Mike Hyatt, CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers, talked recently about how they choose which books to publish. He reveals two key criteria: brand equity and competitive advantage. Brand equity asks, "Will people buy this book because they recognize the author?" Competitive advantage asks, "Will people buy this book because it has great writing and ideas?"

Then Hyatt drops a bombshell. At Thomas Nelson, competitive advantage is more important than brand equity. A well-written book with great ideas, he claims, is better than a book with a famous author. He awards well-written/great-idea books "Tier B" status, whereas books merely written by famous people languish in "Tier C." (Books with both great writing and a "platformed" author receive the coveted "Tier A" rating.)

Brains over beauty? That's what Mike claims. Score one for the little guys! Publication—here we come!

And yet—something about Mike's post strikes me as fishy. Maybe it's my own sad experience of smashing up against the door to publication. Maybe it's my inner cynic gritting his teeth at a cruel glimpse of hope. Or maybe it's the fact that out in the real world, publishers don't think like Mike Hyatt thinks.

Consider Thomas Nelson's own bestseller list. (It's not actually a bestseller list. None of the top three titles score better than 4,000 in the Amazon sales rankings. It's a "what we wish were bestsellers" list.)

Who's the author of their number one "bestselling" title? Bill Cosby. Yes, that Bill Cosby.

Number two: Max Lucado, the most prolific writer in Christendom.

Three: David Jeremiah, megapastor. Starting to see a trend?

The trend continues through the top twenty, thirty books. William Bennett. Beth Moore. John Eldredge. Stasi Eldredge. Another Max Lucado. Frank Peretti. Bono. In fact, every author that Nelson spotlights as a "bestseller" is either a TV personality, an already-bestselling author, a radio host, or all of the above. I see Tier A books (celebrity + good writing). I see Tier C books (celebrity + bad writing). Tier B books are conspicuously missing.

Mike Hyatt says good writing trumps celebrity. His company's favorite books are all about celebrity. Where's the disconnect?

In a more recent post, Hyatt lays out some of his reasons for blogging. He says, "When I am writing, I have my employees in mind first." Maybe this statement holds the answer.

Maybe when Hyatt champions good writing, he is prescribing policy, not describing it. Maybe he regrets that his editors and marketers clamber after titles with "platform" while overlooking quiet gems. Maybe he wants to reverse the trend.

But is it really reversible?

Having worked in the video game industry for over a decade, I've seen the inner world of how games get chosen and made. I've seen great ideas passed over because they didn't have a game god to champion them. I've seen millions of dollars poured into losing ideas because the people who pushed them were "stars." In the games industry, celebrity almost always trumps quality.

The principle is universal. In an uncertain world, decision makers gravitate toward what is familiar rather than what is actually good. I got a Mac last week. I love it. Why didn't I get one before? Uncertainty. This morning I was thinking about buying a new file server. I visited the Dell site. Later I thought: "If I love my Mac so much, why don't I think about getting a Mac for my file server?" But I knew the answer: Uncertainty. I know Dells. I've used them for years in a million ways. Sometimes they've betrayed and cheated me, but I know their wiles. They may be worse, but I know how they're worse. I didn't even considering buying a Mac.

Fear of the unknown. Maintaining the status quo. "A fool returns to his folly like a dog returns to its vomit."

Imagine I'm a book editor. I've got two crisp manuscripts in front of me. On my left is a proposal by an unknown author who quilts in his spare time. His book is luscious, profound, riveting, hilarious, life-changing, world-changing. On my right is a proposal by Joel Osteen entitled Polished Turd. Which do I buy?

The answer is not as obvious as you might think. It comes down to a question of numbers. How many early adopters will each book attract? What will the book's infection rate be?

Every product—game, book, toothbrush, anything—has some number of early adopters. These are the people who buy a product as soon as they get wind of it. They're fans. They search for news about the product. They subscribe to the mailing list. There are 1 million people who will buy U2's next album on the day it comes out. (I'm one of them.) They don't care if it consists of 60 minutes of pulsing static: it's U2, they'll take it. These are U2's early adopters.

