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

Most people who came to the November meeting of our book group were reading Brideshead Revisited for the second, third, and even fourth time, so we relished one of the great pleasures of the reading life: that of re-reading a great book and discussing it with fellow fans. The literary pleasures of Evelyn Waugh’s masterpiece are many. The dialogue is perfect. The satire of 1930s British society is delightful. Much of it is uproariously funny. But Brideshead is a profoundly serious book. The novel is the story of the entanglement of a secularized, upper-class youth named Charles Ryder with the Marchmains, a complicated and dysfunctional aristocratic Catholic family of ancient lineage. For Waugh the Marchmains are a metaphor for England between the world wars. The family was once great, and it still retains the outward signs of grandeur. But it is hollow inside.

Marchmain is the name of the hereditary title. The family’s name is Flyte, and its members are fleeing from each other and from God. Lord Marchmain, unable to divorce his wife because they are Catholics, lives in Venice with his mistress. Son Sebastian descends into alcoholism and leaves the country. Daughter Julia leaves the Church and makes a bad marriage. The pious and manipulative Lady Marchmain alienates those she loves. Yet all return. One of Waugh’s characters quotes Chesterton’s Father Brown, who caught a thief “with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.�? The Catholic faith, which had seemed invisible, still bound the Flytes. God draws them back to the Church, bringing the heathen Charles Ryder with them.

The Church portrayed in Brideshead Revisited is very much a Church of strict rules and imposing tradition, but it’s also a place of mercy and grace. At the end, Julia Flyte chooses God over her adulterous affair with Charles. She explains: “I’ve always been bad. Probably I shall be bad again, punished again. But the worse I am, the more I need God. I can’t shut myself out from His mercy. That is what it would mean; starting a life with you, without Him.�?

“Omit needless words,â€? the terse rule #13 from Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, increasingly governs modern concise, on-the-go communication. But perhaps too many words are being found needless. From the UK comes word of a mobile phone company that will summarize works of literature in text message lingo and broadcast them to students. Here’s the plot summary of Milton’s Paradise Lost: devl kikd outa hevn coz jelus of jesus&strts war. pd’off wiv god so corupts man(md by god) wiv apel. devl stays serpnt 4hole life&man ruind. Woe un2mnkind. Translation: “The devil is kicked out of heaven because he is jealous of Jesus and starts a war. He is angry with God and so corrupts man (who is made by God) with an apple. The devil remains as a serpent for the whole of his life and man is ruined. Woe unto mankind.â€? More info here.

On a lighter note, a reader sends a link to book-a-minute classics, which also boils down large books to small chunks. Here’s the abridgers’ summary of St. Augustine’s Confessions: “I was a bad boy. Damn, was I a bad boy. Not anymore, though.� Here’s the essence of the collected works of Jane Austen:

Female Lead
I secretly love Male Lead. He must never know.

Male Lead
I secretly love Female Lead. She must never know.

(They find out.)

THE END

A few months ago we had a conversation here about the question, “why don’t publishers test-market covers?” It seems like a good idea, but publishers don’t do it for a variety of reasons. Schedules are tight, test-marketing can be expensive, and many designers and editors think they know best. Still, one of our publisher readers, Jim Curley, ran a successful cover test for one of his company’s books.

Here’s another question: why not ask readers to help us with book titles? A law professor from the University of North Carolina is doing exactly that. Read about it here. Authors or publishers who want to try something similar should let me know. Perhaps we can get People of the Book involved.

Only 10 percent of Catholic teenagers say that religion is “extremely important” in shaping their daily life — a far lower percentage than Protestant teens, says a new report from the CARA Center at Georgetown University. Catholic teens also lagged far behind their Protestant counterparts on several measures of religious belief, experiences, and activities. Religious education might have something to do with this. Forty percent of Catholic teens had no parish-based religious education at all. Read a CNS report on the study here.

