Cook Partners

Favorite Books of 2008

Christianity Today Inc. magazine Books & Culture editor John Wilson lists his "Favorite Books of 2008." Take a look at his choices and see if you agree. He writes:

... we are here, again, to celebrate some particularly good books. Not the best books of the year, whatever those might be. (One influential reckoning is the New York Times' list, The Ten Best Books of 2008, posted on the web though not yet published in the print version.) What you have here is a personal list, not issued by any magisterium. These are some books that rose to the surface when I unsystematically thought about a year of reading.

What books would be on your list?

China: Hong Kong Book Fair Grows

Local newspapers report a record 829,967 visitors attended the ’08 Hong Kong Book Fair, an increase of 8.7 percent compared to last year’s 760,000. A survey by suppliers and participating companies during the Fair showed fiction to be the most popular, followed by self-help books or those about recent events. Books on religion ranked third and children’s fourth. Visitors to the week-long Fair included more than 6,200 from outside Hong Kong, 30 percent more than last year. Booths in 13 halls showcased 480 publishers from 21 countries. Both English and Spanish language books had high visibility.

China: Trained Pastors Needed

The Spring 2008 issue of Christian History discusses "open churches" in China—those churches that function legally in a Communist state:

Comprising at least 32,000 churches, 16,000 meeting points, and 18 million worshippers (according to 2004 figures), the [Three-Self Patriotic Movement and the China Christian Council, (TSPM/CCC)] is larger and more diverse than any single denomination in the U.S.A.

The movement began in the 1950's, but with the Cultural Revolution, "all churches were closed, and church leaders were attacked, criticized, and sent to the countryside to reform themselves through productive labor." With changes following Mao's death, TSPM/CCC found that

they had to train a new generation of Christian workers after 30 years of limited and then zero theological education. It was fitting, then, that the man who emerged as the key leader of the TSPM/CCC in post-Mao China was a theological educator, Bishop K. H. Ting.

Ting retired in 1997, and in 2004, Cook International published God is Love, Ting's collected writings, in English.

Cook continues to work with TSPM/CCC and others to meet the needs of the church in China, for "With only 2,600 ordained ministers (one per twenty congregations), the shortage of trained pastoral leadership remains dire." Learn more about our work here.

Storytelling Key to Survival in Digital Age, Says Korean Author

Last week, The Korea Times featured an article on how publishers can survive as formats keep changing. Han Ki-ho, president of the Korean Publishing Marketing Research Institute and author of Books Are Evolving: Publishing Business in Cross-Media Era, argues for publishers to employ 10 storytelling strategies:

1. Moving (not lecturing) readers,
2. Suggesting direction ... rather than just giving facts,
3. Giving a clear message to readers,
4. Having dramatic compositions,
5. Suggesting clear characters,
6. Using a fable or allegory,
7. Boosting the credibility of narrators,
8. Having universal sensibility,
9. Appealing to individual emotions, and
10. Adapting ... to an Information Technology-friendly structure.

Han affirms storytelling is critical to survival for publishers. In fact, he coins the word faction (from fact and fiction) to describe the growing use of storytelling in non-fiction books to help differentiate these in a "digital era marked by an over-supply of information."

USA: No Advances, No Returns

HarperCollins, reports the Wall Street Journal, is launching a new imprint that will pay "little to no advances" and will not accept returns from retailers. According to Marketing Daily,

The venture is aimed at improving the economics of book publishing, which has long been hobbled by the need to pay for space in stores and take back unsold books from retailers at full price. The practice of paying authors advances--offset against future royalties--also can be costly when books bomb.

What's in it for authors? A HarperCollins press release says,

Authors will be compensated through a profit sharing model as opposed to a traditional royalty, and books will be promoted utilizing on-line publicity, advertising and marketing.

