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

I’ve been around priests all my life, and I’ve gotten to know a few, including my uncle and several colleagues I’ve worked closely with. But priests remain mysterious. Their vocation isn’t mine. Neither is their life, which seems to me extraordinarily demanding. But I’ve gotten to know priests better through an excellent new book, The Collar: A Year of Striving and Faith Inside a Catholic Seminary by Jonathan Englert, a journalist and convert who followed five men through a year of seminary and weaved their stories into a dramatic narrative as gripping as a good novel. The men attended Sacred Heart Semininary in Wisconsin, which specializes in training older, second-career men. Englert’s five seminarians are unusual would-be priests: three had been married (two divorced, one a widower), one had been a salesman and a Marine, another was a blind musician. We get to know them well as they learn what the priestly vocation really involves and decide if they are truly suited for it. After the year, three of them continue at Sacred Heart; two do not.

It’s a most challenging job. Toward the end, Englert observes: “there were so many things that these new priests would have to consider: greater and lesser goods; the pastoral reality of finding one’s community where it was, not where one would like it to be; the seesaw between those tense companions mercy and justice; the broken world itself, and the hard, patient, and tender work of being a man of God in such a world.”

The list of book awards from the Catholic Press Association is up here. First-place winners in some of the 21 categories include:

Popular presentation of the Catholic faith
Blessed among all Women, Robert Ellsberg, Crossroad

Spirituality - Soft cover
Walk in a Relaxed Manner, Joyce Rupp, Orbis

Spirituality - Hard cover
The Way of the Mystics, John Michael Talbot, with Steve Rabey, Jossey-Bass

Theology
Theological Bioethics, Lisa Sowle Cahill, Georgetown

Scripture
Gospels and Acts: The St. John’s Bible, Liturgical Press

Family life
What Not to Expect: Meditations on the Spirituality of Parenting, Keith Frome, Crossroad

Biography
American Apostle of the Family Rosary: The Life of Patrick J. Peyton, CSC, Richard Gribble, CSC, Crossroad

First time author of a book
Running into the Arms of God, Father Patrick Hannon, ACTA Publications

A salute to Walker Percy, the Catholic existentialist and author of “philosophical” novels, who was born ninety years ago this week. His books are still in print and well worth reading. He is very funny. Here is the madman-murderer Lancelot Andrewes Lamar, pondering the city of New Orleans:

This city’s soul I think of as neither damned nor saved but eased rather, existing in a kind of Catholic limbo somewhere between the outer circle of hell, where sexual sinners don’t have it all that bad, and the inner circle of purgatory, where things are even better. Add to that a flavor of Marseilles vice leavened by Southern U.S.A. good nature. Death and sex treated unseriously and money seriously. The Whitney Bank is as solemn as the cemetery is lively. Protestants started Mardi Gras, you know. Presbyterians take siestas or play gin at the Boston Club. Jews ride on carnival floats celebrating the onset of Christ’s forty-day fast.

Do books make a difference? If you doubt it, read this post from blogger Julie Davis about the impact Fr. Jim Martin’s book My Life with the Saints has had on her. It’s a true conversion story. She’s been skeptical of the Jesuits for many years. Now, “I think I have a Jesuit soul.” What made a difference was Fr. Martin’s description of Ignatian prayer, specifically the way it enlists the imagination in drawing us closer to God.

A Times essay discusses the challenges of promoting new books. The subject is literary fiction, but it’s actually about the basic problem of our business: reaching readers in niche markets through a mass retail system. An editor says that “you need 15 things to happen in the right order on time” to successfully promote a new book. These include:

drumming up enthusiasm inside the publishing house, spreading the word to booksellers and reviewers by sending out manuscripts months before publication, and securing a front-of-store display at Barnes & Noble and Borders and prominent placement on Amazon.com. To show booksellers you’re serious, Thomas said, you have to ship a minimum of 20,000 copies to stores at the time of publication.

“I used to think it was 80 percent hard work on the part of your author and 20 percent luck,” one agent says. “”Now, I think it’s 50 percent hard work and 50 percent luck.” But there’s blame for the publishers too. “Publishers lament that literary fiction has trouble finding a foothold — then flood the market with overhyped and often derivative work in the hope of meeting some vague idea of reader expectations.”

