The Success Conundrum

Like many book lovers, you have probably enjoyed certain authors so much that you keep reading their books. At some point, though, you may get tired of them. It may begin to feel like they are writing the same book over and over, especially if they have hit on a successful formula. We can see this with money management books, self-help books, or thrillers like The DaVinci Code.

It’s a conundrum for authors. On the one hand we are told to write what we know, yet we are unlikely to have deep knowledge or experience in several divergent areas. Likewise we may have gained expertise in a certain style of writing that may not transfer to a different genre. Imagine trying to shift from technical writing to popular fiction. It can and has been done, but it takes practice and discipline.

Then there is that old issue of audience. If we have developed a following (which can take a lot work and luck), why walk away from readers who still seem to want more?

One strategy is to take a chapter or subtheme in your first book and expand that, going in depth in a way you couldn’t before. Another option is to take the topic you are known for and apply it to a different audience or context. Instead of getting organized in the home, consider getting organized at work.

Malcolm Gladwell (Outliers, Blink, and David and Goliath) is someone who has found a happy balance of combining the similar and the different. He uses the same excellent journalistic and story-telling style to approach many different topics (success, intuition, underdogs). He models a curious mind, and I, for one, am happy to go wherever his interests take him.

I have also followed authors who have written similar kinds of books. The books in Louise Penny’s mystery series centered on Chief Inspector Armand Gamache are quite alike, usually containing the same (or reoccurring) characters, mostly in the same locale (Quebec), using the same style. Yet she manages freshness in plot and superb characterization that makes us care about the people in her stories, book after book.

Yet sometimes after reading a couple books from the same author, I move on. Part of that may be due to taste. Or perhaps I’ve just gone deeply enough into a topic to suit my needs. But sometimes I just feel like I’ve read it before.

Publishers often see this reality in the declining sales of each new book by a previously successful author. It can be a conundrum for them as well. After working hard to establish a new author, they want to build on that—if they can without prompting tedium.

What if, as a writer, you have only one area of expertise and you’ve pretty much said everything you have to say in one book? To me, that’s ok. And if you desire to write more, there are plenty of other channels for shorter pieces like blogging, articles, contributing a chapter to an edited collection, short stories, poems and more.

And one of these may spark an idea for a book on something brand new.

Christmas in a Minor Key

Maybe you’ve noticed that a lot of Christmas music is in a minor key. Even many of our favorites.

  • What Child Is This?
  • O Come, O Come Immanuel
  • I Wonder as I Wander
  • Mary Did You Know

Every key has its own distinct color and mood. But since Christmas is a joyful time of year, we would think it calls for a solid, all-is-right-with-the-world major key, which it often does. Then why do so many carols make use of the sometimes mournful or uncertain tones of a minor key? Even something as cheery as “Carol of the Bells” is minor!

We can understand it for “O Come, O Come Immanuel” which focuses on the centuries that the people of Israel waited for a Messiah to come and rescue them from the oppression of other nations. A minor key can also convey a sense of mystery, which the story of God becoming human certainly contains.

But why does “We Three Kings” mix the minor-like Aeolian key with a chorus that is major? Is it to give the carol a Middle Eastern flavor in light of the magi coming from the east? Perhaps.

The text of this carol by John Henry Hopkins Jr. may also give us a clue. The five tightly constructed standard five verses include an introductory and closing verse. The three verses in the middle are each devoted to one of the three gifts, each in the voice of a different wise man.

“Gold I bring to crown him again,” declares this first. This verse is appropriately upbeat, noting how gold is associated with kingship and, in this case, a king whose reign will last forever.

The second gift, frankincense, is burned in worship, giving a pungent odor that reminds us both of God’s presence and of our prayers rising to God. As the second wise man says:

Incense owns a Deity nigh;
Prayer and praising, voices raising,
Worshiping God on high.

