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

From the Catholic Book Publishers Association:

Hardcover

1. The Seven Levels of Intimacy
Matthew Kelly. Beacon Publishing/Fireside

2. The Rhythm of Life
Matthew Kelly. Beacon Publishing/Fireside

3. Perpetual Motivation
Dave Durand. Crossroad

4. Catechism of the Catholic Church
Doubleday/Our Sunday Visitor/USCCB Publishing.

5. Rediscovering Catholicism
Matthew Kelly. Beacon Publishing

6. Mother Angelica
Raymond Arroyo. Doubleday

7. My Life with the Saints
James Martin. Loyola Press

8. Psalms: The Saint John’s Bible
Donald Jackson. Liturgical Press

9. The Book of Courage
Matthew Kelly. Beacon Publishing

10. The Holy Longing
Ronald Rolheiser. Doubleday

Paperback

1. The Da Vinci Deception
Mark Shea, Edward Sri & the Editors of Catholic Exchange. Ascension Press

2. Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church
USCCB Publishing

3. Catechism of the Catholic Church
Doubleday/Our Sunday Visitor/USCCB Publishing

4. God Is Love (Deus Caritas Est)
Pope Benedict XVI. USCCB Publishing

5. The Friendship of Women
Joan Chittister. BlueBridge

6. Life of the Beloved
Henri J.M. Nouwen. Crossroad

7. Return of the Prodigal Son
Henri J. M. Nouwen. Doubleday

8. Handbook for Today’s Catholic
A Redemptorist Pastoral Publication, Liguori

9. Theology of the Body for Beginners
Christopher West. Ascension Press

10. The Lost Sayings of Jesus
Andrew Smith. SkyLight Path Press

With markets changing, margins under pressure, and digital technology stealing the headlines, book publishers can sound gloomy at times. So it’s refreshing to hear from someone outside the industry who thinks things are looking up. He’s Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine, speaking at a seminar in New York (as reported by the “Shelf Awareness” newsletter):

For the book industry in general, he continued, “the pointers are in the right direction. Mainstream book sales are strong, and niche sales are growing. The online component is growing fast.” About 20% of online sales are of titles not available in traditional stores; and that may soon reach a third. In addition, used books are showing double-digit growth, and print on demand sales are up. Moreover, traditional bookstores are “more than keeping up with Gross Domestic Product.” . . . Anderson’s conclusion was along the lines of the best is yet to come. “The hyperabundance of variety and the richness of all these niches should inspire more sales,” he said.

Anderson loves niches. He’s popularized the notion of the “Long Tail,” the idea that the vast product inventories accessible through the web are making niche markets extremely profitable for book publishers and everyone else who has specialized products to sell. We’ve written about the Long Tail here.

The American Harold Bloom and the Englishman James Wood, two admired and influential literary critics, are both interested in religion. One might say obsessed by it. Wood was raised in an evangelical home. He professes atheism, but in his essays and books he writes about belief constantly, with the wistful regret of a former believer who knows faith from the inside. Bloom, who calls himself a “Gnostic Jew,” has written much about religion in the last decade, none of it friendly to orthodox Christianity. His latest book, Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine, examines the Bible as a work of imaginative literature, and finds the New Testament vastly inferior to the Old.

The atheist Wood rushes to the defense of the New Testament in an erudite essay in The New Republic. Bloom makes many mistakes, he writes, and the worst is to fundamentally misunderstand what kind of text the New Testament is. “Might not the literary differences between the two Testaments have to do with the conviction of the Gospel writers that they were bearing witness, that they were reporting a historical occurrence?” There’s much more, including some perceptive comments on Gnosticism, much in the news these days. Wood sees Gnosticism as an attempt to solve the problem of evil in the world, but it’s a failed attempt: “Philosophically speaking, Gnosticism solves nothing . . . The positing of a false God or Demiurge is quite obviously not a “solution” to the problem of evil, but merely a dualism that does no more than move the problem, so to speak, somewhere else on the board.” Read the whole thing here.

A Times piece on the plagiarism charges leveled against the author of a young adult novel contains a fascinating glimpse into the role of book packagers in the publishing business. Many books, particularly young adult and childrens’ fiction, are conceived by packagers, who develop the plot and characters and then recruit authors to write the book. I’m not shocked by this. I’ve ghostwritten books, and I’ve been involved in many successful book projects that were thought up by editors. Still, I was slightly disappointed to learn that the Hardy Boys mystery stories were created by a book packager, not an author. So were the Nancy Drew books.

The Economist says that the era of mass media is ending, giving way to an era of personal and participatory media where “the boundaries between audiences and creators become blurred and often invisible.”

This has profound implications for traditional business models in the media industry, which are based on aggregating large passive audiences and holding them captive during advertising interruptions. In the new-media era, audiences will occasionally be large, but often small, and usually tiny. Instead of a few large capital-rich media giants competing with one another for these audiences, it will be small firms and individuals competing or, more often, collaborating. Some will be making money from the content they create; others will not and will not mind, because they have other motives.

Small firms serving a niche audience — that’s what Catholic publishers do. And there’s another intriguing implication of the rise of participatory media. Lectures from media companies to their readers and viewers are becoming conversations among the people formerly known as the audience. “People don’t get how subversive it is to take institutions and turn them into conversations,” says one media maven. “That is because institutions are closed, assume a hierarchy and have trouble admitting fallibility, whereas conversations are open-ended, assume equality and eagerly concede fallibility.” Read the whole thing here.

Authors Mike Aquilina and Christopher Bailey nod to that other “code” in the title of their book The Grail Code: The Quest for the Real Presence, but they study deeper mysteries than Dan Brown does. They think that the legends of King Arthur, including many contemporary verions and spinoffs, are really about the human longing for the eucharist. It’s a fascinating journey, which the authors support with an intriguing website that includes links to Latin and Old French original texts.