The religion trade book category will grow between 6 and 10 percent annually through 2010, says a Book Industry Study Group report released at the recent BEA. 2005 sales were up 8 percent in dollars over 2004. The other news from BEA was the intense interest in religion among the major trade houses. The PW report on the show quotes Mark Tauber of HarperSanFrancisco on the hot competition for good books:

“It used to be if we had a proposal, we had a pretty darn good shot. Now we’re competing with everyone; people who had just done religion occasionally are bringing out a major religion title every season. It’s a lot of publishers with big dollars. Sometimes that’s forced us to overspend—the prices for some books have been artificially inflated because the category is so hot.”

The tug of war between American and UK publishers over open markets comes up from time to time among Catholic publishers. The issue is which countries should be open to all English-language editions and which should be restricted — particularly the European Union, a large and growing market for English-language books. The issue was debated at the recent BEA. Here is a report from Publishers Weekly. Not surprisingly, UK publishers want exclusive rights to Europe, while the Americans argue for open markets.

Media coverage of BookExpo America, the publishing industry’s annual trade show, emphasizes the “industry in transition” theme. “Book industry embraces and resists change” is the forthright headline of the AP’s convention story. The Washington Post frames the conflict as a clash between “the technorati and the literati.” The Post features John Updike’s appearance, where he resoundingly defended books:

Unlike the commingled, unedited, frequently inaccurate mass of “information” on the Web, he said, “books traditionally have edges.” But “the book revolution, which from the Renaissance on taught men and women to cherish and cultivate their individuality, threatens to end in a sparkling pod of snippets.

“So, booksellers,” he concluded, “defend your lonely forts. Keep your edges dry. Your edges are our edges. For some of us, books are intrinsic to our human identity.”

The New York Times features authors’ efforts to get noticed while USA Today highlights interesting books coming in the fall.

The Da Vinci Code angers Fr. Jim Martin. So does the attitude that the movie is harmless because it’s fiction. “The only way it could have been any more anti-Catholic is if they had slapped a subtitle saying ‘the Catholic Church is evil’ through the whole movie,” he said on CNN over the weekend. If you don’t like it you don’t have to see it, said the interviewer. Martin replied: “That’s a pretty thin response to bigotry. It’s like saying, hey, I’m going to open up a restaurant that doesn’t serve blacks or Jews and if you don’t like it don’t come.” Grant Gallicho transcribed Martin’s appearance and posted it on the dotCommonweal blog. Read it here.

This site has been overrun with comment spam in the last several weeks. I’ve installed new software that puts suspected spam in a folder where I can review it, but I’ve been getting hundreds of spam comments every day, so I review this folder very quickly before deleting the the contents. It’s possible that I’ve deleted real comments. If your comment doesn’t show up, try again. Or send me an email about it. My address is in the Contact Me link on the top of the sidebar. I welcome comments. Please comment freely.

Descending Theology: Christ Human

           Such a short voyage for a god,
and you arrived in animal form so as not
           to scorch us with your glory.
Your mask was an infant’s head on a limp stalk,
           sticky eyes smeared blind,
limbs rendered useless in swaddle.
           You came among beasts
as one, came into our care or its lack, came crying
           as we all do, because our human frame
is a crucifix, each skeletos borne a lifetime.
           Any wanting soul lain
prostrate on a floor to receive a pouring of sunlight
           might—if still enough,
feel your cross buried in the flesh.
           One has only to surrender,
you preached, open both arms to the inner,
           the ever-present hold,
out-reaching every want. It’s in the form
           embedded, love adamant as bone
In a breath, we can bloom and almost be you.

Mary Karr
from Sinners Welcome

Robert Ellsberg, editor-in-chief of Orbis Books, talks about Dorothy Day, his conversion, Latin America, social justice, and his favorite saints in an absorbing interview in Monthly Review. He sees his work as an editor as “a kind of service to the principles I believe in, producing books that make a difference. And part of that, for me, involves telling the stories of those people of conscience who put their faith and convictions on the line.” Ellsberg wrote the excellent book The Saints’ Guide to Happiness. In the interview, he says this about what conversion means:

What we call conversion is often a matter of finding one’s true calling. And when that happens, you often see a deep transformation. Where before life was weighted by the burden of mediocrity, now it is illuminated by a burning fire. Such people’s life and work assume a new shape, a vitality and energy that were previously absent. This allows them to accomplish things and endure things that they never could have before.

A.O. Scott of the Times has seen the long-awaited movie, and his droll report makes it sound ridiculous. But we already knew that, didn’t we? My favorite quote from the review:

In spite of some talk (a good deal less than in the book) about the divine feminine, chalices and blades, and the spiritual power of sexual connection, not even a glimmer of eroticism flickers between the two stars. Perhaps it’s just as well. When a cryptographer and a symbologist get together, it usually ends in tears.

Read the whole thing.

