You Gots a Big Platform? I Make You a Deal.

A platform is a way to “get noticed in a noisy world,” to borrow from Michael Hyatt’s book of the same subtitle. Hunter Baker has a helpful critique of this idea.

Stop badgering would-be authors with applications designed to tease out how large their platforms are and spend more time locating the best manuscripts,” he writes. In the near future, he suggests a big platform will be the very reason speakers and authors will not submit their document to a traditional publisher. They will self-publish.


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Scot McKnight also has several questions about platform and current publishing tactics:

I get hundreds of books sent to me each year, many of them by people with a sizable platform, and I can say without reservation that the bigger the platform the less the author has to say (not always, but often). Big platform authors are guaranteed sales. They’re not guaranteed good content. I get books on my desk from no-name authors that have much better content than big-name authors. …

I know a pastor who was given a 3-book contract, a previously unpublished pastor, had no idea what he wanted to write about, but was told “We’ll take care of that by listening to your sermons.” At about the same time a young author sent me a manuscript that was rejected by the same publisher because he had no platform, but they did agree he had very good content.

All of this is troubling, but I don’t know what to recommend as a sane alternative. Aren’t there publishers who print what they believe to be the best manuscripts they receive? What success are they having? Should litblogs, like this one, have cutthroat review competitions to compare good vs. big platform books?

I'd know him anywhere

My favorite Christmas gift this year may have come from a total stranger. Digital artist Jeremiah Humphries produced the above drawing of Erling Skjalgsson, apparently, on a whim.

I like the use of light to suggest the hearth fire in the hall.

These are the moments that suggest to a writer that he hasn’t entirely wasted his time.

For more information on Mr. Humphries’ art, check out his blog.

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Vitae Lux

Today is St. Lucie’s Day, celebrated every year in Scandinavia (especially in Sweden) with morning processions of young girls, led by one special “Lucia” who wears a crown of candles. The video above is from Sissel’s televised Christmas concert with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir a few years back. Unfortunately for you, this is the Norwegian TV version, so her introduction is dubbed in Norwegian, which you probably can’t understand. But trust me, she’s talking about St. Lucie’s Day. The video’s also a little misleading, because the song she does here isn’t the traditional song for the ceremony, “Santa Lucia” (yes, the Italian one). But it’ll give you some idea of the thing. And it’s always nice to hear Sissel sing, whatever she does.

Happy Luciadagen!

Doug Wilson on Celebrity and Plagiarism

Author and pastor Doug Wilson has a lengthy post big-named Christians, ghostwriting, and plagiarism. He’s had to deal with plagiarism accusations in the past and he describes some of them:

One of my first books was one called Persuasions. In that book I have a character compare monogamy to buying a musical instrument and learning to play it, which is not like buying a record album and being stuck with listening to just one album over and over again. Years later I had a friend tell me he was disappointed that I had used C.S. Lewis’s analogy when he thought I was fully capable of coming up with my own. But I had no idea I was borrowing from Lewis. I am sure I got it from Lewis, and had used it in many witnessing conversations, and then when I wrote a book of witnessing encounters, in it went.

Other times I use something consciously. I conclude my weekly homily at the Lord’s Table with a phrase I got from John Bunyan — “come, and welcome, to Jesus Christ.” Should I feel bad about not saying, every week, “as Bunyan once said . . .”? But I don’t feel bad.

This reminds me of some devotional emails I used to write. One man praised my writing highly twice, both times after I had simply forwarded a portion of a Puritan prayer printed in The Valley of Vision. I thanked him, but wondered if he thought what I had just sent out was mine. I’m still not sure.

Tim Keller on Pastors Who Write

Author and pastor Tim Keller talks about writing as a pastor, recommending young pastors to give all of their time to their ministry and plan to write later. They can write short pieces now, if they feel compelled to write, but he suggests they wait for greater maturity before they tackle whole books. He also recommends reading:

That is far and away the most important discipline. You must read widely in general for years before you become capable of recognizing good writing. And then before you write a book on a subject, you should read 20 or 30 good books on the subject carefully and skim another 20 or 30. If you just read three or four (and refer to another three or four), your book will be largely a rehash and will offer few fresh insights.

Demonic Bullying

Missionaries supported by my church, Dave and Eowyn Stoddard, serve in Berlin. I urge you to pray for them and read this remarkable post on what Eowyn calls the bullying of demons. She writes:

Satan was not playing fair. Now the shock turned to anger. I scanned the recesses of my brain. What had seminary taught me about demonic activity? I couldn’t recall any class where we had discussed anything remotely similar to what we were experiencing. “Demonology 101” wasn’t even offered! But seminary did teach me not to panic in the face of theological conundrums. It gave me a lens through which I could see everything from the perspective of God’s sovereignty.

On the other side of 'Jorden'

Every Viking reenactor, unless their given name is something like Ulfljotr Bjørnhjaltrsson, needs to choose a Viking name. My first name was easy to figure out — “Halvdan” means “half Danish,” which is close enough for a Norwegian with one Danish grandfather. But for my last name (or patronymic, properly) I was thinking of using “Jordensson.” Because my father’s name was Jordan. I shall explain the spelling discrepancy.

My grandmother once told me she named my dad after a guy she knew growing up in Iowa. I assume that guy’s name was Jorden, which is a respectable Scandinavian name not related to the biblical river in any way. This guess is reinforced by the fact that, although Dad’s birth certificate (which I have somewhere around here) says “Jordan,” his baptismal certificate (which I’ve also got) spells it “Jorden.”

My problem is I’m not sure if Jorden is a Viking Age name. I did a little web searching, in English and Norwegian, trying to find the history of the name. How far back it goes.

To my surprise, it’s not listed in any of the Norwegian (or Danish; I checked) name lists. There’s one list which claimed to have every name carried by more than three people in Norway, and Jorden didn’t make it.

There are three guys named Jorden in America. A name search that came up told me so. But not in Norway.

So the name has gone out of fashion to an amazing degree in its homeland. This might have to do with embarrassment. “Jorden” means “earth” — in the senses of both the planet and dirt. Also it’s pronounced “urine,” which is awkward for English speakers. Which most Norwegians are nowadays.

Still, it amazed me.

Crouch: Plagiarism Isn't the Problem

Andy Crouch discusses the flak flying over some of Mark Driscoll’s publications. Sure, some material was used inappropriately, but is this a plagiarism problem? “There is something truly troubling here, in my view,” he writes. “Not that ‘Pastor Mark Driscoll’ carelessly borrowed a section of a commentary for a church-published Bible study, but that ‘Pastor Mark Driscoll’ was named as the sole author of that Bible study in the first place.”

He points to St. Paul’s use of scribes and partners and the unique credit given in Romans 16:22.

Prolific writer and author John Piper has taken to Twitter on this: “If lying is the ‘industry standard’ reject it. Come on, famous guys, if someone writes for you, put the plebe’s name on it.” For more, see Warren Throckmorton’s blog for many details.

Public service announcement

I figured it all out today. I was talking to a fellow in the library, and I got onto my little speech (which I’ve given in this space before) about the big difference between English and German.

German is famous for long, long words. But those words can be broken down into their constituent parts and analyzed by any moderately educated German speaker. This gives the language tremendous precision.

In English, our long words tend to be borrowed from Latin. And hardly any of us speak Latin anymore. So most of us don’t know what our long words mean.

This has contributed tremendously to the obfuscation of our discourse.

It makes it possible to sound very intelligent in English without making any sense whatever.

In other words, it has given us modernism.

So all we have to do to reclaim the culture is to start teaching Latin again.

There, I’ve figured it out. I leave it to you to work out the details.