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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The Future of Editing 1: Everyone Needs an Editor

Jim Sire, my predecessor at IVP as editorial director, loved to tell the story of a book review he had drafted. He showed it to Paul to look over before he sent it off to a journal.

Paul told him, “Here you say the book has merit but wasn’t evocative enough. What you actually write, however, is, ‘The book isn’t suggestive enough.’ That actually has a very different meaning than the one I think you intend! I doubt you mean that the book fails to contain adequate sexual innuendo.”
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Books That Can Change Lives

On November 3, I was honored at the annual InterVarsity Fall Leadership Meetings in recognition of my 42 years with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and my upcoming retirement in February. About seventy key people from across the country in InterVarsity attended. After hearing some generous comments from Interim President Jim Lundgren and IVP Publisher Bob Fryling, they let me offer a few words. Here is what I said.

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Questions Academic Authors Should Ask (1)

Sometimes academic authors come to me as an editor with questions about book publishing. Too often they do not. They simply have their proposed manuscript to present. As a result, they sometimes make missteps on the road to publication. As we approach the season of academic conferences where I will be meeting dozens of prospective authors, here are some questions they should be asking.
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An Un-Business Book

Leadership and Self-Deception is one of the most unusual business books I’ve ever read. It’s a parable or fictional story, but that’s not what made it different. A number of business books have taken that approach in recent years.

What surprised me was that I found nothing in this book about strategy, tactics, mission statements, creativity, disintermediation, Hedgehogs, BHAGs or getting the right people on the bus. It didn’t talk about innovation or being customer focused or how we live in a totally new normal.
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