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

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.” The Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria said this, and his words have come to mind as I’ve spent time with friends and family over these holidays. A young carpenter out of work with a fractured shoulder. A man keeping his family together after his wife falls seriously ill. A couple’s anxiety about a son in Iraq. A woman responsible for an ailing parent. Jobs that don’t pay the bills. Most people are friendly and cheerful at holiday social occasions, but most of them are fighting a great battle of some kind. Some we hear about and some we don’t, but the battle is almost always there – intense, persistent, painful, largely out of sight. Be mindful of that.

Be mindful also that we don’t fight these battles alone. God is at loose in our world. That’s what the Child’s coming at Christmas means. “Morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs,” wrote the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins:

        Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
              World broods with warm breast and with ah!
                  bright wings.

The Internet makes possible online stores with endless shelf space and sites like YouTube and MySpace with an infinite inventory of user-generated content. But there’s a downside. It’s hard to find what’s good. The Times music critic Jon Pareles is downright gloomy about it: “The promise of all the self-expression online is that genius will reach the public with fewer obstacles, bypassing the entrenched media. The reality is that genius has a bigger junk pile to climb out of than ever, one that requires just as much hustle and ingenuity as the old distribution system.”

Pareles points to the filters that have risen online. Popular websites post lists of most-watched videos and most-played songs. Bloggers are reviewing and recommending. But, “mouse-clicking individuals can be as tasteless, in the aggregate, as entertainment professionals.”

Read the whole thing.

“It is a day of joy: it is good to be joyful—it is wrong to be otherwise. For one day we may put off the burden of our polluted consciences and rejoice in the perfections of our Savior Christ, without thinking of ourselves, without thinking of our own miserable uncleanness; but contemplating His glory, His righteousness, His purity, His majesty, His overflowing love. We may rejoice in the Lord, and in all His creatures see Him. We may enjoy His temporal bounty, and partake the pleasant things on earth with Him in our thoughts; we may rejoice in our friends for His sake, loving them most especially because He has loved them.

“God has not appointed us unto wrath, but to obtain salvation through Our Lord Jesus Christ, Who died for us, that whether we wake or sleep, we should live together with Him.” Let us seek the grace of a cheerful heart, an even temper, sweetness, gentleness, and brightness of mind, as walking in His light, and by His grace. Let us pray Him to give us the spirit of ever-abundant, ever-springing love, which overpowers and sweeps away the vexations of life by its own richness and strength, and which above all things unites us to Him Who is the fountain and the center of all mercy, loving-kindness and joy.

–John Henry Newman, Sermon for Christmas Day

Here’s a tale of publishing success to encourage would-be authors across the land. This fall, Center Street published The Christmas Letters, a charming story with a press run of 75,000 copies. But the book had already sold 60,000 copies in an edition self-published by the author, Bret Nicholaus, in 2000. Nicholaus wrote the book in an 18-hour burst of inspiration. Then he and a partner set out to market it, “doing as much as two humans working out of a basement can do.” This included Nicholaus personally signing every one of the 12,000 copies in the first edition. The book caught on in the chain stores, but it was even more popular in gift shops. Impressive sales caught the eye of New York publishers, and Center Street offered a contract. Publishers Weekly tells the whole Nicholaus Christmas story here.

This is the latest bestseller list from the Catholic Book Publishers Association. “Bestseller” is an elusive concept. These are not bookstore sales, but sales that the publishers report to the CBPA. Publishers sell very few of their books directly to readers. Rather they sell to distributors, bookstores, parishes, and other middlemen who get them into the hands of readers. Some of these books are never sold, but are returned to the publisher. Some of these books are given away. As Amy Welborn notes in a recent post, this appears to be the case with many of the books published by Matthew Kelly’s Beacon Publishing, which has four of the bestselling hardcover books.

HARDCOVERS

1. Perfectly Yourself: 9 Lessons for Enduring Happiness
Matthew Kelly. Beacon Publishing/Ballantine

2. Mother Angelica
Raymond Arroyo. Doubleday

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

4. Celebration of Discipline, 25th Anniversary Edition
Richard Foster. Harper San Francisco

5. My Life With the Saints
James Martin. Loyola Press

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

7. Rediscovering Catholicism
Matthew Kelly. Beacon Publishing

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

9. Gospels and Acts, The Saint John’s Bible
Donald Jackson. Liturgical Press

PAPERBACKS

1. Not By Bread Alone: Daily Reflections for Lent 2007
Sherri L. Valee. Liturgical Press

2. Mere Christianity
C.S. Lewis. Harper San Francisco

3. The Screwtape Letters
C.S. Lewis. Harper San Francisco

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

5. Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church
Libreria Editrice Vaticana, USCCB Publishing

6. United States Catholic Catechism for Adults
USCCB Publishing

7. A Year of Sundays: Gospel Reflections 2007
Cackie Upchurch and Clifford Yeary. Liturgical Press

8. The Great Divorce
C.S. Lewis. Harper San Francisco

9. Handbook for Today’s Catholic
A Redemptorist Pastoral Publication. Liguori Publications

10. Open Mind, Open Heart: 20th Anniversary Edition
Thomas Keating. Continuum

My book group met last night to munch Christmas cookies, pick books for 2007, and discuss The Jeweler’s Shop, a play by the obscure Polish dramatist Karol Wojtyla. The play is about marriage. All of us in the group are married, and we agreed that the future pope had an acute understanding of the experience of marriage.

