Love consists in sharing
What one has
And what one is
With those one loves.
Love ought to show itself in deeds
More than in words.
St. Ignatius Loyola
Publishers spend a lot of time pondering book proposals, tweaking manuscripts, fashioning marketing plans, and agonizing over titles and covers. Then we publish the books — and we’re constantly surprised at the results. Books that we thought would do well don’t do very well. Books that we publish with modest expectations suddenly take off.
Consider the great religion bestsellers of recent years: The Purpose Driven Life, Tuesdays with Morrie, the Left Behind books, The Da Vinci Code. The premises behind these books seem unpromising. In fact they seem rather dull, trivial, offputting, or preposterous. Yet they were all giant hits.
Marketing consultant Seth Godin says we need to account for the Factor L. Luck. Why do some products rocket across the marketplace while other products, good products, die in obscurity? His answer: “I have no idea. You don’t, either. . . . We live in a world of fashion, not rational computation. A world where everything from brake linings and ball bearings to clothes and airlines is chosen for unpredictable reasons.”
He says: “The way to grow in the future is to acknowledge how important luck is and to diversify your risk. Do that with lots of products, not just one or two. Cut your overhead so you have plenty of chips, ready for another spin of the roulette wheel.”
Stress and trouble in the design department? Turn to the patron saints of graphic design, the invention of W. Lynn Garrett, a San Francisco designer who has long been inspired by the saints. Saint Pixela, depicted at right, is the patron saint of retouching. Others include Saint Anxiete, the patron of impossible deadlines, and Saint Concepta, the patron of brainstorming and procrastination. View the whole gallery of saints here. Garrett is not a Catholic, but, she says, “I adore the idea that no matter who you are or what your problem is, there are long-dead holy people solely dedicated to be on your side so that you’re never alone.” She was worried that Catholics might be offended by her project, but she says that Catholics have been her biggest fans, especially “those who attended Catholic school and grew up memorizing the life stories of obscure Saints.”
The Church celebrates the 450th anniversary of the death of St. Ignatius Loyola on July 31. It’s a time for Jesuits and those who are close to Jesuits (like those of us at Loyola Press) to reflect on the spirituality of Ignatius Loyola. One of the best of these reflections is an article in America magazine by Fr. John W. O’Malley, SJ, author of the splendid book The First Jesuits. “Ignatius redefined the traditional basis of saintliness, that is, ‘contempt of the world,’” Fr. O’Malley writes. He was a public relations whiz, an adept fundraiser, an advocate for humanistic education, and a religious superior who insisted that his men lead balanced lives. “Is it too far amiss to describe him as a worldly saint?” he asks.
God is marvelous in his saints. Each one of them, each one of us, is unique and works out the gifts of God’s grace in conformity with that uniqueness. None of them, none of us, can be reduced to a formula. The confluence of these unique workings of grace constitutes a large part of the richness of Catholicism, which is thus more than a catechism of teachings and more than a moral code. That is why we celebrate the saints, and why we are solemnly observing this 450th anniversary of the death of Ignatius Loyola.
Read Fr. O’Malley’s article here.
Most of the readers of the “Left Behind” books are Protestant evangelicals, but a quarter of them are not Christians, and 9 percent are Catholics, according to a survey of the readers of the series, which has sold 70 million copies. Why would non-Christians be interested in fiction based on the arcane theory of premillennial dispensationalism, which holds that Christ will reign on earth for a thousand years after true Christians are “raptured” into the air? Curiosity, says Robert Woods, the academic who conducted the study. “It also seems that many of them thought that by reading these books they could learn about Christianity. . . . So now they think that what the ‘Left Behind’ books teach is what ordinary Christians believe about the end times.”
They probably think they’ve learned about early Christianity and the Catholic Church from reading the Da Vinci Code. This is more evidence of the need for Christians to evangelize pop culture. Read Terry Mattingly’s column about the “Left Behind” study here.
Rumors are circulating that the next iPod model will double as a reader for eBooks. “The next iPod will have a substantial amount of screen real estate (as we’d all suspected), as well as a book reading mode that pumps up the contrast and drops into monochrome for easy reading,” says one report.
The Times looks at the growing sophistication of print-on-demand publishing. Quality is improving. Book design software is becoming more powerful and easier to use. The business has expanded beyond self-publishing writers to “anyone who needs a professional-looking book, from architects with plans to present to clients, to travelers looking to immortalize a trip.” Read the piece here.
