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

In October our reading group took up Black Robe, and entered into Brian Moore’s literary recreation of seventeenth-century New France, the vast, cold, thinly-populated wilderness that had its capital in the small village of Quebec. It’s a sad, thoughtful novel that has no illusions about this world and its peoples. The Indians, whom the novel calls “Savages� as the French did, are treacherous, foul-mouthed, and cruel. The French colonizers are rapacious and brutal. The central character, a Jesuit named Laforgue, is blundering and naïve – a far cry from the masterful Jesuits of missionary lore. There’s no mutual enrichment in the meeting of European and native cultures. Indian and Frenchman fear and mistrust each other, and fail to grasp, much less value, each other’s social and spiritual worlds. Black Robe is a novel with many virtues. Chief among them is its brooding exploration of what Christian missionary work means in a circumstance of total cultural misunderstanding.

Father Laforgue undertakes a harrowing 500-mile journey by canoe in the company of band of Algonquin Indians to relieve a fellow Jesuit marooned among the Huron tribe. The trip claims the lives of several of Laforgue’s Indian guides, and Laforgue himself nearly dies several times. The journey causes a profound spiritual upheaval. He doesn’t understand the culture and spiritual world of his Indian companions, but he perceives them as fellow human beings. He cannot believe, as he has been taught, that they are excluded from God’s mercy simply because they are unbaptized. At the end of his terrible passage he finds a Huron village decimated by disease, which the Europeans, probably the Jesuits, have brought. The surviving Indians beg to be baptized, believing that this magical “water sorcery� will save their lives. Laforgue balks. He’s uncomfortable with this motive. He wants a more informed faith. A more European faith. The Huron chieftain confronts him with two questions:
       “Are you our enemy?â€?
       “No.â€?
       “Do you love us?â€?
       “Yes.â€?
       “Then baptize us.â€?
This Laforgue does, realizing that the love of Christ can break down the ignorance and fear that afflicts them all.

It’s a satisfying conclusion. It’s also a realistically ambiguous one. One would like to see less superstition among new converts. But, as one member of our group noted, it is doubtless true that many of our ancestors were baptized in circumstances similar to these. The novel honestly shows the price that the gospel exacts. The Hurons accepted baptism knowing that it would destroy their culture and way of life. The Jesuit Laforgue left his familiar culture behind and endured great hardship in order to bring the gospel to people who would forever be strangers to him. It’s not comfortable to follow Christ.

“When our daughter Anna Maria was born, she slept a lot — except when we wanted her to sleep.” This is the first sentence of Tim Bete’s humor book, In the Beginning…There Were No Diapers. The opening is not exactly as memorable as “Call me Ishmael” or “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed,” but the book is funny and was good enough to be listed for a time in the top ten parenting humor books on Amazon.com. On his website, Tim tells the story of how the book came to published by Sorin Books, an imprint of Ave Maria. Tim has a lot of good advice about the challenges of marketing books. The economics of the enterprise are gruesome. Tim fearlessly does the accounting for the world to see:

Publisher sales
2,535 copies sold totalling $16,855
Average sale price of $6.65 per copy (avg. 51% discount)
Original print run was 6,500. (Sold 39% during first six months.)
Author advance: $1,500
Royalties due author: $1,761 - $1,500 advance = $261

Author sales
133 copies for a total of $1,728. Profit of apprximately $600.

Total author income from book: $2,361 (first six months)

John Loudon, former executive editor at HarperSan Francisco, is the new executive editor for religion books at Rowman & Littlefield and its Catholic imprint, Sheed & Ward. Loudon had considerable success at HSF. His biggest hit was Paulo Coelho’s 1993 bestseller The Alchemist, which sold a million copies in the US and 23 million worldwide. His other HSF authors included Huston Smith, Marcus Borg, John Dominic Crossan, N.T. Wright, John Shelby Spong, Diana Eck and Coleman Barks. Loudon has ambitious plans for R&L and S&W. He told Publishers Weekly: “I identify up-and-coming authors and I go after them to do books. I’m aiming for the sort of sales that my Harper books have had.”