We picked 12 novels for 2007 by voting for our three favorites from a list of 38 nominees and tabulating the results. We’re reading more Americans (4) than Brits (3), two Russians, and one each from Nigeria, Italy, and Ireland. The list:

January: Morte D’Urban, J.F. Powers

February: My Antonia, Willa Cather

March: Inferno, Dante

April: Purple Hibiscus, Chimimanda Adichie

May: Dubliners, James Joyce

June: Atticus, Ron Hansen

July: Souls and Bodies, David Lodge

August: The Brothers Karamozov, Fyodor Dostoevski

September: The Man Who Was Thursday, G.K. Chesterton

October: The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene

November: The First Circle, Alexander Solzhenitsyn

December: The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder

“It is not only prayer that gives God glory but work. Smiting on an anvil, sawing a beam, whitewashing a wall, driving horses, sweeping, scouring, everything gives God some glory if, being in his grace, you do it as your duty. . . . To lift up the hands in prayer gives God glory, but a man with a dung fork in his hand, a woman with a slop pail, gives him glory too. He is so great that all things give him glory if you mean they should.”

–Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ

The New Yorker weighs in with a long piece about the boom in Bible publishing. At the heart of the business is the principle “that Scripture can be repackaged to meet the demands of an increasingly segmented market.”

Doubleday Religion will publish Pope Benedict’s book Jesus of Nazareth: From His Baptism to His Transfiguration. Doubleday will publish the book in Spring 2007. The Pope describes the book as the result of a “long interior journey,” and an expression of his personal search for the face of the Lord.

An ad agency veteran offers some advice for authors promoting their books through videos. “Do not cut corners in production. If you don’t have the budget to do it right, don’t make a book trailer at all.”

The Times reviews a couple of “blooks” — books that began as blogs. One of them is Dawn Eden’s.

The editors of America make some Christmas reading suggestions.

Daniel Mulhall reviews four books about catechesis and isn’t terribly impressed.

Bible sales are up 25 percent since 2003, the Wall Street Journal reports. Executives at Nelson, Zondervan, and Tyndale, which account for about 80 percent of Bible sales, point to several factors. Sales are surging at Wal-Mart, Costco, and Sam’s Club, which have recently begun to cater to the Christian market. Many Christians buy multiple copies of Bibles of different translations (Says Nelson’s marketing VP: “It’s sort of like me and golf. I have Tiger Woods’s book and Ernie Els’s book. I want all those different approaches to how to play golf.”)

But the main reason seems to be a readers’ desire to have an edition of the Bible that suits their particular lifestyles and interests. Publishers comply: Bibles for women, teens, children; Bibles themed for sports, archeology, leadership; Bibles with covers of fur, metal, duct tape, and your college’s colors. Says one publisher: “What people are saying is ‘I want to find a Bible that is really me.’ It’s no different than with anything else in our culture.”

Marketing guru Seth Godin clicked on a web ad for a book and was annoyed to find himself on the publisher’s website instead of Amazon: “They offer to sell me the book at full retail, and I have to pay for shipping and I have to enter all my data. Nope. Bye.”

Lesson: “If you are getting in the way of the path between your customers and your products, your customers are just going to go away. Clear the path, don’t clutter it.”

Read about it here.

Dawn Eden continues her video marketing campaign for her new book, The Thrill of the Chaste: Finding Fulfillment while Keeping Your Clothes On. This kind of marketing is harder than it looks. The clip has to be clever enough to catch the eye of bloggers and email forwarders. But that’s the only challenge. These videos cost little to produce and nothing to upload to YouTube. The link is here.

Ray Schroth’s book Dante to Dead Man Walking is an informative, opinionated, smoothly-written introduction to 50 of the Christian classics, fiction and nonfiction. Three well-read Catholic bloggers have recently commented on Father Schroth’s list. Julie Davis started it. Tom Kreitzberg and Steven Riddle took it up and added ideas of their own. Some of the commentary is quite funny and provocative. (Riddle on G.K. Chesterton: “A journalist spelling out lay thoughts in prose that rise above the level of Robert Schuller, but still aphoristic to the point of disjointedness.”) I love these kinds of lists. Lots of ideas here for Christmas gifts, book group reading lists, and books for your bedside table.

For an informative and upbeat look at the book business, read the Forbes.com special report on the future of publishing. The editors’ tone is cheerful: “People are reading more, not less. The Internet is fueling literacy. Giving books away online increases off-line readership. New forms of expression–wikis, networked books–are blossoming in a digital hothouse.”

Book reviewers are busily sifting through publishers’ fall lists as the busiest book-buying season of the year gets underway. Here’s a roundup.

10 years after his death, Henri Nouwen is still publishing books. Brian Olszewski looks at two new Nouwen books and a biography.

At Books & Culture, John Wilson writes about new books on prayer, science, and art.

Julie at The Happy Catholic reads a stack of books, including four novels in the Loyola Classics series, and likes many of them.

Looking for a good book? Plunge into Julie’s “Dante to Dead Man Walking Project.” She and her readers rummage through the canon of Christian classics.

Marilynne Robinson won a Pulitzer Prize for the splendid, Christian-themed novel Gilead. In this Harper’s review, she dismembers Richard Dawkins’ anti-religion screed The God Delusion.