So, ssh, don’t tell anyone, but I’m still learning about this big ol’ publishing world. Thanks to a subscription to Publisher’s Weekly, I’m learning pretty quickly, but every week I find myself facing some new challenge that reminds me how unpredictable the book business can be.
Book publishing is dependent on the new. As a general rule, New York Times bestselling lists are filled with books that were released within the last year-and-a-half. And what this means is that publishers are always facing the same, never-ending question: what do people want to read today?
You’ve probably noticed this already, but Canon doesn’t publish a ton of new books every year. Currently, we’ve only got three books on the release schedule for this year, and two of them aren’t even new books (the updated editions of The Book Tree and Latin Primer 1). Last year we only released three new titles (Protocol Matters, Faith of Our Fathers, and The Baptized Body). If we were always thinking about “today,” books like Against Christianity and Fierce Wars and Faithful Loves would have been cast aside long ago.
We’re by no means against publishing new books—we even have a few more up our sleeves that we’ll be announcing this summer. It’s just that we like to carefully choose which books we publish, to make sure that what we release is as applicable tomorrow as it is today. What’s more, we believe that it’s important for us to know who our authors are. This is why we don’t accept unsolicited manuscripts. If we’re going to take the time and the resources to publish a book, we want to be sure that not only is the book worth reading, but the author himself is above reproach.
The truth is, much of my time as “Sales & Marketing Manager” is spent working with older titles. And while that sounds counter-intuitive, it’s actually proven worthwhile. See, the usual “Canon Press” story goes like this. Someone picks up one of our books (Reforming Marriage or Easy Chairs, Hard Words), and their interest is piqued. They want to read more by this Douglas Wilson. And so they stop by canonpress.com and buy a few more books.
The truth is, many readers are like this. Even I am like this. When I stumble upon an author I like (say, Annie Dillard or W.H. Auden or Peter Leithart), I genuinely want to read everything that person has written. Why? Because I’ve read something in them that speaks to me, and they’ve gained my trust. They’ve written things—maybe a paragraph, or just on sentence—that has me convinced that I can trust what they say, and that it’s definitely worth my time to sit down and find out what else they have to say.
Forgive me if this all sounds like “Self-Appreciation Day” or arrogance. That’s not my intent at all. My point is this: we offer a decent selection of books, and nearly all of them are books that we would reprint in a heartbeat. They’re even books that we consider worth re-reading. Which is why we don’t have to be constantly worrying about what people are reading today. Because tomorrow, they’re going want Future Men, or Mother Kirk, or whatever it was that first spoke to them and gained their trust.