Author Frederick Buechner describes a "calling" as a place where a person's deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet. Five young editors in religion publishing have found their calling: bringing books into the world. A sense of vocation informs their work of finding manuscripts, nurturing authors and sending books into a marketplace that seems especially hungry for spiritual wisdom.
"One of the reasons I went into publishing was I wanted to do some kind of good in the world," said Julianna Gustafson, 29, editor at Jossey-Bass. "To give people books that could be a map for their spiritual journey felt like a way to make a great contribution." Her six and half years at Jossey-Bass, where she first started as an intern while attending Westmont College in Santa Barbara, Calif., have helped Gustafson hone her sense about the power books have in people's lives. Though she began her career working on J-B's business books, in early 2002 she began editing and acquiring for the house's Religion in Practice line, desiring to do books that would "go more into the core of another person's being," she explained. "I want to find books that speak to people of faith no matter where they are on the denominational spectrum."
Gustafson doesn't sort readers she's trying to reach or titles she publishes by doctrine or denomination, but she does believe readers need different books, depending on how developed their spiritual lives are. "Some people are looking for books that help them shape their spiritual practice," she said. "Others are not ready to dive in but want something to open up their way of thinking about spirituality." Her favorite project of the 15 or so she's now working on is aimed at the latter audience. Scheduled for spring 2004, What Would Buffy Do? The Vampire Slayer as Spiritual Guide by PW religion Forecasts editor Jana Riess, "can talk about spiritual issues and tie them into pop culture," said Gustafson.
As with Gustafson, internship and inner direction brought Al Hsu into religion publishing. "I felt a sense of calling," said Hsu, 30, associate editor for general books at Intervarsity Press. Religion book publishing was a way to unite his two interests in books and faith. He attended Minnesota Bible College, where he thought about majoring in journalism but also considered going into the pastorate. It was in college that he encountered IVP books. "Consistently over my college career I was so impressed with them as substantive, evangelical, thoughtful," he said.
After graduation, Hsu was studying for a master's in communications at Wheaton College, very near the Westmont, Ill., publishing house, when the door of opportunity opened quickly and unexpectedly. "My second week at Wheaton my adviser told me there was an internship at IVP," Hsu said. He landed that spot, and after graduating from Wheaton in 1996 he started regular employment at IVP, beginning in a temporary job. He's held five jobs in four different departments, on both the marketing and editorial sides. Today he describes his function in words that reflect his earlier desire to pastor. "I'm very pleased to be part of the ministry of books," he said.
Arriving by Indirection
Others discerned a vocational call to writing, but first worked in fields other than publishing. Denise Silvestro, 34, senior editor of religious publishing at Berkley/Penguin, discarded law school as an option, studied literature and writing at New York University and started out as a writer for the television show Good Morning America. At the show, she worked with a producer who booked authors, and through a series of contacts she moved into book publishing. Silvestro began at Pocket Books in 1989, working with reprints by such evangelical Christian authors as Gary Smalley and John Trent. She moved to Berkley in 1995, and her previous experience made her a natural to help develop a list of religion authors when the house decided to look around outside the general market for authors whose message was reaching large numbers of people, like one of her first authors, Bishop T.D. Jakes (The Lady, Her Lover and Her Lord; God's Leading Lady). But her acquisitions cut across a wide theological spectrum, including Catholic titles and more general spirituality books. "What I look for when I acquire an author is, do they have something to say, and can I help them get that message out?" Silvestro said.
Silvestro also works in general nonfiction with authors who are experts in a variety of fields. She sees herself helping all of them express their message in the form of a book. "I really enjoy working with authors who are not necessarily writers," she said. "What I can do is help them say what they have to say so it's in their voice and it's authentic. My big commitment is not to alter what they're trying to say."
Following her graduation from Lipscomb University in Nashville, Ami McConnell of W Publishing needed only a year to figure out that teaching high school English was not the best way to pursue her passion for the written word. "I really enjoyed teaching writing, but teenagers are so nuts," she said with a laugh. "I'm really a reader response person—me interacting with the written word—and my job in publishing works beautifully, with me interacting with someone creative." McConnell, 32, director of fiction and senior editor at W Publishing, began her publishing career at Thomas Nelson Books, worked as a freelance editor and joined W Publishing (a unit of Thomas Nelson Inc.) in 1997. She initially worked with both nonfiction and fiction, but "it began to be evident that my interest was really in fiction," she explained. "Now I don't do any nonfiction."
