Catholic Publishing: A Game for Suckers
It’s a typical morning at Sophia Institute Press headquarters. Panting from my daily hike up the six flights of worn and uneven stairs that lead to our warehouse and office space—the penthouse suite of a semi-renovated nineteenth-century mill—I reach my desk and turn on the computer. Five new intra-office e-mails greet me, which can mean only one thing: publisher, marketing, and editorial (me) are still fighting over a book title. Past title wars are the stuff of legend around here, and this one has all the earmarks of becoming one for the annals. The author of this particular book, about Catholic family life, supplied his own title, but it never won any backers on our end. Now the manuscript is almost ready to go, but the lack of a title is holding up the works: copyright paperwork, cover art, prepublication promotion, all dependent on the final title. We thought we’d hit on a good one a few weeks ago, but it didn’t stick. After that we’d brainstorm sporadically—in impromptu meetings, via e-mail, over the water cooler. But we got no closer, and the latest messages on my computer don’t contain any breakthroughs. So this morning we gather in one room, close the door, and instruct warehouse staff not to let us out until we’ve picked a title or died trying. Publisher suggests a title that plays on the name of a fifties Beat Generation poem. "Wrong audience," replies marketing. "This book is written specifically for people who’ve never heard of Kerouac." He counters with a punchy two-worder taken from a theme in the book’s introduction. Now it’s publisher’s turn to object. "A short title would allow you to have nice big letters on the spine," he concedes, "but this one doesn’t really tell you what the book is about. It could be Catholic family life, or it could be Oprah’s latest diet book." I step into the breach with a particularly snappy title that came to me that morning as I was brushing my teeth. There’s a pause."That’s just stupid," publisher and marketing say together. And so it goes. Eventually we do break for lunch and attend to other matters. I wrestle with some editing for an hour. I send off another futile e-mail to a writer who took an advance from us then went incommunicado. I peck away at the mountain of proposals and unsolicited manuscripts on the desk behind me. The day is slipping away, and we still have this poor little book without a name. Then, later that afternoon, I wander past publisher’s desk. Why, I ask, couldn’t we pull a key adjective out of a subtitle that he’d tried unsuccessfully to mate with an early main-title prototype and add it to marketing’s short, punchy suggestion? That would sufficiently identify it for our readers, and the rest of the subtitle would slide in quite neatly—even euphoniously—behind it. He types it on the screen, and we both stare as if in a trance. The tumblers in our brains begin to click in unison. "I like it if you like it," publisher says finally. "Seriously, do you like it?" I say I do. We buzz over to marketing. He likes it if we like it. We have a title. Send up the white smoke. I get home that evening, and my wife asks me how I can look so ragged and beaten when all I do is read books all day. * * * The fact is that such contests of intellect and will aren’t the only.aspects of this business that gray the hairs and angry up the blood. Catholic publishing is a game for suckers. There’s no glamour in it. No wining and dining of authors, no junkets to exotic locales to scout new writing talent. My business card is not a ticket to free upgrades and courtside seats. Our sales goals are modest. Catholics do not read religious books in significant numbers anymore—excepting turgid novels about Vatican conspiracies or the end times. Five thousand copies of a title sold in a year is a successful run for us; this past summer The Da Vinci Code routinely would triple that number on a bad day. And yet, we wouldn’t publish the next Da Vinci even if it fell in our laps. Like many other Catholic publishers, we are a hybrid of business and apostolate, constantly striving to balance the twin goals of building up the kingdom of God and making enough money to pay the printers, the electric company, and the staff. Another Da Vinci might make us rich beyond dreams of avarice but at the cost of betraying the apostolate and its aims. But trying to sell large numbers of sound, orthodox Catholic books today is at best a dubious business proposition. We’re offering a product that few people want and most don’t realize they need. Not long ago, I helped man a table full of our best-selling books at a fundraising fair for my fairly active, solid, middle-class parish. We had a prominent location in "Ministry Alley" and a large sign announcing that 100 percent of the profits would go to the parish’s Respect Life group. After two days, thousands of passers-by, and hours of shameless hawking, we sold a grand total of two books. If this episode is by itself not proof of much, it is at least suitably iconic. Our market is a niche, and that niche comprises