IVP - Addenda & Errata - A Current Reality

A Current Reality

In these dark days of winter (in the Seattle area, where I live), I daydream about the bright days of summer. And sailing. I will do anything to tie in sailing with publishing and editing. So here it goes.

In sailing Puget Sound in Washington State, a daily reality is the tidal currents that fill and flush this large and splintered body of inland water. In and out, twice a day, the sea water courses to and from the north Pacific. The smaller the gap between two islands or peninsulas in The Sound, the stronger and faster the current. Just think of pinching down on the end of a water hose and you get the idea. Thanks to the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), we have precisely calibrated if somewhat complex charts of these tides and currents—their times of ebb and flood, the tide heights and the current speeds at crucial points in Puget Sound and northward into the San Juan Islands and beyond. Disregard this data and your sailing cruise will be marred with episodes of futility. I know.

A couple of summers ago with some friends I was attempting to sail north through Presidents Channel, a gap between Orcas and Waldron Islands in the San Juans. The breeze was pleasant, the sails were full, the boat was heeling moderately, and the knot meter, which measures the speed of the water passing by the hull, was reading maybe five knots. Mighty fine. But looking at the coastline, it just didn’t seem like we were getting anywhere. One of us had the bright idea of consulting the GPS, which measures our actual speed “over the ground.” Our speed was 0.0 knots per hour. We were on a sailing treadmill, traveling against a serious current! Enough of that! We turned the boat into the direction of the current and sailed around the other side of the island, where the current was not nearly as strong and we could make modest progress.

I’ve since become a serious student of the tide and current charts and try to plan my routes and departures accordingly. There’s no point in leaving earlier if you will be fighting the current the first few hours. And at other times you need to rouse the crew before the crack of dawn to catch the current moving in your direction. The best days of sailing are when the wind and current are moving you in the same direction. Five knots of wind-driven speed along with a two-knot current might add up to seven knots per hour, which in sailing is very fine indeed! This can literally make a difference of hours in travel, not to speak of the attitudes of skipper and crew.

The parallels with publishing are several, but I’ll just mention an obvious one: publishing a book at just the right cultural moment. Some authors get all the breaks, and hit it right on the maximum speed of current. Others catch it on the slack current. Like a sailor, you can have your booky sails trimmed perfectly, your lines of prose and argument wonderfully crisp and clean, but if the cultural current is not moving in your direction, you might find your book traveling at 0.0 knots. Publicity efforts and advertising budget seem to take it nowhere.

There was a time, for example (was it back in the 80s?), when conventional books on apologetics didn’t seem to move any more. There was also a time when I was sure books on C. S. Lewis had exhausted their claim on readers. But in recent years the current seems to have carried some of these books away as quickly as we could launch them (though I suspect the Lewis current might be going slack now).

Of course, if your booky boat is too late in being built and launched, the current may have turned and the opportunity lost. Unfortunately, for cultural tides and currents we have no reliable book of tables to consult! How many times have we at IVP looked back and said, “That book came out at just the right time” (Here’s to our cleverness!) or “That book came out after interest in the topic had peaked” (Clearly the author’s fault!).

Occasionally, an author and a publisher will collaborate to strike rapidly while the current is building (e.g., the release of The Gospel of Judas and the surrounding media hype, or the release of The Da Vinci Code movie—both instances in which a major media corporation is providing the real marketing propellant)—writing and publishing quickly. This is the publishing equivalent of rousing the crew to catch the 4:56 A.M. current. But that’s not the norm, and a topic pregnant with another blog. Sometimes, with the cultural current past maximum speed, it’s time to take another tack and do the book that summarizes and assesses what’s happened and what we can learn. Or it’s time to revise that textbook to take into account the new developments.

Maybe it’s the nature of the case that we see these convergences of books and currents best in hindsight. But the shrewd author (and editor) will study the cultural—or academic—currents that flow through their cruising grounds. Despite his or his editor’s disquieting thoughts on books and study, Qohelet might have put it thus:

There’s a time to write and a time to rewrite;
a time to ponder and a time to publish;
a time to configure and a time to reconfigure.

Over the long haul I’ve learned to put my editorial trust in the Divine Council of Special Providence. And there’s another side to this picture—the prophet who is called to go against the current, even if means going 0.0 knots. At IVP we publish prophets too. But they’d better be true prophets!

Posted by Dan Reid at January 8, 2008 12:50 PM