Those of us who make and sell products love early adopters. Three reasons:

1. They buy early.
2. They buy predictably.
3. They buy crap.

A product or brand that has lots of early adopters is guaranteed lots of early sales. Even if the product stinks and nobody but early adopters buy it, at least you've made that initial wave of sales.

So what's a book editor to do? I look at the initial sales figures for the last Osteen book. That tells me, roughly, how many early adopters he has. ("Roughly" because if the book sold well after the initial wave, the number of fans probably increased, but if it sold poorly then we may have lost some.) I do the math. The J Man (as I teasingly call him—we're old pals by now) will sell at least 2 million copies of Polished Turd. Well, okay, discount 25% because of the title. Call it 1.5 million.

Now I look at Quilter-Boy's masterpiece. If everyone in the world were forced to read it, 90% would love it and world peace would ensue. But we can't use force, unfortunately. So we pay for endcaps in B&N and Borders and slip Amazon a little something to nudge their Recommendations engine. Now millions of people will see the book. It will pass across their optic nerve, if only for a moment. Will they buy it?

I laugh aloud and shake my head, recalling past glories and regrets. Phew! What a question that is! How long you got?

Will the title grab them? Will my cover designer score another Poisonwood Bible? Who can I get to write the blurb? Who can I get to endorse? Who'll write the forward? How handsome is the author? How interesting his bio?

What's the competition? Will this book stand out? What titles are other publishers developing that could get the jump on us?

Is the world "feeling" this book? There's an edge of gloom to this guy's writing—is the mood of the day on the upswing? Maybe we should let it lie for a year or two. The market might be more open then.

So how many early adopters will we get? Unknown. I can ballpark it. But ballparking doesn't feed the kids.

So we ask another question. What's the infection rate? Will the thousand-odd people who read this book in the first few weeks get their friends to read it? How many early adopters will become evangelists? How virulent will their evangelism be?

"Yeah, I read it—it's okay." "There's this book I've been reading that has really got me thinking." "Listen! I just finished this new book—in one night—and you have got to read it. If you don't, we can't be friends anymore."

The infection rate is a number. It answers the question: How many new readers does each new reader make? Zero—the book is a bomb. Nobody who read it recommended it. Zero point Five—the book is okay. One out of every two readers got someone else to read it. One—the book is good. Every reader made another reader.

Two. Five. Ten. Now we're getting into Philosopher's Stone numbers. People can't talk about the book without wiping foam from their lips. Those who haven't read it feel they have to apologize.

This is what I want for Quilter-Boy. He deserves it. But will he get it?

Unknown.

For both books, their sales will be the result of their early adopters and their infection rates. An unknown author's only chance is to write such an incredible book that the infection rate is huge. Even then, infection takes time. Harry Potter's first print run was 500 copies. That was 1997. It took two years—it must have felt an age to Rowling—before the series hit the bestseller lists.

Why would an editor take a chance on so many unknowns? Here's where Mike Hyatt steps in. "We have to find the next generation of talent," he says in a related post. "In fact, we will continue to take risks on those relatively few manuscripts that are exceptionally well-written."

Why? Because the safe road leads to stagnation.

We're learning that hard truth in the games industry, where every other game is a remake of DOOM. The risky, innovative Wii is trouncing the competition. The latest Unreal Tournament (the fifth installment in the series) sold worse than all the others. Even the evergreen Ultima series died around sequel #7. (I helped dress the corpse of #9.) If the youthful games industry is learning it, the book industry must have learned it centuries ago. When it comes to choosing what product to make, risk is a necessary evil.