Newsweek has the goods on the surprising new book from horror writer Anne Rice. Amy Welborn at Open Book notes the positive buzz surrounding Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, a novel about the early life Christ narrated by the 7-year-old Jesus. Rice says she recently returned to the practice of the Catholic faith she was raised in. When someone on a Catholic blog wrote a skeptical comment about the book without having read it, Rice herself (apparently) wrote a tart rejoinder:

I ask you not to pre-judge this book. It has absolutely nothing to do with the gnostic gospels. The book is an attempt to fictionally depict the Jesus of faith, the jesus of the four gospels, set against a backdrop that has been thoroughly researched as to archaeology, sociology and history. I can understand if you have no interest in it, but I ask that you not jump to conclusions about based on fragmentary comments.

The English edition of Pope Benedict’s Italian bestseller Without Roots: Europe, Relativism, Christianity, Islam will be published by Basic Books in February. The book grew out of a speech that Cardinal Ratzinger gave to the Italian Senate before becoming Pope. George Weigel will write a foreword.

Marketing maven M.J. Rose says that it’s time for publishers and authors to learn how to use blogs to promote new books. She points to an AdAge.com piece about the explosive popularity of blogs. The number of blogs has doubled every five months for the past three years. They are read mostly at work. About 35 million Americans read blogs regularly, and they spend an average of 3.5 hours a week at it. This is a grand marketing opportunity, she says:

It means connecting to the right bloggers. Offering them excerpts. Taking out ads (yes there’s that dirty word again) on blog sites that accept them. It means creating podcasts of authors reading snippets from their books or being interviewed and getting blogs to offer them to their readers. . . . When a marketer wants to reach potential customers, the prevailing wisdom has always been find the largest vehicle that reaches the most customers. You can’t use that wisdom when dealing with the blog reading population. While there are wildly popular blogs, the best strategy is to find the blogs that reach your specific target audience who are predisposed to be interested in your book.

If you’ve got interesting books to talk about, I’m all ears. I’d like to write more about new books on People of the Book – particularly notable books and books with a story behind them. Send me an email at manney@ameritech.net.

Wired notices that large publishers have quietly begun to sell books directly from their websites, thereby starting to compete with online booksellers and bricks and mortar retailers, who are also their customers. Technology is breaking down old business models. Says the chairman of Penguin Group:

The boundaries on publishing, retailing and distribution are getting blurred. We can’t rely any longer on the traditional assumption that we’re a publisher, he’s a retailer, we won’t retail, he won’t publish. We’ll have to accommodate one another.

This quote from mega-bestselling author Rick Warren will appear on coffee cups at Starbucks shops sometime soon:

You are not an accident. Your parents may not have planned you, but God did. He wanted you alive and created you for a purpose. Focusing on yourself will never reveal your real purpose. You were made by God and for God, and until you understand that, life will never make sense. Only in God do we discover our origin, our identity, our meaning, our purpose, our significance and our destiny.

Warren has been included in a Starbucks program that prints provocative quotes from writers, scholars, athletes, and celebrities on cups in the company’s coffee houses. There have been 63 quotes in the program. Warren’s is the first to mention God.

Time Magazine is out with its list of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present. Definitions are tricky, but I’d say that eight of them are “Christian” novels. Two are by Graham Greene: The Power and the Glory and The Heart of the Matter. The others are The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis, Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh, The Moviegoer by Walker Percy, Death Comes to the Archbishop by Willa Cather, and Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin. Flannery O’Connor didn’t make the cut. Neither did James Joyce. Ulysses was published in 1922. The list begins with 1923, the year Time started publication.

It was a tough third quarter for the two big chains. Both Borders and Barnes & Noble lost money. The news is worse at Borders, where losses were much greater than expected. The Motley Fool says that costly store renovations at Borders have yet to pay off, and speculates that online booksellers are really hurting the chains.

Morris Rosenthal doesn’t go in for fancy names. His blog Self Publishing is all about what you’d think it’s about. His content is as straightforward as the title: lots of advice for writers who want to publish their books themselves. One theme runs through his advice: authors must become marketers. If they won’t work hard to sell their books, don’t bother. Rosenthal himself is a hard-working author. He has written a book about self-publishing (self-published, naturally), and his blog is a creative, useful, and subtle way to promote it.

Reader Christopher Blunt, commenting on last week’s “A Tale of Do-It-Yourself Publishing” post, notes that print-on-demand and self-publishing is virtually the only option for a Catholic writer who has a novel to publish. Then he asks a good question:

Jim, I’d be very interested in a discussion of why Catholic publishers have moved away from the adult contemporary fiction market — particularly given the success that CBA publishers have had in this area.