It’s when we get to myrrh that the minor key truly comes in to play. This spice was commonly used when burying the dead, including Jesus’ burial (John 19:39). Thus:

. . . its bitter perfume
breathes a life of gathering gloom;
sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying,
sealed in the stone-cold tomb.

Here we find the reason a minor key is sometimes employed. Christmas carols often point out that the Incarnation is a necessary prelude to the cross. “I Wonder As I Wander,” for example, explicitly opens with the question of why the Savior was born only to die.

The last verse of “We Three Kings” doesn’t stop at the cross, however. It completes the story by looking forward to the resurrection even as it summarizes the previous three:

Glorious now behold him arise;
King [gold] and God [frankincense] and sacrifice [myrrh].

We rightly celebrate the joy of Christmas and the promise brought by the Prince of Peace. Yet it is a story that is deeply human as well as deeply divine, mixing both sorrow and joy. The mixture makes the joy much more than a superficial happiness, but something that is deep and lasting.

The Problem of the Anonymous Author

Everyone who has tried to get a book published recently knows the question every publisher will eventually ask: “What’s your platform?” That is, how well known are you? Will you be able to let lots of people know about your book once it’s published? Do you speak to groups regularly, and if so, how many? Do you have a prominent professional position or a large following in social media? If you don’t, publishers aren’t usually interested.

Once upon a time, publishers could successfully sell books of not-so-famous authors through the thousands of bookstores spread around the country. But with the rise of e-sales and the resulting demise of two-thirds of all brick-and-mortar book shops, publishers have had to rely more and more on authors to make a book known.

But what if the content of your book means you need to remain anonymous. Maybe you have a memoir in the works, but you don’t want to directly expose sensitive information about those close to you, information like past addictions or trauma.

Maybe (more intriguingly) you are a whistleblower. If your identity in a particular organization were to become public, then you might expose yourself to retaliation. Nonetheless, publishers want the author out there in person, using your real name to promote the book. Otherwise they won’t touch the project.

What’s the solution?

One option is to find a coauthor with a platform who could be the public face for the book. Ideally your coauthor would have some credentials in the main topic of your book. If addictions or trauma is involved, then teaming with a psychologist might make sense. If corporate misdoings are the focus, then a business writer could work. Having a coauthor with an established platform can even help you get published even if you don’t need or want to be anonymous.

Pairing with someone who will do all the promotion and who will already be well-known could mean your coauthor gets more than half of the royalty—even if you write half or more of the book. But hopefully the book will do at least twice as well as an anonymous solo effort. So you should break even or better.

In fact, having a coauthor could make the difference between being published and not being published at all.

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Image by Irina L from Pixabay

The Best in the Business

As an executive at a publishing house for decades I read dozens of business books. Some I read for my own interest. Others were assigned to me by my boss for our team to read.

Too many of these were filled with abstract ideas, gave few examples of how to put the theory into practice, had longs lists of to-do’s, were based too much on one person’s experience, or simply had too few ideas.

The best of them kept their audience firmly in mind. The authors knew their readers were busy people who needed fresh, practical ideas on specific topics. They had to keep the attention of people who were distracted by dozens of problems needing immediate attention, people who wanted help—right now. How did they do that?

1. Stories. Some business books (which shall be nameless to protect the guilty) give theory or outlines without engaging the human element. Stories engage our passions. But they also use stories to make principles concrete. Often we don’t know how to put an idea into practice in our own context until we see an example even if it is in a completely different setting.

One of the most memorable pieces of leadership advice I ever read was in First, Break All the Rules. Counterintuitively the authors said not to spend a lot of time trying to fix weaknesses in employees. Rather concentrate on their strengths and on your best employees. That seemed odd to me until they told a concrete story of Jean P. whose average for data entry was 50% higher than the national average. Her manager helped her set goals to improve and track her progress. In three months she doubled her performance. So she set new goals and in six months she doubled that! (p. 177)

Suddenly the point became clear. Rather than spending a lot of time trying to get five average people on the team to improve by 10%, far more could be achieved by giving focused attention to star performers (in data entry or sales or case loads). When I read that, I got it! And it transformed how I managed.