Book lovers shouldn’t get all sentimental about the decline of independent bookstores, says economist Tyler Cowen in Slate. The maligned chain bookstores have larger and deeper inventories, and, because of their computer-managed inventories, they’re more likely to have the book you want. Don’t the indies serve offbeat interests and ferret out overlooked talent? All the niche markets and forgotten gems are there on the internet, says Cowen. Online, “the literary world has more room for independence . . . than ever before.” Cowen makes this interesting point about the effects of plentiful choices:

The real change in the book market is not the big guy vs. the little guy, or chain vs. indie stores. Rather, it’s the reader’s greater impatience, a symptom of our amazing literary (and televisual) plenitude. In the modern world we are more pressed for time, and we face a greater diversity of cultural choices. It was easy to finish Tolstoy’s War and Peace when there were few other books around and it was hard to find them. Today, finishing it means forgoing many other options at our fingertips. As a result, we tend to consume ideas in smaller bits, a proposition that (in another context) economists labeled the “Alchian and Allen theorem.” Long, serious novels are less culturally central than they were 100 years ago. Blogs are on the rise, and most readers prefer the ones with the shorter posts.

This post has gone on too long. Read Cowen here.

A New Yorker piece looks the way Sony is marketing the Da Vinci Code movie to Christians. The studio is apprehensive about Christian hostility to a story that many believers see as a thinly-disguised anti-Christian polemic. The piece points out that Sony greenlighted the DVC movie before the stunning success of Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” changed the way Hollywood thought about the Christian audience. Read it here.

Kevin Kelly’s long piece in the Times Magazine yesterday is a thorough and thought-provoking look at how books will be produced, published, stored, and used in the future. Scanning technology is creating a universal library. “Copies of isolated books, bound between inert covers, soon won’t mean much. Copies of their texts, however, will gain in meaning as they multiply by the millions and are flung around the world, indexed and copied again. What counts are the ways in which these common copies of a creative work can be linked, manipulated, annotated, tagged, highlighted, bookmarked, translated, enlivened by other media and sewn together into the universal library.” Read it all.

Almost 40 years after his death, Thomas Merton remains a major figure in contemporary spiritual writing — inspiring, enigmatic, influential. Above all, he is read. His books sell steadily. Other writers and thinkers find him interesting enough to write good books about him. Two recent ones are worth reading.

Angelic Mistakes: The Art of Thomas Merton is a beautiful book that discusses Merton as a visual artist, especially in the last decade of his life. Its centerpiece is a portfolio of thirty-four representative pieces, most of them drawings with brush, that show the influence of Zen calligraphy and abstract expressionism. Merton did not want his art to be interpreted. Author Robert Lipsey does nevertheless, stressing how it gives visual expression to themes of his writing. Many of the drawings celebrate freedom and movement. Lipsey quotes Merton: “The world and time are the dance of the Lord in emptiness . . . We are invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds and join in the general dance.”

Readers who are new to Merton will get an expert orientation from Thomas Merton: An Introduction by William H. Shannon, a professor and founding president of the International Thomas Merton Society. Shannon gives a concise biography, an introduction to the major books, and an intellectual history.

Garrison Keillor is fed up with writers who complain about how hard their lives are:

The biggest whiners are the writers who get prizes and fellowships for writing stuff that’s painful to read, and so they accumulate long résumés and few readers and wind up teaching in universities where they inflict their gloomy pretensions on the young. Writers who write for a living don’t complain about the difficulty of it. It does nothing for the reader to know you went through 14 drafts of a book, so why mention it?

The truth, young people, is that writing is no more difficult than building a house, and the only good reason to complain is to discourage younger and more talented writers from climbing on the gravy train and pushing you off.

Read the whole thing.

The archdiocese of New York will launch a 24/7 Catholic channel on Sirius Satellite Radio this fall. Mel Karmazin, CEO of of Sirius, told the New York Times that the company has concluded that Catholics are underserved by radio. “We can’t tell you how big it will be or how many listeners we will get,” he said, “but we know how big the Catholic churchgoing market is.” The Times report on the plan notes the institutional Church’s mediocre record in media ventures. In the 1980s, the U.S. bishops’ attempt to launch a Catholic television channel failed quickly. Indeed, the archdiocese’s thinking about radio programming seems to run along institutional lines. Catholic listeners can expect “everything from talk radio featuring clergy members and lay Catholics from across the country, to sacred music, to daily Mass from St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York. The channel will also feature ‘exclusive’ appearances by Cardinal Egan.”