 

Screwtape Letters Revisited

The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis' classic book, consists of letters of advice from Wormwood, an experienced devil, to his nephew, Screwtape, who is learning how to wreak havoc in the life of the human being he's assigned to tempt. Lewis' creative use of "reverse theology" has inspired a number of similar works. In the United States, these include Kregel's Flambeau@darkcorp.com (1999) and its follow-up, Flambeau 2.0; Multnomah's Lord Foulgrin's Letters (2000); Augsburg Fortress' The Devil's Inbox (2004); and Orbis' The Wormwood File: E-mail From Hell (2004). And in Spain, Cultura Cristiana just released Nuevas cartas del diablo a su sobrino [New letters from the devil to his nephew]. 

Books 2.0

Imagine this: A publishing company based on content provided free by its own readers using wikis. Despite its books' genesis as Web-based, universally accessible content, the company has eager buyers for a print format. It updates its books every month. And, using print-on-demand technology, it ships books worldwide. That's the business model for Wikitravel Press, a Canadian company described in this Toronto Star article.

Can this business model work for Christian products? One idea, of course, is to continue with the same genre, producing Christian travel guides that would include information on Bible sites. Another experiment in wiki-based content is Missiopedia, an initiative begun a year ago by Momentum Magazine and The Network for Strategic Missions, though it is not intended to result in paper-based products. (And the Web-based competition to reference materials is fierce: see this Cook Partners post.)

Are there other genres where there is synergy between web-based content a print format? Where does our unique content, as Christian publishers, offer distinct advantages in this brave 2.0 book world?

Reviewer Rankings on Amazon

A prior Cook Partners post discussed the ethics of book critics. Now, Slate magazine provides insight into the world of Amazon book reviews:

... My publicist confirmed that she'd solicited Grady Harp's review.

I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised, but I had imagined Amazon's customer reviews as a refuge from the machinations of the publishing industry... a harbinger of "Web 2.0"—an ideal realm where user-generated consensus trumps the bankrupt pieties of experts. As I explored the murky understory of Amazon's reviewer rankings, however, I came to see the real Web 2.0 as a tangle of hidden agendas—one in which the disinterested amateur may be an endangered species.

Publishing in the "Twilight of the Books"

"Twilight of the Books," an article by Caleb Crain in The New Yorker, tackles the question: What will life be like if people stop reading? Crain discusses literacy statistics in the U.S. and the Netherlands; the biology and history of reading, according to Proust and the Squid; primary and secondary orality; and television and new media. While Crain does not directly address how publishers should respond to the emerging era of "secondary orality," much of what he highlights has implications for publishers:

• Stories and vivid language are key to reaching people in oral cultures. How memorable are the stories and turns of phrase in your books?
• "In an oral culture, clichés and stereotypes are valued," writes Crain. In what ways can you encourage your authors to make effective use of such images and ideas while still urging them to be original?
• "Redundancy is an asset that helps an audience follow a complex argument," adds Crain. Do you use diagrams, sidebars, summaries and other means to repeat and condense arguments for your readers—especially those with low literacy levels?
• Crain notes that a key difference between print and streaming media is "emotional responsiveness," i.e. the instant connection that viewers have with those they see. How can books communicate emotion and enhance a prospective buyer's identification with the author or protagonist of a book? 
• "In a culture of secondary orality," writes Crain, "we may be less likely to spend time with ideas we disagree with." How does this disinclination impact the way we present the gospel—and particularly, titles intended for evangelism and apologetics?

Another item of interest Crain's article: while "there is research suggesting that secondary orality and literacy don't mix... the Internet, happily, does not so far seem to be antagonistic to literacy."

Translation: "It Doesn't Go Both Ways"

The Guardian has an article by reader who evaluates books in Spanish and French, for possible translation into English. She discusses her work:

I was startled that any agent would have submitted such a book to a US publisher: it was full of references to Spanish TV shows and their stars, soccer players and teams, Madrid... any number of books filled with local references to our own culture have been successful in translation around the world. The Nanny Diaries, to pick an example at random, has already been translated into four languages. Ours is an export culture, which means that a significant group of readers in Madrid, Tokyo, Bombay, and just about everywhere else are, after a lifetime of watching our TV shows and movies and reading our novels, either well acquainted with or very curious about our celebrities, domestic habits, and in-jokes. The agent... had just forgotten, momentarily, that it doesn't go both ways.

Read the rest of "Literature's Invisible Arbiters" here.