2. Practical. The best books don’t open with several chapters of theory and then offer concrete advice at the end. Rather they mix theory and practice in every chapter. Unless readers feel they will get something they can use right away, they will give up on the book.

3. Substance. I am often annoyed by business books which “are magazine articles with a very high view of themselves.”* Books that stretch out a single, thin idea are exasperating. They waste my time. While most readers won’t tolerate a thick, academic approach, they do want something that is based on solid research which has been distilled in a way that doesn’t talk down to them. Which brings us to the next point.

4. Simplicity. It’s hard to put something into practice that you can’t remember. It’s also hard to put something into practice that is overly complicated. Don’t get me wrong. I love subtly and nuance and balance and sophistication in everything I read. Sometimes I’m able to gather the main points myself. But it is so much better if authors could do that for us.

One of the best business books I’ve read is, under the surface, a manual on how to write a business book. Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath is for those who have an important message to convey—teachers, sales managers, team leaders, coaches, writers, parents, entrepreneurs talking to investors, yes, . . . and those writing business books.

They highlight six points which they summarize in a memorable acronym SUCCES—Simplicity, Unexpectedness, Concreteness, Clarity, Emotion, Stories. And they practice what they preach, using all six of these features in their book to explain each of the six points.

No one formula is right for every book. But if you are able to incorporate even some of the elements the Heath brothers encourage, regardless of the kind of book you are writing, then you’ll definitely be in business.

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*As my friend Steve Board once put it.

The Stories Publishers Tell

The story of Christian publishing in the last hundred years is one of spunky start-ups and massive conglomerates, of individual faith and social movements, of passing fads and foundational convictions. It is also a story little told.

Helping fill that gap is Chasing Paper edited by independent scholar Stephanie Derrick. With forewords by Mark Noll and Philip Yancey as well as twenty brief essays (disclosure: including one I wrote), we hear from key participants whose work helped shape not only their publishing houses but also thousands of books issued in the last sixty years.

I was most impressed by the international scope of the collection. The global range of the enterprise is well represented with inside looks at Christian publishing in Brazil, sub-Saharan Africa, Pakistan, the Philippines, Peru, Vatican City, Canada, England, and the United States. The variety of religious communities is also significant, including Catholic as well as Protestant mainline, evangelical, African-American, and Pentecostal.

Most contributors take the approach of memoir, which allows for appropriate storytelling that makes for a quite readable volume. But they do not neglect the social, cultural, economic, and religious context of their work. These broader reflections are illuminating. The authors also relay the specific strategies they employed, strategies which could trigger creative and effective ideas for publishers and authors today who have different contexts with different but similar difficulties.

Peter Dwyer of Liturgical Press, for example, recalled how a dozen years ago he divided the challenges they faced into short-term (the economy of the Great Recession), medium-term (the business model required to deal with e-publishing and Amazon), and long-term (the Catholic Church with its clergy shortage and abuse scandals). Joseph Sinasac’s piece on publishing in Canada also offers a valuable array of strategies for facing the sea changes of recent decades.

Publishers love giving authors an opportunity to tell their stories. Here’s a book that gives publishers a chance to tell their own.

The Future of Writing

“The art of prophecy is very difficult, especially with respect to the future.”*

That is no less true in the world of writing and publishing than in politics or business. What will be the hot topics of the next year or decade? Few predicted two years ago that we’d see a huge resurgence of such backlist books as  Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez, Albert Camus’s The Plague, and A Journal of the Plague Year (1722!) by Daniel Defoe.

Should we try to be current or should we aim to be evergreen? When trying to figure out what to write next, it can be a difficult question. In general, I think we should avoid the current or trendy unless that new fad happens to hit our sweet spot—something we already have some experience with, interest in, or knowledge of.

A corollary is that we probably shouldn’t worry whether our interests are in favor or not with the reading public. We should write about what interests us. You can’t fake enthusiasm. Your passion will capture readers.

