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

Sister Lise Fanshawe isn’t your typical nun. Before joining the sisters of Bethany she had been first a prostitute, then a brothel manager, and finally a murderer. She killed the man who had originally seduced her in order to keep him from abusing a young woman. Lise served a long sentence for the crime in a French prison, which is where she encountered the Bethany nuns – an order dedicated to serving prisoners, prostitutes, and other outcast women.

Lise is the central character in Rumer Godden’s Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy, the latest novel to be reissued in the Loyola Classics series. It’s a somber but inspiring tale, set in mid-century Paris. Lise’s conversion is depicted in entirely convincing fashion despite (or perhaps because of) its melodramatic elements. She becomes a new person, and dedicates her life to the difficult work of serving other women caught in the misery that used to entangle her. The story is credible because it is realistic. Lise’s ministry is fruitful, but in the end it takes a tragic turn. This is a darker story than In This House of Brede, Godden’s other classic tale of nuns. It shows how the mercy of God extends to the darkest human places.

Here is Sister Joan Chittister’s introduction to the Loyola Classics edition. Click here to buy the book.

A list from the Catholic Book Publishers Association.

The six Harper San Francisco titles, including the two top hardcovers, aren’t exactly “Catholic” books.

Also of note: only one title by Matthew Kelly on the lists. For years the Cincinnati-based author and speaker has had multiple titles on these monthly lists.

HARDCOVERS

1. Religious Literacy
Stephen Prothero. Harper San Francisco

2. Amazing Grace
Eric Metaxas. Harper San Francisco

3. A Book of Hours
Merton & Deignan. Ave Maria Press

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

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

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

7. With Jesus Every Day
Christoph Cardinal Schoenborn. Crossroad Publishing

8. The Catholic Priesthood and Women
Sara Butler. Liturgy Training Publications

9. Crossing the Desert
Robert J. Wicks. Ave Maria Press

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

PAPERBACKS

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

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

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

4. Sacred Space for Lent 2007
Jesuit Communication Centre, Ave Maria Press

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

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

7. Good News about Sex & Marriage
Christopher West. Servant Books

8. United States Catholic Catechism for Adults
USCCB Publishing

9. The Kinsey Corruption
Susan Brinkman. Ascension Press

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

The huge popularity of the bestselling book The Secret has triggered a backlash. Publishers Weekly reports that at least three books debunking Rhonda Byrne’s book will be published in the coming months, with more to come. It brings to mind the skeptical reaction to The Da Vinci Code. When the movie was released last year, there were 35 anti-DVC books on the market.

The Secret looks like The Next Big Thing in spiritual publishing. “We’ve been flooded with proposals for Christian ‘response’ books, and most of them aren’t very interesting or good,” said Joel Fotinos, director of religious publishing for the Penguin Group and publisher for its Tarcher imprint. “We’ve also been flooded with proposals all saying they are the next Secret, and most of those haven’t been that good either.”

The semester is drawing to a close. Looking for a parting gift for your teacher, or your child’s teacher? Here’s a gift idea: My Best Teachers Were Saints by Susan Swetnam.

Swetnam is an English professor at Idaho State University. Like many teachers, she was deeply influenced by certain “master teacher” mentors when she was young. When things got tough in the classroom, she would often ask herself what her mentors would do. Over the years, Swetnam’s mentor support group gradually grew to include saints of the Catholic Church, a remarkable number of whom were teachers. Her book is about how these saints give lessons on how to overcome the unique problems of the teaching profession.

Benedict’s Jesus of Nazareth sells 50,000 copies on its first day on sale in Europe. The book will be published in the U.S. on May 15. Pre-order your copy here.

The LA Times remarks on the surge of high-quality literary novels with acolayptic themes. Among them is Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Books & Culture features a review-essay by Andy Crouch about religious environmentalism.

A new book by J.R.R. Tolkien will be published this week, nearly 34 years after the author’s death. The book is titled The Children of Hurin, and it was assembled by the author’s son Christopher from his father’s outlines, notes, and unfinished drafts, including a version written as an epic poem. Adam Tolkien, Christopher’s son, says that the book “might be compared to a sort of literary Director’s Cut, the long version of the story assembled from all the best footage available.”

The story is set about 6000 years before the tales of Middle Earth told in The Lord of the Rings. Houghton Mifflin, J.R.R. Tolkien’s longtime U.S. publisher, is keeping details of the story under wraps until it is published on Tuesday. The Wall Street Journal hints that it’s a dark tale involving “tragic themes such as suicide and unknowing incest.” A Tolkien scholar says that the hero “never turns to evil, but everything that he touches gets destroyed. Irony drives the entire plot.”