Why indeed? A couple of thoughts. Fiction requires a strong commitment from a publisher. A couple of novels aren’t enough. You need a “line” of fiction to get an appointment with the fiction buyers for Borders and Barnes & Noble. Quality fiction is hard to find. Most Catholic editors aren’t comfortable editing it. The marketing of fiction is very different from the marketing of non-fiction. Most Catholic publishers see fiction as essentially entertainment. Nothing wrong with that, but they’re strongly mission-oriented, and fiction seems tangential to the mission. For all these reasons, fiction seems too difficult to do.

What do others think?

All the good movies begin as books, and Disney’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is surely the most-anticipated book-related movie of the year. It won’t be in theaters until December, but Barbara Nicolosi has seen a screening and loves it. John Wilson of Books and Culture thinks that Alan Jacobs’ The Narnian is the best of the many Narnia books that have been published to tie in with the movie. TeachNarnia.com is an impressive site that helps parents teach children about the literary and spiritual riches of the C.S. Lewis classics. For the movie trailer, go here.

The Devil’s Advocate is one of the few novels that have made a new phrase common currency in the English language. Ever since Morris West’s tale of duplicity, intrigue, and spiritual awakening sold millions of copies in the 60s and 70s, the term “devil’s advocate� has been used for the person who deliberately takes the critical, contrary position in an argument or discussion. How many times have you heard someone say in a meeting, “let me be the devil’s advocate here for a minute�? That person is taking on the role of Morris’ protagonist, Fr. Blaise Meredith, a dying priest sent to a poor post-war Italian village to untangle the skein of rumors, lies, and facts that surround the life and death of a mysterious man whom many believe is a saint.

The Devil’s Advocate is once again a bestseller. The book has just been reissued as part of Loyola Press’ Loyola Classics series, and it has landed on the Catholic Book Publishers Association paperback bestseller list. The novel is set in a world that has vanished: impoverished, post-war Italy where a pre-Vatican II Church struggles with militant Communists. But the characters are superbly drawn, and they engage each other in struggles that elucidate timeless themes. In his introduction to the new edition, Kenneth Woodward compares Morris West to Graham Greene in their depiction of the spiritual rebirth of priests:

One interesting difference is this: Where Greene sees his whiskey priest as ontologically different from other men because of his ordination and the powers that go with it, West’s dying Meredith comes to feel that “I must understand that a priest is just a man with sacramental faculties� . . . The two books share a similar fascination with the power of love and the mystery of divine grace—not to mention the many sides of sin. Each has a specific gravity that is possible only in a world where sin and salvation are considered real and where the line between them is recognized as wafer thin. That’s what makes them Catholic.

New fall books are out, and seven of them have landed on the new bestseller list from the Catholic Book Publishers Association. Mother Angelica by Raymond Arroyo is the number one hardcover. Also new on the hardcover list are Facing Pain, Finding Hope by Daniel Hurley and Catholic Prayer Book for Mothers by Donna-Marie O’Boyle. The new paperback bestsellers are Amazing Grace for Married Couples, Travelling with the Saints in Italy by Lucinda Vardy, I Am Not Being Fed by Jeff Cavins, and The Devil’s Advocate by Morris West. Loyola Press and Ascension Press each have two of the new bestsellers, while Doubleday, Our Sunday Visitor, and Paulist Press have one each.

At People of the Book we’ve been paying attention to the explosive growth of self-publishing and print on demand publishing. Writers can now publish just about anything they want without benefit of editors or publishers, but the question remains: can writers really find an audience this way? Bill Quick thinks so. Quick is a political blogger and part-time thriller and mystery writer who decided a few weeks ago to publish his latest novel himself. He made an e-book version and put it up for sale on his website for $5. He has taken in $4500 on 900 copies sold. All that money goes to Quick; none of it goes to agents, publishers, or booksellers.

Quick has advantages that most self-published writers don’t have: a popular blog, friends who plug his book on their blogs, and a track record as a novelist. Still, those looking for a glimpse of the future of trade publishing may see some of that future here. Quick puts it succinctly:

This sort of outcome is a godsend for those of us professionals who think of ourselves as midlist, and who used to grind out two or three books a year in order to make thirty or forty grand before taxes. It offers us the possibility of bypassing the old apparatus entirely, and becoming self-publishers in a way that may eventually be able to match the financial rewards of traditional publishing.

