InterVarsity Press Launches New Line for Young Adults

By Donna Freitas -- Publishers Weekly, 6/28/2006

“We’ve always been affiliated with the college student group,” said David Zimmerman, associate editor at InterVarsity Press—an outgrowth of the Christian campus ministry InterVarsity Fellowship—explaining the decision to launch Likewise, a new line of books geared toward young adults in college and their early twenties. “We are trying to empower this particularly activist generation and age, when people are more inclined to be audacious in their faith, by providing them resources to be thoughtfully active and actively thoughtful.”

The logo for the new line—a graphic of a man pulling a donkey with the words, “LIKEWISE. Go and do,” underneath, was inspired by the parable of the Good Samaritan. Speaking of the man who helps another in dire need, Jesus tells a man looking for eternal life to “go and do likewise.”

IVP is developing Likewise by going directly to its audience for ideas. In June, Brooke Nolen, Andrew Bronson and David Zimmerman, the Likewise publishing team, held what they called The Gathering at their offices in suburban Chicago. “It was a literal gathering together of the cultural architects and thought leaders within the line’s target generation,” Zimmerman said. Most of those invited to attend (all potential authors) were under thirty, added Nolen, the line’s publicist.

Likewise also aims to be likeminded in the way it markets to younger readers. “Large bookstore chains will not comprise the lion’s share of our efforts,” said Bronson, special market sales and marketing manager for the line. “We need to get in front of this generation’s eyes, which are online. Our biggest priority will be the blogosphere.”

The marketing push culminates at Urbana ’06, InterVarsity’s annual December student missions convention, when the Likewise sampler—one chapter each from five books releasing this fall, including an excerpt from Blessed Are the Uncool by Paul Grant—is put directly into the hands of 20,000 student attendees.