From my friend and colleague Joe Paprocki:

I’ve provided some information for catechists on my blog (www.catechistsjourney.com) about how to respond to the assertions of The Secret. That post can be found here.

Check out the rest of Joe’s blog too.

Jana Riess thinks so. The book is The Secret, the mega-bestseller that claims that bad things happen to good people because they think negative thoughts. Jana, who writes about religious books for Publishers Weekly, has extremely negative thoughts about The Secret. Read them here.

Novelist and publisher Debra Murphy is inviting friends to pray a novena for a Catholic literary revival. Her prayer invokes the intercession of St. Francis de Sales, Cardinal John Henry Newman, and Pope John Paul II — writers all. You’ll find the prayers here.

Murphy’s publishing house, Idylls Press, is scouting for serious Catholic fiction. Idylls just published Farrell O’Gorman’s novel Awaiting Orders, favorably reviewed here in America magazine. Like Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy, the reviewer says, O’Gorman “is trying to explore how a Christian message of hope and redemption can attain credibility” in the modern world.

The new issue of Dappled Things is up. This is an online literary magazine “dedicated to providing a space for young writers to engage the literary world from a Catholic perspective.”

The title of the Books and Culture review of the third volume of the collected letters of C.S. Lewis is “They Didn’t Have Email.” Indeed. Editor Walter Hooper collects 3,228 of Lewis’ letters in the three books. Lewis sat down at his desk and carefully wrote his letters. Writers today dash off emails. Will books like this be possible in the future? The collected emails of Dan Brown?

Finally, Kingdom Come, the last volume of the extraordinary “Left Behind” series, hits the bookstores this week, just in time for Easter. After 12 years and 16 books, Jesus finally prevails over Satan. This may be the end of the story, but it’s not the end of the “Left Behind” publishing phenomenon. The marketing manager for publisher Tyndale House says, “In three to four years, we’ll relaunch the whole series with new covers. In that sense, the series will never really die.”

Online promotion specialist Seth Godin thinks that you should write an ebook. “It’s technically easy and when it works, your idea will spread far and wide. Even better, the act of writing your idea in a cogent, organized way will make the idea better.”

Godin’s complete ebook primer is here.

If you’re a fan of lists, as I am, a Catholic school teacher and sporadic blogger named Nick Senger is your guy.

Senger recently posted a very useful list of “101 Essential Websites for Readers of Literature” on his blog Literary Compass. This list is conveniently subdivided into 18 categories: Genre Fiction, Children’s, Reading Group Resources, Fun, etc.

Senger has also compiled a “Catholic Classic reading list” and “10 Best Books for New Catholics.”

From the Catholic Book Publishers Association:

HARDCOVER

1. Celebration of Discipline
25th Anniversary Edition
Richard Foster, HarperSanFrancisco

2. A Book of Hours
Merton & Deignan, Ave Maria Press

3. Perfectly Yourself
Matthew Kelly, Beacon Publishing/Ballantine Books

4. The Rhythm of Life
Matthew Kelly, Beacon Publishing/Fireside

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

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

7. Lord, Have Mercy
Scott Hahn, Doubleday

8. Rediscovering Catholicism
Matthew Kelly, Beacon Publishing

9. Spiritual Workout of a Former Saint
Danny Abramowicz, Our Sunday Visitor

10. The Holy Longing
Ronald Rolheiser, Doubleday

PAPERBACK

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

2. The Screwtape Letters
C. S. Lewis, HarperSanFrancisco

3. Mere Christianity
C. S. Lewis, HarperSanFrancisco

4. Sacred Space for Lent 2007
Jesuit Communication Centre, Ave Maria Press

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

6. The Great Divorce
C. S. Lewis, HarperSanFrancisco

7. Good News About Sex & Marriage
Christopher West, Servant Books

8. United States Catholic Catechism for Adults
USCCB Publishing

9. The Kinsey Corruption
Susan Brinkman, Ascension Press

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

Paula Huston is a thoroughly modern person who tells a classic conversion story in two recent books. “Journey” is an overused term for accounts of personal spiritual awakening, but it fits Huston’s life. Her story covers many miles, and many changes of mind and heart.