So I don't believe that Thomas Nelson—or any other publisher—will ever take on risky writers with as much enthusiasm as we'd like. They'll tell themselves that their Tier Cs authors belong in Tier A while tossing Tier Bs out the window. Mike Hyatt imagines a world where Tier Bs get the respect and investment they deserve. It's a dream, but maybe dreaming it can make it more true.

Labels: books, games, writing

Christian book publisher Thomas Nelson laid off a tenth of their work force this week. Their president and CEO, Mike Hyatt, has been blogging about the decision. His candor and openness are quite refreshing—not to mention educational for aspiring authors like me. He gives us an glimpse into the tough inner world of book publishing.

The words "tough" and "book" don't belong in the same sentence. It's like putting Shirley Temple into a film about Jack the Ripper. As I read through Mike's posts, I realize that part of my anxiety about getting published comes from this tension. How do we marry the creative and practical sides of writing and selling books?

I might ask the question this way. Are books really about this:



Or are they really about this:



Of course the answer is that they're about both. You can't keep making books unless you make a profit. Yet nobody who chooses a career in publishing chooses it purely for the money—other industries will make you wealthier quicker. As Mike says, "It is partly about the money. Otherwise, we won't stay in business. But that is certainly not what gets us up in the morning."

So we don't want to say that the "good" side of publishing is the creative/intellectual side while the "bad" side of publishing is the practical/financial side. The two sides have to stick together. Divorce is not an option. You can't have one without the other.

Yet, from an emotional standpoint, when I imagine being a published author, it's not the money that gets me excited. It's the readers. It's the bookstores. It's the physical presence of the book itself.

Yesterday morning I spent 45 seconds sniffing C. H. Dodd's The Epistle of Paul to the Romans, which was published in 1932. The yellow pages are browning at the edges like an old daguerreotype. Dodd's commentary is fierce, but it smells sweet—literally, like a summer meadow.

My dad published a few books when I was a kid. I remember him bringing the galleys home—oversize pages with fine, typeset lettering—a sort of prototype for the book. Looking at them was like sneaking a glimpse into a secret world. They would be marked up in blue by a copy editor, who even noted things like indentions and headings and the location of page numbers—things no ordinary reader would ever know someone had fussed over. I hear publishers don't use galleys anymore. They've been cut adrift and left to bob in the wake of digital technology. Pity.

I love books, and I love reading—not just doing it, but imagining it done—the long, united centuries of paper and print and the people who have loved them. When I write a paragraph, I don't think about its market value. I think about its meaning, its function, its structure, its beauty or lack thereof.

But I know that to get published I must sometimes take off my wire-rim spectacles and don safety goggles, or even a helmet, and charge once more into the fray, and let slip the dogs of market analysis and pitch meetings and niggling contract terms. I have to make the beautiful sell.

It's tough straddling the worlds of books and business—one foot on land, the other on sea. You have no choice but to serve both logos and mammon.

Labels: books, faith, writing

My review of Dallas Willard's The Great Omission has just appeared on Relevant magazine online.

Labels: books, faith

I used to get depressed whenever I walked into a bookstore. I would stand there dazzled by the thousands of titles—so many of them so intriguing—and feel the fingernails of death at my neck. Everywhere I looked I saw books I yearned to read—The Bookseller of Kabul, How the Irish Saved Civilization, The Morrow Guide to Knots, Society of Mind. I would never live long enough to read them all. Strolling through the bookstore gave me a feeling like strolling through a cemetery. Each alluring book marked a mile on a road I could never hope to travel to the end.

It's a matter of arithmetic. On any given shelf, one book in ten seemed irresistible. Given a total bookstore inventory of 100,000 distinct titles, I had 10,000 books to read before I die. I've got 60 years left on the outside, so that's 166 books a year. To read all the books I want to read, I have to read three a week.

In college I took a course in Great Books of the Western World and blazed through about three books a week. I learned more in that course than in all my other college courses combined, but the pace exhausted me. These days I read a book or two a month, and I'm content with that. I wouldn't enjoy reading three books a week for the rest of my life. It would feel like work. My brain would fill up.