Have you wished you could be part of a group that reads and discusses good Catholic books? Why not start one if there’s no local group available? This article in America magazine tells you how to do it. It’s written by Fr. Jim Martin, SJ, who has been running two book discussion groups in New York City for eight years. Why do this? Says Fr. Martin: “The book club is a great deal of fun, very little work for the organizer (just publicizing it, getting a room, ordering the pizza and selecting the books) but a great way to build community, do a little catechesis, and encourage faith sharing in the parish in a non-threatening way.”
I’ve been facilitating a literature discussion group for more than a year, and I’ve found it to be great fun and a powerful source of spiritual insight. Fr. Martin’s groups read both fiction and non-fiction. He provides a fascintaing list of the books they’ve read since 1998. Here are the books my group has read and will read through the end of this year:
Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor
Mr. Blue by Myles Connolly
The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
A Canticle For Leibowitz by Walter Miller
Black Robe by Brian Moore
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
Mr. Ives’ Christmas by Oscar Hijuelos
Lancelot by Walker Percy
The Place of the Lion by Charles Williams
Vipers’ Tangle by Francois Mauriac
Out of the Silent Planet by CS Lewis
Father Brown Stories by GK Chesterton
Diary of a Country Priest by Georges Bernanos
In this House of Brede by Rumer Godden
Mariette in Ecstasy by Ron Hansen
Murder in the Cathedral by TS Eliot
Silence by Shusako Endo
Memento Mori by Muriel Spark
Suggestions? Click on “Comments” and share them with us.
HARDCOVER
1. Values in a Time of Upheaval
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI). Crossroad Publishing
2. The Rhythm of Life
Matthew Kelly. Beacon Publishing/Fireside
3. Perpetual Motivation
Dave Durand. Crossroad Publishing
4. The Seven Levels of Intimacy
Matthew Kelly. Beacon Publishing/Fireside
5. Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church
Libreria Editrice Vaticana, USCCB Publishing
6. Rediscovering Catholicism
Matthew Kelly. Beacon Publishing
7. Catechism of the Catholic Church
Doubleday/Our Sunday Visitor/USCCB Publishing
8. The Holy Longing
Ronald Rolheiser. Doubleday
9. The Book of Courage
Matthew Kelly. Beacon Publishing
10. 7 Steps to Becoming Financially Free
Phil Lenahan. Our Sunday Visitor
PAPERBACKS
1. Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church
USCCB Publishing
2. Catechism of the Catholic Church
Doubleday/Our Sunday Visitor/USCCB Publishing
3. The Da Vinci Deception
Mark Shea, Edward Sri & the Editors of Catholic Exchange. Ascension Press
4. Handbook for Today’s Catholic
A Redemptorist Pastoral Publication. Liguori Publications
5. Good News about Sex and Marriage
Christopher West. Servant Books
6. The Little Monk
Madeleine Delbrel. Crossroad
7. Return of the Prodigal Son
Henri J.M. Nouwen. Doubleday
8. Theology for the Body for Beginners
Christopher West. Ascension Press
9. Life of the Beloved
Henri J.M. Nouwen. Crossroad
10. “We Believe…”
Oscar Lukefahr. Liguori Publications
Publishers Weekly profiles Ave Maria Press. New publisher Tom Grady is promoting his five imprints, tightening links with Notre Dame, and sprucing up old favorites. “We’re taking our backlist, dressing it up and getting it on the dance floor,” Grady says.
If you or your friends are interested in publishing your own books, put Morris Rosenthal’s Self Publishing blog on your blogroll. Rosenthal is the author of Print on Demand Book Publishing, which, naturally, he has published himself. The blog is full of good advice for self-publishers. This post is directed at newcomers to the business of self-publishing. Rosenthal stresses one point in particular: “No matter what else you do right, your book won’t sell unless you market it. You can’t buy help marketing a book, you have to learn how to do it yourself if you’re going to have any long-term chance of success.”
Several years ago a friend suggested that I try the novels of Jon Hassler. I’m indebted to her for this inspired suggestion. He’s one of my favorite writers. 
Hassler’s novels are morally serious tales, warm and often gently comic. “I had the good fortune to be reared in a cocoon of goodness,” Hassler wrote in his memoir Good People. An essential goodness permeates his novels, which are set in small-town Minnesota. That doesn’t mean that his fiction is sweetly sentimental. His stories deal with forgiveness, friendship, treachery, pride, aging, and other somber themes. Hassler is a Catholic, and he writes with a Catholic sensibility. Give him a try if you haven’t already.