Mike Aquilina, author of The Grail Code and The Fathers of the Church, has posted his list of the top twenty books on early Christianity. Says Mike, “these are the books whose scholarship on the Fathers has (in the words of my pre-teen kids) rocked my world.”

Bloggers are getting credit for the success of How Would a Patriot Act, a new book that rose to #1 on the Amazon bestseller list “without a single penny being spent on marketing or advertising,” according to its author, Glenn Greenwald. The publisher, Working Assets Press, used political blogs to publicize the book. Says Publishers Weekly editor Sara Nelson, “Working Assets is looking a whole lot savvier than any number of companies 20 times its size.”

That’s what blogger Whispers in the Loggia thinks. The Jesuit author of the well-received My Life with the Saints has appeared recently on the op-ed page of the New York Times and as a commentator on NPR’s “All Things Considered.” Follow this link to hear his amusing take on the Da Vinci Code movie. Hat tip to Jim Campbell.

The number of religion titles issued by U.S. publishers plummeted by 34 percent in 2005, according to Bowker’s Books in Print database. The number of new titles in all categories dropped 21 percent to 149,000 titles in 2005, down from 190,000 titles in 2004. The Bowker press release is here. Category statistics are here. Great Britain replaces the U.S. as the publisher of the most new books in English. Some 205,000 new titles were published in the UK in 2005, an increase of 28 percent.

The title of Mary Karr’s new collection of poems, Sinners Welcome, comes from the words on a banner over the entrance to the Catholic church she attends in Syracuse, New York. Karr, who became a Catholic at age 40, describes herself as a “black-belt sinner,” and her poems chronicle a profound spiritual awakening. An essay in Sinners Welcome, reprinted here in Poetry magazine, gives a prose account of her journey to what she calls an “unlikely Catholicism.” The essay is also something of a literary manifesto. “Poetry has often spread the virus of morbidity. It’s been shared comfort for the dispossessed,” she writes. “My new aesthetic struggle is to accommodate joy as part of my literary enterprise.”

Prayer has yielded comfort and direction—all well and good. But imagine my horror when I began to have experiences of joy. For me, joy arrives in the body (where else would it find us?), yet doesn’t originate there. Nature never drew me into joy as it does others, but my fellow creatures as the crown of creation often spark joy in me: kids on a Little League diamond in full summer—even idly tossing their mitts into the air; the visual burst of a painted Basquiat angel in Everlast boxing shorts at the Brooklyn Museum last week (can’t stop thinking about it); my teenage son at night in the dead of winter burying our kitten in a shoebox so I wouldn’t have to see her ruined by the car that hit her—his flushed face later breaking the news to me—a grief countered by my radical joy at his sudden maturity. In the right mind-set, the faces that come at me on the New York street are like Pound’s apparitions, “petals on a wet, black bough.” Inherent in joy is always a sense of joining with others (and/or God).

I’ll leave it to others to dissect the theological deficiencies of The Da Vinci Code. I’ll just note Dan Brown’s limitations as a writer. He’s pretty bad. This has been recognized by others, memorably by professor Geoff Pullum a couple of years ago on the Language Log blog. Here’s the great paradox: “Brown is a huge, blockbuster, worldwide success who can go anywhere he wants and need never work again. And he writes like the kind of freshman student who makes you want to give up the whole idea of teaching.”

This week I’ve posted about interesting presentations at a recent conference sponsored by the Book Industry Study Group: Chris Anderson’s cheerful view of the book business and Ian Bradie’s success in boosting backlist sales through ultra short run printing. Their Power Point presentations are available online. Chris Anderson’s “The Long Tail of Books” is here, and Ian Bradie’s “How to Keep Your Titles Alive with Print-on-Demand” is here.

BooksPrice.com is a nifty website that searches the major online booksellers for the best price for books you want. The site also contains links to book-related news in major newspapers.

Writing on her blog, publicist and author M.J. Rose warns that blogs take time away from writing and they may not sell very many books. But blogs might work if they have a clear goal, an identifiable audience, and an authentic passion behind them.

Passion might be a strange one in that mix but its key. Otherwise your readers will see through your efforts. This gig takes a lot of time so you better care about what you’re blogging about because authenticity comes through online.

Since 1998, Cambridge University Press has earned $30 million it would otherwise have lost through its program of ultra short run digital printing of backlist titles, according to its distribution head, who spoke at an industry conference last week. (The report from the Shelf Awareness newsletter is here. Scroll down a bit.) Thousands of Cambridge titles are printed in the USR fashion. The press can break even on a book if it sells seven copies. The advantages: extra revenue, lower overhead, minimal inventory, and virtually no returns.