So I realized I was running out of time. Despite my biblio-morbidity, or perhaps because of it, I never left a bookstore empty-handed. Soon my shelves were covered in books I never read. Book-shopping lead to depression and shame, and I stopped going to bookstores.

I didn't give up reading books—I just took a new approach to getting them. My policy: Never buy a new book when you can buy a used one; never buy a book you can borrow. This policy saved me a lot of money. I could buy A Gentle Madness on Amazon for $15 or get it from the library for free. The policy also made me more deliberate about what I read. I could no longer load up a shopping cart of books I happened to like—now I first had to identify each book I wanted to read, then find the best place to get it. I had to want each book badly enough to think about it, to seek it out.

The Pencil

Even though I avoided bookstores, I still added daily to the sad list of books I would die without ever having read. Then I came across a book that helped to change my attitude.

It was The Pencil, by Henri Petroski. It looked fascinating—a historical romp through the evolution of that most underappreciated of tools, the lowly pencil, complete with insightful applications to the study of engineering in general. How do people make things?—that's the essential question—How do they make them better and better over time? A thousand titillating questions would orbit and illuminate the central one: Why are pencils so often that color of yellow? Who had the bright idea to make pencils hexagonal—not square, not octagonal—so they refuse to roll off your desk? What sort of wood do they make pencils out of? When did they start sticking erasers on them? An object we take for granted would prove to be a treasure trove of fascinating factoids.

As it happened, The Pencil bored me to tears. And this made me question my arithmetic. Sure, 1 in 10 books on the shelves looked intriguing, but you can't, as they say, judge a book by its cover.

Take On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt. How can you go wrong with a scholarly treatise on the practice of bullshitting from Princeton University Press with a cover so uncool it's cool and an expletive front and center? It can't help but be droll and charming and witty. Well I've read it and here's the punchline: This really is a scholarly work. I found it quite interesting, actually, but it's nothing like funny; and at $10 for 80 tiny little pages, it's nothing like worth it.

Or take Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig. Winsome premise: man motorcycles across America in search of himself and a profound philosophy. What they don't tell you is that Mr. Pirsig thinks he is the smartest and wisest and most mysterious and just all-round neatest fellow he has ever known, and he can't get enough of himself. None of which, by the way, leads to any sort of coherent philosophy, much less a profound one.

I reworked my math. Ten percent of books seem fascinating; ten percent of those actually are. A great deal of what gets published lacks any appreciable beauty, truth, or value. That's kind of depressing—but at least I don't have so much to read now.

Reading for Nourishment

So I have another policy. I'll give a book a couple of chapters; if it fails to engross me, I get rid of it. Life's too short to read boring books.

How do you know when a book's worth reading? Right now I'm reading Glamorous Powers by Susan Howatch, a novel about a psychic monk at the outbreak of World War II. Sounds ridiculous, I know, but a friend recommended it. And do you know—it has absolutely pulled me under. The very thought of reading it in the evening brightens my afternoon. That's the test of a worthwhile book: it sheds light; it affects. Not all good books thrill, but all good books nourish.

So I asked myself: Why did I waste so much time and money on books that ended up a slog? And I realized to my horror that what drew me to those books was the hope they would make me more respectable.

I wanted to read all the "important" books—Vonnegut and Catch 22 and The Sun Also Rises—books you can mention to good effect at parties. I raided bookstores and stayed up late at night earning clout, dreaming of—or dreading—the day someone would ask me whether I had ever read X. Sure I read for pleasure, and for knowledge, and for insight—but most of all I read to impress.

The trouble, of course, is that no one ever asks. People care about what team you're rooting for; they care about how you got your lawn so green; people don't care if you read Godel, Escher, Bach. There are maybe 600 people in the United States who will like you better if you can rattle off a slick reading resume, and they spend their time chatting to each other on NPR and C-Span 2. Nobody cares what I read. The respect I strove to earn was never up for auction.