Hassler’s best book, in my view, is North of Hope, which Loyola Press published this year in the Loyola Classics series. Amy Welborn, who wrote the introduction, has a nice post about Hassler here. Staggerford is a good place to begin reading Hassler. It’s the first of five novels featuring Agatha McGee, the feisty spinster who is Hassler’s greatest character. Commonweal just published a review of Hassler latest novel, The New Woman. Read it here. Here is article about Hassler. Here is a short literary biography.
Ozzie Guillen on Mariano Rivera yesterday after the Yankee closer 
recorded his 400th career save against Ozzie’s White Sox:
“On the field and off the field, he’s a Hall of Famer. Young players look up to him. The way he is, the way he performs on the field and the way he treats people, I think Mariano is the perfect baseball player.”
Debra Murphy writes to remind me that Idylls Press also has a blog. I should have mentioned it when posting about publisher blogs a few days ago. It’s a very good blog about books — and especially fiction.
And thanks to Amy Welborn for finding this image of a pope taking his ease.
The book that explains the most interesting new marketing concept in a long time was published this week. It’s The Long Tail by Chris Anderson. 
The book’s subtitle captures the essence of the idea: “Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More.” This notion is illustrated by the drawing at the left. There’s a market for virtually everything a business produces. Potentially, a business can make as much or more money selling many less-popular items than selling a handful of hits. Now that everything can be put up for sale on the web, where shelf space is infinite, businesses can readily exploit the powerful potential of “the long tail.”
You can find an excerpt from the book in the current issue of Wired magazine, where Anderson is editor-in-chief. The New Yorker has a review of the book here. Check out the long tail. It has obvious implications for book publishers, especially small publishers who serve niche markets, as Catholic publishers do.
Rice University Press, which shut down a decade ago, will reopen in early 2007 as an all-digital enterprise, the Wall Street Journal reports. Books will be acquired and edited in the traditional way, but they will be published only on the publisher’s website. Readers can read them online for free. A fee will be charged for downloading. Readers will be able to order a hard copy from a print-on-demand publisher. The idea may be daring, but it’s unproven, as the Journal points out:
Electronic books have been slow to catch on generally, and some universities that have experimented with the format have found lackluster demand. Stanford University has placed some of its press titles with online-book distributors, but the move hasn’t resulted in “a whole lot of new customers for the [books], at least not so far,” says Michael Keller, publisher of the Stanford University Press and the university’s librarian.
Jim Guigli, a retired designer in California, is the winner of the 24th annual Bulwyr-Lytton bad writing contest. This paragraph won him the prize, which contest sponsors call “a pittance:”
Detective Bart Lasiter was in his office studying the light from his one small window falling on his super burrito when the door swung open to reveal a woman whose body said you’ve had your last burrito for a while, whose face said angels did exist, and whose eyes said she could make you dig your own grave and lick the shovel clean.
The runner-up is pretty funny too:
“I know what you’re thinking, punk,” hissed Wordy Harry to his new editor, “you’re thinking, ‘Did he use six superfluous adjectives or only five?’ - and to tell the truth, I forgot myself in all this excitement; but being as this is English, the most powerful language in the world, whose subtle nuances will blow your head clean off, you’ve got to ask yourself one question: ‘Do I feel loquacious?’ - well do you, punk?”
Read all the results here.
Some university presses are making good use of blogs to promote their books and authors, according to a recent article in the AAUP newsletter. Examples cited are blogs from the university presses at Yale, MIT, and Chicago. An article in the online magazine Inside Higher Education urges university presses to make better use of web publicity opportunities — especially blogs. Might Catholic publishers do the same? Ignatius Press is the only Catholic publisher with a blog, to my knowledge.
Those resourceful Jesuits are out there using technology to help people pray in the Ignatian tradition. The British Jesuits are producing excellent daily podcasts and distributing them through their Pray-as-you-go.org website. 
This is an experience of daily prayer — reflections, scripture readings, music, and silence. You can listen to them at your computer or put them on your iPod or other MP3 player. Sacred Space is Ignatian daily prayer at your computer, produced by the Irish Jesuits. Ave Maria Press has published a daily prayer book based on this popular website. The Jesuits at Creighton University offer a complete online retreat — a 34-week version of Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises. Photos by the the noted phtographer Don Doll, SJ accompany the online retreat. The photo here is one of them. It goes with my favorite prayer by Saint Ignatius:
Take, Lord, receive all my liberty,
My memory, my understanding, and my entire will.