Huston was a lapsed Lutheran and an English professor at a California university when she decided to explore her persistent spiritual longings. She found a peaceful place to pray at a Camaldolese hermitage in the Big Sur, and became a Catholic. Then her story lurched in an unusual direction. She left her tenured teaching job, and embarked on a radical simplification of her life. Some of this involved changes in lifestyle, but the most important changes were interior ones. Huston tells this story with affecting honesty in The Holy Way.

But that was just the beginning. A deeper conversion began, as did St. Augustine’s, when a verse from scripture penetrated her heart. For Huston, it was Jesus’ invitation, “let anyone who thirsts come to me and drink.” This she heard as a call to deeper holiness. Huston writes about her response to this call in her latest book, By Way of Grace. This part of the journey has focused on the classic virtues: prudence, temperance, fortitude, justice, humility, faith, hope, and charity. Virtues are difficult to love. They are heroic abstractions. Huston makes them real by showing how a saint exemplified each of them, and how she herself understands them. Click here for the contents and the introduction.

Her books show Huston to be especially endowed with the virtue of humility, which she defines as the art of honest self-appraisal. It makes for spiritual reading that is both down-to-earth and inspiring.

The Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor has been awarded the Templeton Prize, the most prestigious honor in the world of religion. Taylor’s 1999 book A Catholic Modernity? addressed the problem of the Christian’s engagement with secular culture. From a review:

The real obstacle to religious belief in the modern world, Taylor argues, is not the triumph of the scientific worldview. Instead, the obstacles are moral and spiritual, having to do with the historical failures of religious institutions. He is not necessarily calling for a Catholic modernism, but for serious reflection on how Catholics and other Christians can participate fully in this culture without drowning in it intellectually and spiritually. He wants to explore how we can be Christian in a culture that seems antireligious, whose life forms and practices undercut the forms and practices of the historical Church. Taylor is not naÏve about the dangers posed to religious insight and freedom by the multiple perversities of modern culture. Yet, since he does not think all aspects of modernity are against the Church, he proposes a model of “whoever is not against us is for us” (Mark 9:40).

Pope Benedict XVI will publish two important documents this week. On Tuesday the Vatican will release his Apostolic Exhortation Sacramentum Caritatis (”The Sacrament of Love”), Benedict’s reflections on the Eucharist following the Bishops’ Synod on the Eucharist in 2005. This will be a highly theological work, but the pope recently said that he hope it will help revitalize popular piety.

The other work is definitely aimed at a popular audience. It is “Il Mio Amato Predecessore” — “My Beloved Predecessor,” a tribute to and study of the late Pope John Paul II. It will be published in Italy this week and undoubtedly in other languages soon.

Benedict’s book on the historial Jesus will be published in English on Tuesday, April 10.

Most Protestants dismiss the sign of the cross as “a Catholic thing,” but Nathan Bierma, a writer for Christianity Today, urges his fellow Protestants to take another look at this ancient gesture of prayer. Bierma reviews two new books: Bert Ghezzi’s The Sign of the Cross: Rediscovering the Power of the Ancient Prayer and The Sign of the Cross: The Gesture, the Mystery, the History by Andrew Andreopoulos. “After reading these two books, this previously ignorant Protestant, for one, has decided to introduce the sign of the cross into his daily prayer, as a link with the early church, a sign of God’s claim on me, and a reminder of the mystery of the Trinity,” he writes.

Bierma makes this shrewd point about prayer:

Whether we practice it or not, the sign of the cross is one manifestation of how physical—how embodied—worship really is. It can be as simple as raising our hands during a praise song, sitting up straight when the first few chords of a hymn are struck, or closing our eyes and folding our hands to pray. All of these motions have become ingrained in our body language of worship. Like the sign of the cross, they contain great potential for physical demonstration and remembrance of a deeper meaning—and also great potential for becoming so routine that eventually we do them out of mere habit—or worse, for show.

Read the whole thing.

From the Catholic Book Publishers Association:

Hardcovers

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

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

3. Crossing the Desert
Robert J. Wicks. Ave Maria Press

4. Prophets: The Saint John’s Bible
Donald Jackson. Liturgical Press

5. The Bridge to Forgiveness: Stories and Prayers for Finding God and Restoring Wholeness
Karyn D. Kedar. Jewish Lights

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

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

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

9. Rediscovering Catholicism
Matthew Kelly. Beacon Publishing

10. Perpetual Motivation
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. Catechism of the Catholic Church
Doubleday/Our Sunday Visitor/USCCB Publishing