Now I can walk into any bookstore, anytime, and look it straight in the eyes (like James Frey at the end of A Million Little Pieces). I walk in, I look around, I see something intriguing, I jones, I get out, I go to the library. I give away my books every chance I get, so they don't get attached, like wayward kittens. You've got to own your books or they'll own you. And the best way to own them is as little as possible.

Labels: books

A few weeks ago I volunteered to lead a discussion group at SMU on Nick Hornby's How to be Good. SMU invites entering students to participate in these groups before the semester starts as a sort of academic appetizer. This week I read the book to prepare for leading the discussion next fall.

Too close to home?

This was almost—but not quite—my first encounter with Hornby. My wife and I both love the film version of About a Boy, though we've never read the book. She started to read How to be Good several years ago, but put it down when it hit too close to home. Our marriage was struggling at the time. We were living in England. It felt like the emotional emanations of the book would resonate with our own and swell them into something worse.

So I approached the book with a mixture of interest and unease. Hornby has a stellar reputation as a storyteller; the endorsements that litter the book's cover simply gush ("How to be bloody marvelous," says The Mail on Sunday); and what I gathered of the book's premise intrigued me. But would it dredge up painful memories of the dark times in my marriage?

Flavors of Good

The book's title frames its central question: How, indeed, to be good? But "good"—as the story reveals—is a slippery word, with many possible meanings. There are the moral questions: What sort of person is a "good" person? What sort of deed is a "good" deed? And then there are the existential questions: What sort of life is the "good" life? Can anyone ever feel truly happy? What—if anything—makes living worthwhile?

Another question lurks beneath these, and in some ways overshadows them: Which of these questions—the moral or the existential—most appeals to me? Am I driven by the desire to live right or to live well? If I want to know how to be good, I must first decide whether good means righteous or happy.

Katie Carr's Cul-de-Sac

At first glance, How to be Good seems too gentle a story to be diving into such thorny issues. It centers on Katie Carr, a forty year old doctor in a North London suburb whose marriage has collapsed like a bad lung. She takes little pleasure in life, least of all in her sneering, sarcastic husband David, a semi-employed writer. Her friends talk at her rather than with her. Her children hardly know her. Recently, she has taken a lover; but she realizes he gives her thrills rather than satisfaction or even real pleasure. She has reached a midlife cul-de-sac. Yet her wry, insightful, and often funny narration brightens these dark themes.

The crisis takes a new turn when David changes dramatically—miraculously—for the better. He gives up writing his weekly rant for the local newspaper. He becomes meek, loving, and considerate. He apologizes for failing to love her. Yet her delight at this transformation is dulled by the eerie abruptness with which it came about.

A faith healer with the curious name DJ GoodNews emerges as the one responsible for David's transformation. Though Katie is skeptical of GoodNews at first, she is forced to recognize his gifts when she sees him perform a miraculous healing. Soon GoodNews comes to live in the Carr household, and David and he begin to plan how to spread their vision of love and charity for everyone. Katie comes face to face with "good."

But philanthropy is not the same thing as love, as Katie discovers when her saintly husband grows more and more remote. The question of how to be good proves more nuanced than any of them had reckoned upon.

The book explores its themes with wit, warmth, and insight. It's a delight to read, likable and engrossing. And the questions it poses about morality, marriage, family, and religion are important and universal.

Is Family Enough?

So far I've been giving you a book review, the long and short of which is: If you haven't read this book, read it. But now I'm going to assume you've already read the book, because I want to talk about its most controversial feature: the last sentence.

Spoilers ahoy.

If you found the book's last sentence jarring—maybe even disturbing—a quick google for "hornby good last sentence" will show you're not alone. It ends the book like a slap in the face: sharp, sudden, painful, unexpected. Why did Hornby put it there, and was he wise to do so?