Joy Lasts: On the Spiritual in Art is a lovely little book by the popular art historian Sister Wendy Beckett. She comments on the spiritual meaning of fourteen works of art, most of them medieval and renaissance masters, but including a Cezanne still life. Her favorite is El Greco’s Christ on the Cross, where she finds “the Passion understood rather than shown.”

Saint Paul once wrote that when we are weak, we are strong, a mystical paradox that this painting makes visual. It is Jesus in death and in resurrection, dying in pain and rising in glory, utterly true to the dual dimensions that make him the spiritual center of so many lives. Joy lasts and grief passes: that is what I see in Christ on the Cross.

The latest book in the “Complete Idiots” series is the Guide to Mary of Nazareth by Maria Ruiz Scaperlanda, a skilled and prolific writer who has written books about Edith Stein, pilgrimage, and the Oklahoma City bombing, as well as a previous book on Mary. Visit Maria’s website here. As for that slightly sassy title “Complete Idiot,” Fr. John Triglio, author of Catholicism for Dummies, points out that Paul called believers “fools for Christ.” He adds: “The actual word in the Greek, if you translate it literally, means ‘morons.’ Nobody gets bent out of shape that St. Paul is calling them a moron.”

Publishers are bringing out more memoirs, which have proven to be one of the most popular and enduring genres, according to the Wall Street Journal. The popularity of memoirs seems connected to the public’s continuing fascination with reality television, the lure of narrative non-fiction, and the decline of the novel. The Journal talks to the editor of the journal Creative Nonfiction, who says he gets 300-400 memoir submissions every month. “The autobiographical novel has been replaced by the memoir,” he says. Recent memoirs with Catholic themes: My Life with the Saints, The Collar, The Scent of God: A Memoir, and An Infinity of Little Hours.

An absorbing new book from Eerdmans is Shouts And Whispers: Twenty-one Writers Speak About Their Writing And Their Faith. This is a collection of talks given over the past decade at the biannual Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The novelist Ron Hansen contributes an especially fine piece, entitled “Faith and Fiction,” which contains this memorable paragraph:

Writing with faith is a form of praying. Evelyn Waugh maintained prayer ought to consist of adoration, contrition, thanksgiving, and sup¬plication. And so it is in the writing of fiction, in which authors can adore God through their alertness to creation and to the Spirit that dwells in their talent; confess their own faults by faithfully recording the sins, fail¬ings, and tendencies of their characters; offer thanksgiving through the beauty of form, language, and thought in their creations; and beseech by obeying the rule of Saint Benedict which states: “Whatever good work you begin to do, beg of God with most earnest prayer to perfect it.”

Author Lauren Winner reviews three new religion trade books in the Washington Post. An Infinity of Little Hours by Nancy Klein Maguire tells the stories of five men who joined the austere Carthusian monastic community in Parkminster, England. One of them is Don Henley, an American, who discovered prayer as a teenager, and wondered, “if prayer is real, why would anyone want to do anything but pray all day?”

The subjects of Cathleen Falsani’s The God Factor could hardly be more different. Falsani’s interest in the spiritual lives of celebrities — including rock stars Bono and Melissa Etheridge, Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs, and Playboy founder Hugh Hefner. Winner is disappointed: “Now we know a little more about the religious lives of our superstars — so what?”

Winner praises James Martin’s My Life with the Saints, part memoir and part inspirational guide that treats the saints “not as paragons but as exemplars of holy struggle.” Martin’s message is that saints teach us to be most fully ourselves, she writes, and she offers this Hasidic story as a comment:

Reb Zusya taught that when he arrived in the World to Come, God would not demand, “Zusya, why have you not been like Moses?” Rather, God would ask, “Zusya, why have you not been the best Zusya you could have been?”

Alex Beam of the Boston Globe takes aim at two recent “religion” bestsellers: Misquoting Jesus by Bart Erhman (”a proto-academic howler”) and The Jesus Papers by Michael Baigent (”moronic”). Erhman discovers what the church has always taught: that the scriptures were written by human beings, not by God. Baigant retools the evidence-free fantasies of the Da Vinci Code and his earlier Holy Blood, Holy Grail.

Beam notes the surge of popularity of religion books. Five of the fiction bestsellers on Easter Sunday’s New York Times list have to do with Christianity, as do four of the non-fiction bestsellers.

Jonathan Merkh, publisher of Nelson Books, complains that Christian books are drastically underrepresented on the bestseller lists. The reason: sales through Christian retailers are not reported to Bookscan, or counted in the leading bestseller lists. He estimates that these sales amount to $1 billion annually and claims that “if we were honest about book sales, Christian titles would dominate the lists.” Read Merkh’s Publishers Weekly column here.

The Pitcher

His art is eccentricity, his aim
How not to hit the mark he seems to aim at,

His passion how to avoid the obvious,
His technique how to vary the avoidance.

The others throw to be comprehended. He
Throws to be a moment misunderstood.

Yet not too much. Not errant, arrant, wild,
But every seeming aberration willed.

Not to, yet still, still to communicate
Making the batter understand too late.

–Robert Francis

Tim Drake talks to publishers, professors, and writers and sees signs of a renewed interest in Catholic literature. Of particular interest in his piece in the National Catholic Register is his talk with author Debra Murphy, who set up Idylls Press two years ago to publish her novel The Mystery of Things. Murphy prints her books with a print-on-demand printer and distributes them through Ingram, a major distributor. It’s a model that other writers can follow to become publishers. The Mystery of Things is a compelling murder mystery with interesting characters and powerful theological-philosphical ideas. Go to the Idylls Press website to order it.