4. United States Catholic Catechism for Adults
USCCB Publishing

5. The Good News about Sex & Marriage
Christopher West. Servant Books

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

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

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

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

10. The Gospel According to Luke, New Collegeville Bible Commentary, Vol. 3
Michael Patella. Liturgical Press

Some bishops play golf or go fishing in their spare time. Archbishop John Myers of Newark has been writing a science fiction novel. The title is Space Vultures. Co-author Gary Wolf, a lifelong friend of the bishop’s, says the book is an old-fashioned pulp sci-fi tale. “It has attacks in space, flesh-eating vampires. You name it it’s in there,” he says. The story is a fast-paced intergalactic tale about a heroic marshal and a con man, who team up with a widow and her two children to fight the Space Vulture, the “most villainous marauder in the cosmos,” according to Wolf.

The book will be published late this year or early in 2008 by Tom Doherty Associates. Bishop Myers and Wolf got an advance in “the low six figures” according to press reports.

Many priests have written popular novels. (Think Andrew Greeley, who got his start years ago when my boss, Tom McGrath, then editor of U.S. Catholic, published his first short story.) But not many bishops have become novelists. Only Cardinal John Henry Newman comes to mind.

If you have a taste for science fiction, as I do, check out this discussion of the tradition of Christians writing fantasy and sf. He lists 21 writers who have broad literary reputations, who employed Christian themes and symbols, and who wrote more than one book.

Amy Welborn and friends comment on many scripture resources from many Catholic publishers.

The Times dissects the much-used thriller formula used by the many Dan Brown imitators: “Take a sacred treasure. Add a secret conspiracy. Attach a name well known to scholars — Dante, Poe, Wordsworth, Archimedes, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, the Romanovs, Vlad the Impaler, ‘Hypnerotomachia Poliphili,’ whatever — and work it into a story that can accommodate both the Glock and the Holy Grail. If there’s any room left for the Knights Templar or DNA samples from Biblical figures, by all means plug them in.”

The British critic A.N. Wilson writes about J.R.R. Tolkein’s fascination with Europe’s mythic past.

Columnist Phil Lawler isn’t happy that Doubleday, not Ignatius, is publishing the Pope’s new book. But, one commenter points out, “For all of Ignatius Press’ orthodoxy, they’re very slow . . . . Doubleday will get the book out fast and that’s good, isn’t it? More people will read it.”

Three famous novelists — Jeffrey Archer, Elizabeth Berg, and Anne Rice — are releasing new books inspired by the gospels.

Steve Bogner and friends indulge in some stimulating book talk. Lots of “word of mouth” recommendations here.

At YouTube, the Pauline Sisters suggest best Catholic books for Lent.

And finally, with the Super Bowl safely behind us, it’s time to think about God’s game. Pitchers and catchers report next week. Click here for a complete list.

Teresa of Avila is “a hot mystic right now,” says Carolyn Myss, the bestselling author, whose new book is about the venerable doctor of the church. Publishers Weekly looks at two new books about Teresa.

The Catholic Book Publishers Association website has a new look.

Go here for a free first chapter of Dawn Eden’s The Thrill of the Chaste.

At the First Things blog, Fr. Edward Oakes, S.J. comments on the recent spate of books by militant atheists.

The Happy Catholic likes Rumer Godden’s classic novel In This House of Brede.

And finally, nominations for the 2007 Catholic blog awards open next week. The awards for 2006 are posted here.

From the Catholic Book Publishers Association:

Hardcovers

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

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

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

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

5. Rediscovering Catholicism
Matthew Kelly. Beacon Publishing

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

7. The Book of Courage
Matthew Kelly. Beacon Publishing/Fireside

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

9. Mother Angelica
Raymond Arroyo. Doubleday

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

Paperbacks

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

2. United States Catholic Catechism for Adults
USCCB Publishing

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

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

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

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

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

8. The Return of the Prodigal Son
Henri J.M. Nouwen. Image

9. Becoming Who You Are
James Martin. HiddenSpring

10. In the Name of Jesus
Henri J.M. Nouwen. Crossroad

Christianity Today interviews N.T. Wright, Anglican bishop, New Testament scholar, and popular spiritual author. A friend of mine and I are reading and discussing Wright’s Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense, a most impressive book, whose title deliberately echoes C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. Says Wright: “We’re talking about Jesus as the Lord of the world—not the Lord of people’s private spiritual interiority only, but of what they do with their money, with their homes, with the wealth of nations, and with the planet.”

Speaking of Lewis, the Washington Post reviews the latest volume of his collected letters — the final volume. This one sheds light on both Aslan and Joy Davidman.

