The Key Question I Ask Authors

When people hand me a proposal or manuscript for a non-fiction book and ask me for a publishing opinion, we’ll talk about a number of issues. But I have one chief diagnostic question. Almost anything and everything an author has to say flows from the answer to this question. It tells writers what kind of vocabulary and images to use, how long the piece should be, how to organize the material, what to leave in, what to take out, and even where to try to publish it.

The question is this:
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Between the World and He

What is it like to grow up black and male in the United States? Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of the highly acclaimed Atlantic article on reparations, tells us in Between the World and Me, a memoir cum extended letter to his fifteen-year-old son. It is a life in which you don’t have final control over the most basic aspect of human existence–your own body. Your body can be thrown in prison or shot or just pushed aside at most any time for most any reason with little recourse.
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Enjoy a Week in the First Century

Want a quick, entertaining way to get a solid feel for what it was like to be in Roman-occupied Palestine? That’s what Gary Burge offers in A Week in the Life of a Roman Centurion. In this window into the world of the first century, we look through the eyes of Appius, a tough-minded, pragmatic Centurion. The story is enriched as we get to know his household, his familia. Livia, his companion, knows the power of her allure. Tullus is a captured slave with skill as a scribe who rises to a place of trust. Gaius is the manager of Appius’s affairs, organized and completely loyal to his lord.
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The Publishing Experience (2)

Does a fifty-year-old book on publishing have anything to offer the radically different publishing environment today? Cass Canfield’s The Publishing Experience, on his career at Harper from 1924 to 1986, is such a book. While his brief vignettes of many prominent authors are most fascinating and worthwhile quite on their own, along the way he also offers some precepts that guided his work, which still ring true decades later.
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Not Last, Maybe Least

I began my first post at Andy Unedited with these words: “To write a blog, you need to have an interesting personality or provocative opinions. I have neither.”

Nine years and over four hundred blogs later, it’s still true. My kids nicknamed me Eeyore. I reckon I have the emotional range of a turnip. And I am at my most passionate when it comes to commas.

Although February 12, 2016,

i-8cf98d2de7fe02b06ca7513781f9cc43-Andy's full shelves.jpg

is my last day at IVP after over forty years as a full-time employee and thousands of IVP books published, by the good graces of folks here at IVP, I shall continue Andy Unedited. I will, however, now don the guise of a guest blogger.

I have enjoyed the opportunity to inflict such opinions as I have on an unsuspecting public. So if there are topics you think I should address, continue to let me know. Books, ideas, publishing, writing, history, editing, leadership, scholarship–all these and more continue to be important to me, and I think important to society.

But blogging needs one other element–fun. And as long as that lasts, so shall Andy Unedited.

Photo credit: Cindy Bunch. My IVP office before I packed up my library of 2,500 IVP books and shipped them off to Christian students and seminary libraries in the Majority World.

The Future of Editing 2: Who Editors Need to Be

For me, editing has always been about loving words and loving ideas. Learning and thinking will always be important. Yet in a technology-saturated world with an ever-accelerating rate of change, we don’t know exactly what books and reading will be like in the future. We have a better idea, however, of who editors need to be in the future.
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