If you look back over the last several pages before the end, you'll see the resolutions that Katie Carr makes to give meaning to her life. She must take time to be alone, to read, to rediscover her spirit. In the very last page, she hesitantly accepts her family as the core of her life, the thing that will give coherence and meaning. The tone of the last several pages is one of dogged optimism—indeed, much of the book's overall charm is Katie's enduring sense of "things are hard but we'll work them out somehow." The last sentence violently departs from that charm. The optimism is gone. We're left with the sense that although Katie may resolve to find meaning in family, in the back of her mind she'll always know that nothing means anything.

The last sentence hurts because it terminates a hopeful book in a hopeless way. It's as if Abraham Lincoln had ended the Gettysburg Address with, "Or whatever."

You can pinpoint down to the semicolon the moment Hornby decided the book was ending too brightly. This is his failure in writing the last sentence: it simply doesn't ring true. It doesn't sound like Katie: it sounds like Hornby manipulating the reader, and judging from his impeccable narration in the rest of the book, I would think he'd know better. What drove him to do it?

Imagine the book without the jarring ending and you begin to see why he included it. Without it, the book could easily end on too sugary a note. The reader could come away thinking, "Yes, despite all the problems and moral compromises, family makes everything worthwhile." This idea gives us warm fuzzies, but it fails to answer the real complexities. Family is valuable, but it doesn't make life worth living. Without faith in a transcendent reality—and this is precisely what Katie doubts in the end—it's very difficult, perhaps impossible, to imagine a life worth living. A fun life, perhaps; a survived life, yes; but a meaningful life—how can you get one without God?

Astronomers say the sun will plump into a red giant several million years from now and swallow up the earth and everything we've ever known. What meaning will our lives have had then? Today, we might find meaning in our experiences and sensations. We might find meaning in helping our fellow human beings. We might find meaning in being remembered by our children and grandchildren, or even by history books and archives. But eventually our grandchildrens' grandchildren will forget us, and somewhere down the line humankind will be destroyed, or will evolve into something with little regard for our pesky lives. Where will our meaning be then?

Perhaps I'm projecting into Hornby's intentions; perhaps I'm being overgenerous to his insight as a writer; but I think his last sentence is intended as a blunt reminder that all sentiment aside, there are no easy answers, especially in a world without God.

What You Find in the Night Sky

Did How to be Good dredge up dark memories for me? I'll admit I recognized many of the emotions and events that David and Katie experience in their marriage. Indeed, like David, I underwent a profound transformation just in time to help my marriage turn around. Though my rebirth didn't happen overnight (it took months, even years—in fact it's still going on), it was helped along by miracles, and spiritual people acted as midwives. So I saw in the book some resemblance to my life, but it didn't pain me.

The book's nihilism did pain me. It pains me when people take God's existence for granted in either direction—either vacuous faith that "he must be there" or vacuous denial that "nothing's there." God—the mere concept of God—deserves more careful treatment than that. Hornby's faith healer gets his power from drugs. His clergywoman is burned out, incompetent, faithless. God's irrelevance is simply assumed—and you know when you ASSUME, you make an ASS out of U and ME.

By not seriously engaging with the question of God, Hornby tips his hand, showing that his is a book reveling in postmodern angst, not grieving it or seeking to escape it. Angst is fashionable these days. Many people see something romantic in the compelling futility of the search for meaning. They would, as I once did, rather search than find—rather lick their wounds than see them healed.

Unlike Katie, I looked into the night sky and found that God was not only there but near. I wish I could tell you what is the difference between those who look and find and those who look and don't find. I suspect those who don't find don't look very hard.

Labels: books

I'm taking a journalism course right now, and I've just published my first article—albeit in an online publication. (Not that that's inferior or anything—chill out already.) It's a review of Marjane Satrapi's graphic novel Chicken with Plums, which came out last November. It's a good book, but not as good as her earlier Persepolis autobiographical graphic novels.

Labels: books