only a sliver of the millions of Catholics sitting in the pews—or for that matter, teaching CCD, attending Bible study, and baking muffins for the women’s sodality. Blame the many distractions of the modern media if you want, blame the catechetical vacuum of the last forty years, blame the Freemasons: Catholics aren’t reading. The market for good Catholic books of spirituality, apologetics, and popular theology—again, we’re not talking Andrew Greeley or The Prayer of Jabezhere—is by all comparisons tiny. (For the next fundraiser, the Respect Life group offered boxes of Krispy Kreme donuts as the Boy Scouts did. They sold out in two hours.) * * * Of course, a generation or three ago, when the Church in America had really come into its own, the English-speaking world enjoyed an unprecedented richness of Catholic books. It was love for those fine old books and a desire to re-introduce them to a modern audience that would lead former philosophy professor John Barger, in 1983, to set up Sophia Institute Press in his basement in Manchester, New Hampshire. Beginning with Dietrich von Hildebrand’s Marriage: The Mystery of Faithful Love, Barger and Sophia would go on to develop a reputation for resurrecting forgotten Catholic classics: hunting down forgotten works of theology, philosophy, and spirituality, and then, most importantly, editing them to modern standards of readability. New titles, contemporary fonts and layout design, and attractive covers typically complete the resurrection. In recent years, Sophia began adding to its catalogue new books by living authors, and today roughly a third of the twenty-four-some books we publish each year are new titles by current authors. In 1993, the company moved from the publisher’s basement to its current riverside offices in one of Manchester’s many converted textile mills. No longer a one-man operation, today we’d be considered a small-midsize publishing house, subsisting on just over $1 million in sales and another $150,000 in benefactor donations each year. As editor, I am primarily responsible for acquisitions and editing tasks: from evaluating proposals and manuscripts (and writing polite rejections to well-meaning folks who send us stuff like Thoughts and Meditations on God, Volume One) to working with authors to fine-tune their concepts and prettify their prose. During every stage of developing a manuscript for publication, I try to keep one question before me at all times: What about this book would compel someone to pick it up? In many ways, the evolution of a book works backwards: from the sale to marketing efforts to at least an initial vision of the cover and title and then finally to the concept and the text. Beginning with the end in mind keeps us ever-conscious of the needs and wishes of the members of our niche market. Staying true to our dual identity as business and apostolate—striving to give our audience what they want as consumers yet what they need as Catholics—sometimes calls for tricky balancing acts and strategic compromises. Although most members of our orthodox and socially conservative Catholic readership probably wouldn’t be too tempted by Greeley-style schlock or another Left Behind clone, in our market there are other types of books that might sell but nonetheless would be illicit for us to publish. We might be able, for instance, to sell large numbers of books harshly and uncharitably indicting certain bishops—say, the liberals or the homosexual/pedophile coddlers. With other readers we might have great success peddling sensationalistic accounts of the latest reported private revelations. But we couldn’t do these things while remaining faithful to our mission and principles. So when considering manuscripts our calculation doesn’t end (as it would for a strictly business publisher) with what the audience wants—that is, what would sell. We have to ask ourselves: What good will this do the Church? On the other hand, neither can the question of our readers’ spiritual needs be the sole criterion. Many an unsolicited manuscript has landed on my desk topped with a cover letter announcing that every Catholic in America needs to read this book! Embedded in each is some message guaranteed to make the reader happier, holier, and closer to God. They can be rich in Scripture, steeped in the wisdom of the early Church Fathers, and suffused with the piety and sincerity of the author. And we’d be lucky, in a year, to sell enough to pay the initial printing costs. If most people had the intellectual clarity to know just what they needed and then the supernatural integrity to want it, we wouldn’t have an out-of-print list filled with so many wise, edifying, and unsalable books. As it is, our business, like all others, is subject to the ravages of original sin. And so our challenge is to fulfill the mission of our apostolate by publishing books that Catholics need to read—books that will help them better to know, love, and serve God—packaged and presented in way that will make Catholics want to read them. This helps us sell enough books to support the business, and