Author David Gibson doesn’t dismiss the new 100-Minute Bible, which reduces the Old and New Testaments to about 60 pages of text. In a Wall Street Journal piece he says that this line of “downsized, user-friendly scriptures� is simply the latest innovative way to bring to bring spiritual wisdom to people with limited time. Some of these efforts involve new technology. He points to the proliferation of religious podcasting, and the recent announcement of an audio Bible for iPods. But Gibson points out that Christians have been distilling and summarizing the scriptures for centuries. The rosary, the breviary, and the Liturgy of the Hours are examples of this. He writes, “it could be argued that Christianity has been keeping it simple since Jesus stymied the Pharisees by synthesizing Jewish law in two precepts: love of God and love of neighbor.�

In the effort to communicate the faith of the Scriptures it is worth taking a few chances. Perhaps some of the latest gimmicks — putting speed at a premium — will pique the sensus fidei enough to lure people into a deeper engagement with the full texts and thus with the life of faith. Those first 100 minutes can last for years.

The first of the post-demise appraisals of John Paul II will be published next week. It’s John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father, by Peggy Noonan, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal and a former White House speech writer. Noonan has written memorable pieces about John Paul in the Journal. The one that I liked best can be found here. Her new book is described as a blend of appraisal and memoir. Karol Wojtyla was elected pope just as Noonan was returning to the church, and he played a large role in her spiritual journey.

The data is in: those customer reviews on Amazon really do sell books. A study by two professors at the intriguingly-named Center for Customer Insights at the Yale School of Management shows that customers at both Amazon.com and Barnsandnoble.com are influenced by reviews posted by other customers at those online sites. The researchers made one particularly interesting finding: book-buyers are more influenced by negative reviews that positive reviews. That is, a “1-star� negative review carries more weight than a “5-star� positive review. The reason seems to be that “multiple glowing reviews for a book may be perceived as hype generated by an author or publisher.�

Is it hype or is it marketing? No matter. Smart authors and publishers will work hard to generate those positive customer reviews.

“Do not scrutinize so closely whether you are doing much or little, ill or well, so long as what you do is not sinful and that you are heartily seeking to do everything for God. Try as far as you can to do everything well, but when it is done, do not think about it. Try, rather, to think of what is to be done next. Go on simply in the Lord’s way, and do not torment yourself. We ought to hate our faults, but with a quiet, calm hatred; not pettishly and anxiously.”

– St. Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life

The New York Times profiles one of the intrepid readers who owns the entire library of Penguin Classics, which Amazon put up for sale last summer. A couple of dozen people have snapped up all 1082 Penguins for a mere $7,989.50 (shipping is free). Kathryn Gursky told the Times that she has read roughly one of the classics every two days since the collection arrived in September. She and her husband have no children and no TV. “We don’t have anything better to do” than read, she said.

The Next Big Thing at the intersection of technology and publishing may well be online access to the contents of books. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Amazon are all involved in projects to scan books and make at least parts of them available on the internet. Publishers are worried. They want to get paid for use of their books, but the problems are deeper than that. Putting whole libraries online could change the nature of “publishing.”? It’s no surprise that the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers have recently gone to court to stop Google’s ambitious book-scanning operation.

But the online revolution will come, according to a recent piece in The Economist. It quotes a Google executive saying, “In the future, the only thing that will get read is something that will be online. If it isn’t online, it doesn’t exist.”? An overstatement? Of course. But there’s a logic to putting books online, and it’s not limited to books:

For search companies such as Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft’s MSN, digitising books is particularly important because it represents the next critical phase of the industry. Most of the web has already been scanned and indexed—there are already between 8 billion and 10 billion items online. Although search technology is constantly tweaked to provide better performance and more relevant results, studies by Microsoft have shown that around half of all search queries fail to provide the information that users want. “We need to get offline content online. Offline is where trusted content is, and where people who need to answer questions go,”? explains Danielle Tiedt, manager of search content acquisition at MSN. “Books are only the first step,”? she says.