All I have and call my own.
Whatever I have or hold, you have given me.
I restore it all to you and surrender it wholly to governed by your will.
Give me only your love and grace
And I am rich enough and ask for nothing more.
This seems to be a first: a magazine has published an entire issue in PDF format and is making it available for free through iTunes. The magazine is Detroit-based Fader, which covers the alternative music scene. The iTunes download comes with a 47-minute podcast that features music that is written about in the magazine. Fader’s publisher has a refreshing view of technology: “I’ve always been of the belief that you need to embrace it and see where this thing can take us. It just opens endless possibilities of building a connection.” The Detroit Free Press writes about the experiment here.
Last week our book group got together to talk about The Diary of a Country Priest by Georges Bernanos, and the discussion was one of the best we’ve had in the year we have been meeting. 
The novel is not summer beach reading. It’s the journal of an intelligent, perceptive, but melancholy village curé in 1930s France who struggles to do his pastoral work while afflicted with both spiritual and physical problems. The priest writes his diary to record his most private thoughts, but the reader soon realizes that the young priest is not seeing himself very accurately. His humility is excessive. “Every day I become more aware of my own ignorance in the most elementary details of daily life,” he writes early on. He struggles with despair: “Suddenly I was overwhelmed by a sense of destruction, a feeling that all the dreams, hopes, and ambitions of my youth had been broken down.”
The drama of the book is the story of how this man becomes a mighty instrument of God’s love and mercy. He does it by forgetting about himself. His humility is as false as the arrogance of a prideful man. He is self-absorbed, and this blocks the work of God. The story’s decisive moment is the priest’s encounter with the local countess. He is able to lead her to relinquish her bitterness toward God, but he does so only because he finally surrenders his preoccupation with himself. In surrender, he becomes a tool for God to use. When the woman achieves peace with God the priest realizes that he himself is somehow responsible for it. He’s astonished. “Oh, miracle—thus to be able to give what we ourselves do not possess, sweet miracle of our empty hands! Hope which was shriveling in my heart flowered again in hers.”
There’s much else to notice and admire in this great novel. I was very glad to have a group to discuss it with. I learned much more about the book from the group than I saw on my own. The Diary of Country Priest shows the power of literature. You can read essays about humility, the nature of saintliness, the spiritual power of suffering, priestly ministry. But a great story can bring these ideas to life more vividly than a great essay. The imagination is engaged. You can imagine becoming a saint.
Web 2.0 is the shorthand buzzword to describe the new ways that people are using the internet. Some people think the term is overly vague, used to describe whatever is currently popular in the tech community. There’s probably some truth to that, but it seems to me that Web 2.0 does mean something definite. Web 2.0 hasn’t affected the book publishing community very much yet, but it will eventually. So what is it?
It’s many things, but above all it’s a web-based community and a web-based way of getting work done. The Wikipedia article says that Web 2.0 “lets people 
collaborate and share information online” and “gives users an experience closer to desktop applications than the traditional static Web pages.” Web 2.0 communities include del.icio.us and furl, where people store favorite webpages and share them. Basecamp is a project management and communications tool on the web. You can store and share your photos on Flickr, and you can use Backpack and Kiko to organize yourself. One fascinating Web 2.0 site I found was Dropcash, a web-based way to create a community around your non-profit’s fundraising campaign.
Here are a couple of articles for your continuing study of Web 2.0: This one is long and detailed. This one reviews many definitions of Web 2.0. This piece, with apologies to Wallace Stevens, is called “Sixteen Ways of Thinking in Web 2.0.” The fifth of these sixteen ways says: “Be prepared to share everything with enthusiasm.” The eighth says: “Everything is editable.” And the eleventh: “Obey the law of unintended uses.”
The Times Book Review this weekend features an essay about baseball novels. 
The writer, John Thorn, thinks it’s difficult to write a good novel about a game, even a game as beautiful and metaphorical as baseball, but he thinks a few novelists have done it. He commends Ring Lardner, Mark Harris, Robert Coover, and Eric Rolfe Greenberg. Greenberg is new to me. I’ll have to get The Celebrant. Thorn quotes one of Robert Coover’s characters, who has seen a perfect game: “Think of it . . . to do a thing so perfectly that, even if the damn world lasted forever, nobody could ever do it better. . . . In a way, you know, it’s even sad somehow, because, well, it’s done, and all you can hope for after is to do it a second time.”
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