it also further serves the goals of the apostolate: If we publish good Catholic books that almost no one will buy and read, we’re just hiding our light under a bushel. But "spiritually beneficial" and "compelling to the buyer" still aren’t enough. In addition to these qualities, we look for manuscripts that are unique in some way. Until some enterprising author discovers a fourth person of the Trinity, there will be precious little new under the sun in Catholic publishing. Why should a Catholic bookstore browser buy this book on the rosary and not one of the hundred others that have come before it? How is this Defense of the Catholic Faith or that Learn How to Pray Better going to stand out on shelves and in catalogues stuffed with dozens of similar titles? Show an editor something really and truly different, and you will have caught his attention. (Although, sometimes we get proposals for books so different they border on—or cross over to—the downright bizarre.) Sophia founder and publisher John Barger is fond of reminding us that a new book is published every three minutes, around the clock. If our books can’t distinguish themselves in the overcrowded marketplace, if they can’t offer readers unique and compelling benefits, then both the business and the apostolate are likely to fail. * * * Of course, as editor you can pore over a manuscript and subject it to every test. You can deem it unique, compelling, and beneficial beyond question. You can read the market perfectly. You can slap on an inspired title and an arresting cover. You can publish it with fanfare—only to watch it flop spectacularly. In a couple of years, all those leftover copies of the book you thought would change the world will be turned into fireplace starter logs and blown insulation. In fact, some of our most notable failures have been books we were high on at printing time, books that I still consider among the best I’ve edited. A year and a half ago, for example, we published Adventures in Orthodoxy, a delightful Chestertonian waltz through the articles of the Creed, written by popular convert-apologist (and This Rock contributor) Dwight Longenecker. Never dull and at times brilliant, it was written with more stylistic flair than any manuscript that’s ever made its way out of my office. Beneficial spiritual insights galore. Unique? Show me another book like it. We gave it what we thought was a provocative cover—featuring an Indiana Jones-like explorer reaching to open the door of a church—and turned it loose on the masses. The masses shrugged. Why? Did we misjudge our modern Catholic audience’s appetite for the whimsical religious essays of a Chesterton-lite? Did we fail to promote it adequately? Or could it have been the title or the cover? In the past we’ve been able to turn some flops (or at least sleepy sellers) into hits by reprinting them with new looks and names. Perhaps a similar treatment someday will give Longenecker’s book the success it deserves. Conversely (and happily), sometimes the hundred-to-one shot gallops home; the stone that the builders rejected, as P. G. Wodehouse put it, becomes the main thing. That is, a book for which we had only modest hopes turns into a bona fide hit. Such has been the case just recently with A Mother’s Rule of Life by Holly Pierlot. We saw in it a fine little book that borrows from the wisdom of religious life to help Catholic moms organize their households and fulfill their vocations as wives and mothers. But we never reckoned on the rave responses it would receive from readers and the extensive word-of-mouth promotion among Catholic mothers’ groups and homeschoolers that would drive it to the top of our bestseller lists. It has opened our eyes to one of the hottest genres in our niche market: what one observer has dubbed "mom lit." Currently we are striking out for the first time in the direction of original children’s fiction. Children’s books are reliable sellers, and the word from bookstores is that Catholic parents continue to ask for kids’ books that are unambiguously Catholic and catechetical yet entertaining. We’ll take our first few tentative steps into this market later this year and next, and their success or failure will help guide future decisions. I for one am guardedly hopeful, if only because it would make my job easier. Half, if not more, of the proposals and manuscripts I receive are for children’s books! * * * Through all the unexpected hits and misses, notwithstanding every failure of our best-laid plans, we try to stay positive. Catholic publishing is a game for suckers, and that’s a relief—it means that our bottom line isn’t to be found on the sales sheet. It means we can hope for incalculable profits. We do work hard to focus our resources, talents, and experiences shrewdly and wisely; we do try all we can to jigger the game in a way that we believe will increase our odds for success. But in the end, it’s God’s work, and doing God’s work means recalibrating your measure of success. What began as one man’s labor of love has become an entire company’s daily act of faith.