Finally, about a month before pitchers and catchers report to spring training, the Real Live Pastor (aka Gordon Atkinson) writes a lyrical blog post about baseball and Bible study. He and his preacher buddies talk about the Bible while playing catch. It’s like being a kid again:

And then your friend winds up like a spring and then unwinds. You see his arm blur around his body and there is a white circle coming toward you at a terrific speed. But you feel no anxiety because your gloved hand slips forward smoothly and you pluck the ball right out of the air. You’ve caught a thousand balls, and you know you’ll catch this one. There is a sharp pop in the leather of your glove that stings a bit, but even the sting is nice in its own way.

I think I’ll ask my friend if he wants to discuss Simply Christian while playing catch. Maybe this idea will catch on at my parish. It’s hard to get adults, especially men, to turn out for parish events. They might if the Lent event features small group catch . . .

The bestselling Catholic book of 2007 will surely be Jesus of Nazareth by Pope Benedict XVI, which Doubleday will publish in the spring. The preface for the book has been released (go here for a translation), and it’s clear that the pope is weighing in on the great debate about the “historical Jesus” that has been going on since the nineteenth century. The historical-critical methodology has yielded many insights into scripture, but the skeptical “hermeneutic of suspicion” has also led some scholars to claim that little can be known about the historical figure of Jesus. The gap has been filled by speculative “reconstructions” of who Jesus was or might have been. Benedict wryly notes the contradictory results: “from the revolutionary enemy of the Romans who opposed the established power and naturally failed, to the meek moralist who permitted everything and inexplicably ended up causing his own ruin.” But Benedict also writes that the notion that very little can be known for sure about Jesus “has deeply penetrated the general consciousness of Christianity.”

Benedict’s approach, he says, begins with trust in the gospels and a conviction of faith. He writes:

I wanted to make an effort to present the Jesus of the Gospels as the real Jesus, as the “historical Jesus” in the real sense of the expression.

I am convinced – and I hope that I can also make the reader aware of this – that this figure is much more logical, and from the historical point of view also more understandable, than the reconstructions we have had to confront in recent decades.

I maintain that this very Jesus – the Jesus of the Gospels – is an historically sensible and convincing figure. His crucifixion and the impact that he had can only be explained if something extraordinary happened, if the figure and the words of Jesus radically exceeded the hopes and expectations of his time.

Heady stuff. This is an academic debate with many implications for the daily lives of ordinary people. Reserve your copy of Jesus of Nazareth now, and get ready for lots of debate and commentary this year about the person of Jesus.

The Best American Catholic Short Stories has just been published by Sheed & Ward, and it’s an impressive, absorbing book. J.F. Powers, Flannery O’Connor, and other mid-century Catholic masters are here, but so are contemporary writers: Richard Russo, Ron Hansen, Tobias Wolff, Tim Gautreaux, and others. Click here for a list of the contents. The book was edited by Daniel McVeigh and Patricia Schnapp of Siena Heights University. The editors take a stab at the vexed question of how to define “Catholic fiction.” These stories, they say, “spring from a mind familiar with the creed, with the paradox of the Trinity, with belief in the Eucharistic presence, and, perhaps especially, with the crucial tenets of the ‘forgiveness of sins’ and ‘life everlasting.’”

The St. Louis Review profiles Fr. Matt Kessler, the new publisher of Liguori Publications.

More on Amazon’s pricing. Turns out that the online bookseller has a secret 30-day price guarantee.

The secrets of the book publicist’s trade are revealed here.

The Happy Catholic reviews a book on Mother Teresa.

Finally, though the feast has has passed, here are Christmas reading suggestions from the editors of America.

John Allen is working on a new book that he’s calling “The Upside Down Church” which will describe the trends that are “turning the church on its head.” Before Christmas Allen posted a column in which described 10 “mega-trends” and asked for reader reaction to them. He then wrote another column adding five more trends based on reader response.

All of this is useful to those of us in Catholic publishing and media. Allen is a sharp observer of the Catholic scene. He is also a shrewd participant in the information revolution that is reshaping the Catholic conversation. Inviting people to comment on his book in progress is an example. The “wireless revolution” is one of his mega-trends. He writes: “Today, anyone who can find their way to a Starbucks with a laptop can be their own publisher. The blogosphere is full of Catholic offerings. . . . The Catholic conversation is a wide-open marketplace, and if bishops want to make themselves heard, it has to be by dint of their message rather than their office.”

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