When she acquires, McConnell is quite clear on what she's looking for. "We need entertaining reads," she said. "In addition, we like for them to be edifying, and we need not to disappoint commercially." Quality is important, McConnell adds. Her authors include such A-listers as thriller writers Ted Dekker, Robert Whitlow and Terri Blackstock and romance author Karen Kingsbury.
Elda Rotor's work as acquisitions editor in Oxford University Press's trade division for humanities allows her to focus on religion and literary studies. It's an exciting place to be for someone who loves words and writes poetry as a "quiet side job." With 10 years of experience already, Rotor, 32, has been at Oxford for almost her entire professional life, coming there only a year after her graduation from George Washington University. That seasoning has provided her with the confidence to know what will fit OUP's list and what will work in the market. Her pet project now is a series on Christianity's seven deadly sins, works tied to lectures given at the New York Public Library by seven high-profile writers, among them Joseph Epstein, Francine Prose and Simon Blackburn. "It's been a great experience pitching the ideas I have," Rotor said. "We know exactly what would fit our list."
Harmony of the Whole
Just as a sense of call marks the careers of these five editors, so does the sense of an opportunity to use and deepen personal faith. But their faiths—and how those commitments inform professional judgments—vary widely.
"Growing up in a Protestant home, I was born and bred on 'what does scripture mean?'" said W Publishing's McConnell, raised in Charleston, S.C. Her experience in publishing has changed her personal religious expression to the point where she now describes herself as a "high church liturgical" Christian. "When you're in religion publishing you get such perspective," McConnell said, "and it's tremendously helpful in your own personal orientation."
Gustafson at Jossey-Bass also has experienced faith evolution. "I grew up pretty fundamentalist Christian and then in college had this sort of awakening where I needed to make my faith my own, so I ended up being confirmed in the Episcopal Church," she said.
Hsu at IVP also described a mix of religious influences, laughingly calling himself a "broadly evangelical mutt. That also fits IVP as a publisher," he added more seriously, "and I very much appreciate that we publish across a wide variety of denominational spectrums." Hsu's convictions and his personal experiences also enter explicitly into his work as an author. He wrote The Grieving of Suicide (IVP, 2002) in the wake of his father's death. His Asian ancestry prompts his interest in what he calls "multiethnic" books, and it figured into his first book, Singles at the Crossroads (1997). "One of the views I wanted to add was that from a global perspective arranged marriages are not that big a deal," he said.
Rotor's ethnicity and religion—she is Filipino-American and Catholic—also affects how she approaches the world and the work of publishing. "Certainly being Filipino, New Yorker, American, a woman—all of that comes into play for me," she said. "I grew up Catholic and consider myself a spiritual person. I am generally fascinated by people's desire to understand human nature and by the universal attempt to lead a good life whether guided by spiritual or secular beliefs."
Berkley's Silvestro eschews faith labels and tries hard to not filter the words of her authors through her own religious beliefs. She says, paradoxically enough, that her sense of commitment to her authors is faith-based. "I think it would be doing a disservice to authors to let my faith influence their work," she said. "Because my faith is very, very important to me, I know how important faith is to my authors, and I want to maintain the integrity of their beliefs."
My Generation?
These younger professionals offer different opinions about how their age and peers influence their work. At age 34, Silvestro doesn't even feel herself a part of the generation growing up with reading text on screen instead of in a book. "I didn't have a computer in college, and we were raised with books," she said. "I edit for a broad readership and don't focus my work on a generation."
IVP's Hsu recalled taking part in a Gen-X Christianity conference at which the moderator asked if the book was dead. "The most significant e-commerce entity," responded Hsu, "is Amazon.com, selling paper books. Despite what everybody says about the decline of the independent bookstore, people are reading."
"This Gen-X thing, really," said Jossey-Bass's Gustafson with exasperation. "I have an author who keeps insisting he's writing for the sound bite generation, and nobody I know wants to think of themselves as the sound bite generation." She and her friends and peers, whom she describes as glasses-wearing reading geeks, "all lament how little people read in general, but I think there is a strong group of readers out there."
Rotor at OUP believes authors and editors need to be culturally engaged in order for a book to have something to say to today's readers. "I think you have to be very engaged to maintain any relevance, and relevant is something I really think about when I acquire books," she said.
W's McConnell views the book as a kind of physical container for story. Because story is such a basic human impulse and so concrete, she finds it important to be able to touch and hold a book. "Lit-up screens and Palm pilots?" she asked. "There's no way the book is going away. Story is central to the way we experience things. I would put all my money on books."