That’s one of the funnier lines in The Bad Catholic’s Guide to Good Living, a new book just out from Crossroad, which got a thumbs-up from Amy at Open Book and The Curt Jester. Authors John Zmirak and Denise Matychowiak are very funny people. Go to the book’s website for the truth about the Vatican’s space program. Here is their menu for a Halloween “Purgatory Party” observing the seven deadly sins:

Pride: Black Caviar, arrayed with chopped red onions, sour cream, toast points and lemon wedges on your finest silver tray.
Envy: Something thin and green—Roasted Asparagus with Lemon and Garlic.
Gluttony: Something WAY too fattening—Dates Stuffed with Cheese, Wrapped in Bacon.
Anger: Shrimp and Mussels Fra Diavolo.
Lust: The medieval symbol of sexuality—Figs, Coated with Belgian chocolate.
Greed: Something irresistible: Peanut Butter Cookies.
Sloth: Something good but ridiculously easy: Haagen-Daz ice cream—self-service, straight out of the container.
Drink: Flaming Purgatory Punch.

New point-of-sale technology allows booksellers, publishers, and agents to immediately track how well books have actually sold. This can have baneful consequences for authors’ careers. An editor reviewing a new book proposal can open up Bookscan and find out exactly how well — or poorly — the author’s previous books have sold. If they haven’t sold especially well, or, worse, if each successive book sells fewer copies than its predecessor, the author’s career could be over. “You’re only as good as your last book’s sales,” says agent Richard Pine.

The quote from Pine comes from a Wall Street Journal piece on one tactic writers are employing to evade the bad sales stigma. They are writing their new books under new names. William P. Kennedy’s military thrillers stopped selling in the 1990s. Since then, as Diana Diamond, he has written six successful novels. Reed Farrel Coleman’s career as a mystery writer had run out of gas. He’s now Tony Spinosa, whose first thriller in a projected new series will be published next year. Is this unethical? Some think so. “Just to defeat the computers at Barnes & Noble and Borders isn’t a good reason for doing this,” says one writer. But Reed Coleman-Tony Spinosa disagrees: “I’m doing what the market expect me to do: Play the Game.”

Francis and Clare in Poetry is a delightful new book, just out from St. Anthony Messenger Press. Editors David Craig and Janet McCann have collected 165 poems, including this one by Seamus Heaney:

Saint Francis and the Birds

When Francis preached love to the birds.
They listened, fluttered, throttled up
Into the blue like a flock of words

Released for fun from his holy lips.
Then wheeled back, whirred about his head,
Pirouetted on brothers’ capes,

Danced on the wing, for sheer joy played
And sang, like images took flight.
Which was the best poem Francis made,

His argument true, his tone light.

There’s plenty of interest – and no small amount of hype – about the potential of Long Tail marketing for book publishers, especially small publishers who serve niche markets (like Catholics who read religious books). The Long Tail says that there’s an audience for everything. Now that virtually everything can be put on sale on the internet, publishers might be able to make more money from the many books with a small audience than they can with a handful of bestsellers with a mass audience.

Or so goes the Long Tail theory. A recent discussion on the publishing blog MediaBistro concluded that “for smaller publishers—and the vast majority of U.S. publishers actually put out less than a dozen titles—the tail may well be where they’re able to eke out a reasonably comfortable existence.â€? Richard Nash, publisher of Soft Skull Press, agreed, and his comments should be of particular interest to small publishers everywhere:

The interesting thing is that in Year Two of a given title’s life, Amazon could be responsible for as much as two-thirds of a book’s sales. Now those numbers in unit terms could be too small to make it worth a big publisher’s time to keep it in print, but for an indie, or a university press, having, say, half your in-print titles moving 50 units a year (in our case that would be for 100 titles) that’s about an extra $25K/year…and close to pure margin.

The appeal of the Long Tail in the world of music is that digital downloads have close to zero marginal cost: They’re digital copies! Books of course have a relatively high marginal cost; each additional book could be a dollar, say. But in practice, what we do is make a guess about demand, and print, say, 3,000 books. After about a year, that book has basically had its day in brick and mortar stores and, I would argue, the value of the inventory at that point should be written down to about zero. The books are worthless.

