Book endorsements can be a seedy business

Plus: A church that gave up on being the church, a brand-new outlet launched by my former colleagues at The Week, and more

Good morning! It’s Wednesday, and here are this week’s five items for you.

In this post, paid subscribers will receive:

1. the rest of the first item

2. a church that gave up on being the church

3. a book I do endorse

4. some recent work, including my piece at a brand-new climate outlet, Heatmap News, launched by my fellow The Week alums Nico Lauricella and Jeva Lange!

5. a British folk muralist whose work I love

If you’re not already a paid subscriber, please consider upgrading to read the whole post—and to support my work.

---

1. A take I haven’t written elsewhere

Book endorsements can be a seedy business

Not my endorsements, obviously. But elsewhere …

Evangelical and adjacent Twitter circles were consumed over the last week by controversy over an article published, then retracted, by The Gospel Coalition (TGC). The article in question—which analogized salvation to sex—is not what I want to discuss here, though you’ll get the gist of the situation from this piece by

Katelyn Beaty

for Christianity Today:

Katelyn Beaty @KatelynBeaty

Amid the TGC article dustup, some people are surprised that a couple book endorsers hadn't read the full book. But that's exactly in line with the way endorsements work in Christian publishing these days. And that's a problem. My piece for @CTmagazine

christianitytoday.comThe Problem with Christian Book EndorsementsPublishers and authors have played along by pushing celebrity blurbs—but it’s time to rewrite the rules of promotion.

This is a worthwhile read on a dynamic well-known among authors but probably veiled for a lot of the reading public, and Beaty—now editorial director at Brazos Press, which published Untrustworthy, and a twice-published author herself—is well-situated to pull back the curtain. She writes:

As criticisms [of the TGC article] mounted, ministry leader Dennae Pierre and pastor Rich Villodas publicly retracted their [endorsements of the forthcoming book from which it was excerpted]. Pierre said she had written hers “based on training [the author] had done for local pastors” and had done a “quick skim” of the book. Villodas said a mutual friend had invited him to endorse the book: “I agreed to the favor, but in poor judgment, read only 25-30% of it.”

It was good for Pierre and Villodas to admit they hadn’t fully read a book that will feature their names, at least on the first printing. Their retractions are a wake-up call for book buyers: Endorsements aren’t always about quality of writing or theological soundness. In practice, they aren’t even always an honest assessment of someone else’s work.

From there, Beaty explains how the endorsement process works and why some endorsers would tell a lie of omission by blurbing books they have not read. She covers that ground ably, so I figured I’d simply share my own experience with this aspect of publishing, which has been mostly—but not entirely—on the up-and-up.

With one exception I’ll discuss in a moment, I believe everyone who’s been willing to endorse my books has read them cover to cover. Potential endorsers have been up front with me about their time constraints, sometimes (rightfully!) declining my blurb requests when they knew they wouldn’t have time to do the reading.

If I recall correctly, I've generally been able to offer six to eight weeks of reading time to endorsers, which isn’t a lot when you factor in all the other reading writers will typically be doing in that span—reading for which they might actually get paid, unlike endorsement reading. If the endorser is a college professor, this is an especially big ask. If the deadline falls around the end of the semester … suffice it to say I am very much in some of my endorsers’ debt.