Roger Burlingame wrote in 1946: “A few years ago there were resurrections of the Brontës, Anthony Trollope and Jane Austen, whose novels of manners presumably belong to an area on which the door had definitely shut… So it is never safe to say that a book or a genre is dead or fatally dated.”** And the Jane Austen revival seems to have had remarkable staying power even to this day.

If something out of date or passé interests you, don’t worry about it. Write what you care about. Write with excellence. And see what happens.

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*This phrase or variations of it have been identified as a Chinese or Danish proverb, and also attributed to Mark Twain, Samuel Goldwyn, Nostradamus, and others. But it likely originated with physicist Niels Bohr. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/10/20/no-predict/

**Roger Burlingame, Of Making Many Books, (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University PRess, 1946, 1996), p. 328.

Originality Is Overrated

I long to be creative and fresh, offering new ideas and new ways of saying things that are arresting and stimulating. When I see a painting that is startling in the new perspective it offers, when I watch a movie that exudes inventiveness, when I read a book that is original and captivating—I am invigorated, and yearn to do the same.

Yet if I go just a bit deeper into these creative efforts, I invariably find that they begin with something decidedly unoriginal. They begin with “something borrowed.” Shrek is one of my favorite films. It offers a fun, revisionist twist on many fairy tales . . . but there it is! The movie borrows fairy tales and gives them a new take (ogre as hero).

Whole genres even borrow from prior genres. Don’t many sci fi books and movies owe a great debt of gratitude to the old Western? What is different is combining two genres into one.

The past (Homer, Dante, Chaucer, Cervantes, Austen, Achebe) offers inspiration for the future. So we should immerse ourselves in the past, mine the past, and consider how the past might serve us by giving it a twist or by mingling pieces which have not been connected before.

But there is another advantage. The past can give our writing a heft, a substance, a weight that we can’t generate on our own. If I can effectively employ Tolstoy’s motifs, themes, images, or language, my work automatically begins to rise.

Don’t worry about stealing. Everyone does it. All the greats themselves borrowed from others. Michaelangelo borrowed from the Romans. Milton borrowed from Dante. George Lucas borrowed from Kurosawa. Kurosawa borrowed from John Ford.*

It’s impossible not to borrow. Yet we don’t want shallow imitatations; rather our aim is to build anew on the old.

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*See Andrew T. Le Peau, Mark Through Old Testament Eyes (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Academic, 2017), pp. 13-16.

Screenshot: Lucasfilm, The Mandalorean

Dante and Darth Vader

With the 700th anniversary of the death of Dante this month, I read his Inferno for the first time. Much was as expected, yet I was surprised as well.

I knew that in the book Dante is taken on a tour of hell with the ancient Roman poet Virgil as his guide. The best-known line, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,” greeted me as it greeted Dante on entering the underworld. There he found descending circles of the damned for such sins as lust, greed, violence, fraud, and betrayal.

Dante was not only a poet but a political figure in Florence around the year 1300. So he achieves a certain measure of revenge while in exile by writing his epic and describing the gruesome punishments of his enemies. He and Virgil also meet other political, financial, and religious notables from that era of Italian history.

What surprised me was that they also encounter not only those from ancient Greek history but also from Greek mythology. At first this seemed to be an odd syncretism, a strange mixture of two religions. On reflection, however, I think this was Dante’s attempt to integrate everything into his Christian world view. For him, even pagan myths must submit to the Christian story.

It would be like integrating the Star Wars universe or the world of Harry Potter into a biblical cosmology, where Darth Vader and Dumbledore both find themselves under the sway of a powerful Creator God who nonetheless uses sacrifice to resolve all storylines, reconcile all things, renew hope, and make everything right.

Christian theology, as it should, often sees history in God’s hands, how he oversees and guides events for his purposes. We also need to read, see, and hear artists tell stories that show how all the tales of human imagination reflect and bow to the Great Story.

That is a journey for which Dante acts as our guide.