Forecasters predict that high gas prices and the maturing of the e-commerce industry will cause a boom in online retail sales this Christmas season. E-commerce sales are expected to increase 22 percent in the final quarter of this year, according to a recent Times technology report. Total online sales for 2005 should reach $26 billion, compared to $21.5 billion in 2004. Many of these products will be books. Last year, Amazon.com, the leading online book retailer, accounted for about $7 billion of these online sales (though Amazon sells many products other than books).

A little perspective: despite the $100 fill-up, people will still go the mall for most of their shopping. Store sales are expected to reach $435 billion this year. Still, that’s only a 5 percent increase, compared to a 22 percent increase for e-commerce business.

Novelist and publishing consultant M.J. Rose has launched Author Buzz, a new marketing service that brings authors directly in touch with readers, booksellers, librarians. It is web-based, and uses the Shelf Awareness and Dear Reader.com online publications to bring authors’ “buzz” to the reading public. Rose says that the new service reaches 300,000 readers, 3000 library systems, and 1000 booksellers.

Mother Angelica, Raymond Arroyo’s biography of the feisty, entrepreneurial founder of the Eternal Word Television Network, has landed on the New York Times bestseller list. The book ranked 15th last week and 23rd in the list published yesterday. This is a rare appearace for a Catholic religious book on the Times’ nonfiction hardcover list, which includes two other religious books: Bruce Feiler’s Where God Was Born and The Universe in a Single Atom, the Dali Lama’s reflections on science and spirituality.

The annual Best Catholic Writing collection is out from Loyola Press. The editors have chosen 28 articles, essays, poems, and book excerpts that deal with spiritual issues (liturgy, aging, priesthood, ethics, prayer), pressing public questions (the Iraq war, homosexual marriage, Catholic politicians and abortion), and lively Catholic personalities (Mel Gibson, Evelyn Waugh, Antoinin Gaudi, Mother Teresa, St. Francis of Assisi). The writers include Kenneth Woodward, Ron Hansen, James Martin, SJ, Barbara Nicolosi, Pattiann Rogers, and Rod Dreher. The richness of Catholic writing is on full display here.

MORE: Loyola Press is now gathering material for Best Catholic Writing 2006. Tell me about recent “best Catholic writing” that you think should be included. Send me an email at manney@ameritech.net.

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

–Wallace Stevens

Podcasting seems to be catching on as a tool for book publicity. Holtzbrinck reports 10,000 downloads of the 30-minute promotional podcasts it began posting on its website barely a month ago. Last week, Simon and Schuster launched a podcast site called SimonSays.com, which features original programming and book excerpts. USA Today reports on them here.

Religion publishers face many challenges, but competition from used books doesn’t seem to be one of the more serious ones. Publishers Weekly reports that only $27 million worth of used religious books were sold in 2004 — about 1 percent of total religious book sales. This figure is from the Book Industry Study Group study of used book sales reported last week. Here’s the breakdown by category. The numbers are in millions.

Category Units Dollars
Education 38.6  $1,633.0
Nonfiction 28.7  230.0
Fiction 18.7  79.0
Professional 9.4  132.0
Children 5.8  27.0
Religion 5.0  27.0
Collectible 4.0  84.0
Unclassified 1.0  11.0
Total 111.2  2,223.0
Source: BISG

Jeff Guhin of BustedHalo.com invites readers of this blog to submit their lists of important spiritual books. We had some lively postings about this recently. BustedHalo’s Essential Reading Feature asks “What books have helped you on your spiritual journey?” Send your list to essentialreading@bustedhalo.com.

C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien are closely linked. They were friends, fervent Christians, fellow Oxford scholars, and the authors of beloved fantasy epics. But their friendship was apparently close enough to encompass – and survive – passionate disagreements. According to Norman Stone, director of the movie “Shadowlands,â€? Lewis and Tolkien argued about literary and religious matters. Tolkein disliked what he considered heavy-handed Christian allegory in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the first book in Lewis’ Narnia Chronicles. Tolkien, a Catholic, was instrumental in Lewis’ conversion from atheism to Christianity, but detected anti-Catholic views in his friend’s writings. He worried that Lewis would “become again a Northern Ireland Protestant.â€? Stone quotes a friend of the pair who says “they took no prisoners when it came to arguing about their work.â€? Lewis once irritably said of Tolkien: “No harm in him, only needs a smack or so.”

The contention between Lewis and Tolkien is described in a TV documentary about Lewis that Stone has produced. It will be broadcast in December to coincide with the release of the eagerly-awaited “Chronicles of Narnia� movie.