But in fact they do keep selling! Maybe only 50 units a year, as I said, but it is pure marginal revenue! And, for a publisher that has $1 million in sales, and profit margins of 5 percent, an extra $25K in revenue on which the marginal cost is basically zero (the inventory would otherwise have been pulped), you’ve increased profitability from $50 to $75K!

The effectiveness of blog publicity is hard to demonstrate. For that matter, it’s hard to demonstrate the effectiveness of any publicity. But Tim Bete has proven that bloggers will definitely review books. Tim signed up with a PR service to get bloggers to review his humor book In the Beginning . . .There Were No Diapers, published by Sorin Books. For $500, he got reviews on 29 blogs. Tim tells the whole story here.

About half the books sold in the U.S. by Amazon.com are part of the company’s “Search Inside the Book� program, which allows online browsing of portions of a book’s content. Yesterday the online bookseller announced two programs that will charge customers for an expanded online access to books. “Amazon Pages� will provide online access to parts of a book for a fee. “Amazon Upgrade� will allow customers who buy a print book to also have access to it online. Amazon gave no indication when books might be available under the new programs.

How much might online browsing cost? Amazon provided no pricing details, but in another announcement yesterday Random House gave its ideas about fair compensation. It would expect to earn 4 cents per page for all page views that exceed more than 5 percent of the total book, a percentage that Random considers to be a fair “free sample.” For more reference-type material, such as cookbooks, the price will likely be higher and the sampling threshold lower. Viewing would be limited to on-screen viewing, with no downloading, printing or copying permitted.

Marketing is the big challenge for Catholic publishers, says Amy Welborn at Open Book. Commenting on Regina Doman’s essay “The Catholic Fiction Problem is a Marketing Problemâ€? (see post below), she says:

There are, essentially two Catholic book-buying subcultures: the EWTN/CMN-based crowd, and then the crowd that buys Nouwen and Rolheiser. They are both devoted book buyers, with the former probably having an edge. . . . When it comes to living authors, most Catholics buy books based on who they see on television, who they see speak in a workshop, or who is recommended to them by a bookstore owner, priest or DRE, and since there is no common Catholic culture any longer, all of that is very niche, very specialized. There are a few who can overcome it, and most of them are published by secular publishers.

Where do Catholics break out of their niches? “Mysteries, it seems, from Kiezle to McInerny to medieval clerical and nun mysteries, are the place where Catholicism flourishes in pop culture.” Read the whole thing.

Two experienced, proficient novelists and editors have weighed in on the subject of Catholic fiction, and both are hopeful. There’s high-quality writing out there, and they see signs of a growing audience for it. Debra Murphy, author of the well-received mystery-thriller The Mystery of Things, launched Idylls Press to start “a real, honest-to-God Catholic fiction publishing movement.�

To this end I’ve received over a dozen submissions in a half dozen genres, with a Catholic theme or subtext being the single unifying factor. About halfway through these MSS, I’m finding some real talent out there. I’ve already committed to publishing a YA fantasy next year, and am about to make a similar proposal for a work of adult literary fiction–a very polished work that reminds me, as a matter of fact, of Ron Hansen.

Debra made these comments right here on this blog. Scroll to the end of this post.

Regina Doman is a novelist who edits a series of young adult fiction for Sophia Institute Press. She says that “a steadily growing number of Catholics, especially Catholic parents, are searching for alternative culture and are putting their money towards creating one. And this subculture that is being created through their buying choices does include (or will include) entertainment.” This Catholic subculture, analogous to the evangelical Christian subculture, may become receptive to Catholic fiction of a high literary quality. Regina has many provocative, cogent thoughts about Catholic fiction. Read her article “The Catholic Fiction Problem is a Marketing Problemâ€? here.

All Saints’ Day is publication day for Anne Rice’s Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt. Reviews from Amy Welborn at Open Book and the LA Times.