barna Group, a marketing and survery research company that works mainly for evangelical Protestant clients. Barna claims that 40 percent of American Catholics have read the book. This seems like a lot. Perhaps Barna exaggerates. Some doubt that The DaVinci Code is a religious book at all. But there’s no question that the DaVinci theory of Christian origins has influenced many people.

Here’s a thought. The Barna people looked at seven religious bestsellers: DaVinci, The Purpose Driven Life, The Prayer of Jabez, the Left Behind books, The Five People You Meet in Heaven, Tuesdays with Morrie, and Your Best Life Now. Who would have predicted that these books would sell in such colossal numbers? Only The Purpose Driven Life (in my view) is both well-crafted and rich in content. The other six are either superficial, poorly written, or both. The success of DaVinci and Left Behind is especially mysterious from the point of view of craft and message. There’s a saying in publishing: nobody knows nothin’. That’s not true, and we don’t believe it, but it may be more true than not when it comes to predicting religious bestsellers.

The International Christian Retail Show opens today in Denver. This is the reinvention of the venerable Christian Booksellers Association international trade show — the largest festival of Christian books on the planet. But the Christian Booksellers Association now calls itself simply CBA. The book show has become a “retail” show. And the trade association has taken other steps to distance itself from the “bookseller” label. All this reflects the fact that books now account for only about 25 percent of the average CBA store revenue.

CBA stores are under intense pressure from Wal-Mart, Costco, Target, and other discount retailers, which have rapidly increased their sales of Christian books. Wal-Mart alone now carries 1200 religious book titles. The “big-box” retailers increased their share of the Christian retail market by 22 percent last year, while the CBA share fell by 3.5 percent. Some 288 CBA stores closed last year.

CBA stores may be struggling, but their business is booming. Revenues in the Christian retail market topped $4.3 billion last year, up from $4 billion in 2000.

Cardinal Avery Dulles, S.J. is perhaps the most prominent American theologian, so it is always noteworthy when he publishes a new book. He has revised and expanded his The History of Apologetics. In an interview on his publisher’s website, Cardinal Dulles says that the best apologists keep in mind the limitations of reason:

Some have imagined that the way to win converts is to minimize the element of mystery and thereby make Christianity appear more accessible to reason. But if God speaks, he might be expected to say things that would be far beyond the capacity of the human mind to discover by itself. Preserving the mystery of the divine, apologetics does not seek to prove the contents of revelation, except to show that they cannot be disproved. It does aim to show that Christianity brings blessings on the world, that we may reasonably believe it to have been revealed, and that for those who see the grounds of credibility, it is unreasonable to withhold assent.

So who are his favorite apologists? In the twentieth century he likes G.K. Chesterton, C.S. Lewis, Karl Rahner, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and John Paul II.

Will blogs become an important way that people find out about books? Some publishers think so, says the book critic of The Guardian newspaper in London.

Exactly what sells books remains mysterious, but one tried-and-tested method is the word-of-mouth recommendation. The world’s oldest marketing tool, it’s slippery as the truth and impossible to fake. Or so we all thought. Lately, however, American publishers have wised up to the arrival of the so-called ‘bloggerati’, a network of cyber bookworms whose blogs are signed by the likes of Moorish Girl, Book Dwarf and Four-Eyed Bitch. . . .Despite the book-group boom, reading remains a solitary pursuit and, like all things online, blogs offer a sense of community.

What do you think, people of the book? Are blogs changing the way you find out about books? Have you ever bought a book because of something you read on a blog?

John Allen, the National Catholic Reporter correspondent in Rome, took a close look at Pope Benedict’s new book, The Europe of Benedict in the Crisis of Cultures, which was published in Italian last week. Allen says that the book suggests that the Pope will be an evangelist, not a diplomat.

“If Christianity, on the one hand, found its most efficacious form in Europe, it has to be said on the other hand that a culture has developed in Europe that constitutes the most absolute, radical contradiction not only of Christianity, but of traditional religions and the morals of humanity,” he writes.

This is an observation, the pope believes, with immediate consequences for relations with other religions.

“The true clash that characterizes today’s world,” he writes, “is not that between diverse religious cultures, but between the radical emancipation of the human being from God, from the roots of life, on the one hand, and the great religious cultures on the other.”

Allen says that “To date, there are no plans for an English translation.” He talks about the book at the end of his current, “Word from Rome,” his excellent weekly column.