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Dante image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay; Darth Vader image by Voltordu from Pixabay

Mr. Ryan’s Class

Propped up on a desk in the front row of the room, thirty-something Mr. James Ryan sat silently surveying my high school English class. I was a junior on the first day of school. The first minute of class. We quieted down waiting to see what he would say. Would he introduce himself? Tell us about class requirements? Have us open a book?

“Are there any questions?” he began.

We were even more silent now. Questions about what? What was he talking about? We were confused. At least I was.

After waiting a moment and hearing nothing, he said, “Ok, then,” and with a wry smile that impishly suggested we had had our chance and wasted it, he began.

Many people have had a teacher or coach who had a major impact. Someone who believed in us when we didn’t believe in or even know ourselves, someone who made a subject captivating that we previously thought was dull as a spoon. Mr. Ryan would become that teacher for me.

Over fifty years later I still remember things he taught us, ideas and practices that have continued to affect my life as a writer and editor.

Consider vocabulary. He exposed us to a wide range of words each with a nuance of meaning that made literature and writing richer and deeper. Memorizing word lists sometimes seemed tedious. But he showed how word selection matters. It can make a huge difference in the power of a paragraph.

Overwhelm is such a great word, he told us. It is a combination of “over” (as in turn over) and “helm” (as in the tiller of a boat). To be over-helmed, then is to be capsized, to be in danger of drowning. Think about how you might use that word, he urged. Not to talk about a delicious new ice cream flavor or when we missed the latest episode of Batman. Instead, we should use it when our world or our perspective on something important has been turned upside down, when we are at least momentarily out of control.

Tone was another key topic he introduced us to—how a piece of writing works on you at a deep level. More than just the ideas or information, the tone can make a piece powerful, memorable, significant. For fifty years I have tried (not always succeeding) to develop tone in my writing and help authors do the same.

That’s where the chapter on tone came from in Write Better. That’s where I learned of the magic and weight of words. That’s where my lifelong journey into creativity, ideas, and story took hold of me. From Mr. James Ryan.

Who was an influential teacher, coach, or relative in your life?

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Image by Wokandapix from Pixabay

Comparisonitis

All of us have our insecurities. Perhaps those of us who are writers are above average in this regard.

We hesitate to write. We then hesitate to show anyone what we have written. Then we are reluctant to submit it for publication. Then we doubt anyone will like it if published. Finally, we are distressed that our publisher seems to have promoted another author’s book more—and more successfully—than ours!

That way madness lies.

Over a hundred and twenty years ago, Edith Wharton, the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize, also suffered from this common malady. In 1899 she wrote to her publisher,

I do not think I have been fairly treated as regards the advertising of “The Great Inclination.” The book has now been out six weeks, & I do not think I exaggerate in saying that it has met with an unusually favourable reception for a first volume by a writer virtually unknown. . . . I have naturally watched with interest the advertising of the book, & have compared it with the notices given by other prominent publishers of books appearing under the same conditions. [Others] advertise almost continuously. . . . If a book is unnoticed, or unfavourably received, it is natural that the publisher should not take much trouble about advertising it; but to pursue the same course towards a volume that has been generally commended, seems to me essentially unjust. (117-18)

This letter, excerpted in Roger Burlingame’s Of Making Many Books, is but one of many such examples the author found in Scribner’s correspondence files. He discovered several cases in which Author A would write complaining that he got less advertising that author B. Yet Author B made the same complaint regarding Author A!

Comparisonitis has plagued humanity not just for a century but for millennia. None of us is immune. Sadly we have no magic cure.

One discipline may ameliorate the condition, however. I mention it in Write Better. Gratitude. Remembering to give thanks for all we have been given can redirect our focus from what others have that we do not. We can tamp down our lesser angels by regularly, daily, asking what good things are in my life or what was a highlight of the day.

Certainly we are better off giving energy to our writing than to our insecurities.

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Image by MorningbirdPhoto from Pixabay