Bestseller Bytes
by Daisy Maryles, Religion BookLine -- Publishers Weekly, 8/13/2008
Tyndale House's biggest recent successes have been with football books, including its latest, The Winners Manual by Jim Tressel, Ohio State's head coach. Two earlier bestsellers were Don't Bet Against Me by Deanna Favre, wife of Green Bay legend (and now New York Jet) Brett Favre (Sept. 2007, 75,000+ copies sold); and Quiet Strength by Indianapolis Colts head coach Tony Dungy (July 2007, one million+ copies in print). Tyndale's associate publisher, Jan Long Harris, who acquired Dungy's book, recently said: "Tyndale isn't seeking to publish every football book... but it partly reflects that once you do a successful book in one category, others will follow." With Tyndale as his publisher, Tressel was promoted on retail sites like Christianbook.com and invited to Christian bookstores for signings, almost always drawing large crowds. To date, the July 15 title has 125,000 copies in print. And football season is just around the corner.
Bestselling authors Alex and Brett Harris are unusual twin brothers. At 16, they served as the youngest Supreme Court in-terns on record in Alabama. At 17, they launched TheRebelution.com, now one of the most trafficked Christian teen Web sites, with more than 16 million hits since August 2006. At 18, the brothers launched the Rebelution Tour, a conference series that was well received nationwide and in Japan. And on April 15, 2008, at 19, they published Do Hard Things—A Teenage Rebellion Against Low Expectations. Multnomah reports 100,000 copies in print.
"It is possible to stress the doctrine of hell in unwise ways," said Timothy Keller in a recent sermon at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City. "Some can preach hell in such a way that people reform their lives only out of a self-interested fear of avoiding consequences, not out of love and loyalty to the one who embraced and experienced hell in our place. The distinction between those two motives is all-important. The first creates a moralist, the second a born-again believer." Keller, author of the bestselling The Reason for God, founded the church in 1989 with a few dozen people and it now draws more than 5,000 weekly attendees. Multnomah reports 130,000 copies after 15 printings.
An item in the August 11 New Yorker notes that the "most prominent mediator of late is Pastor Rick Warren, who has wrangled John McCain and Barack Obama for their first joint appearance," on August 16, 5-7 p.m., at his Saddleback Church, in Lake Forest, Calif. According to the church's Web site, Warren plans to introduce the presumptive nominees together and then interview each for an hour—he will be the evening's sole interlocutor. Who's on first? Obama—he won the coin toss.
Wanda E. Brunstetter's A Sister's Hope is the final title in her Sisters of Holmes County trilogy, which has more than 350,000 copies in print (including 154,000 of this last book). Holmes County is in Ohio and represents the largest Amish community in the U.S. The author believes that people could learn a lot from the Amish: "Too many of us put too much emphasis on material things—getting ahead, making more money—but the Amish don't care about these things. Their emphasis is on God and family. To see how they interact with each other is incredible."
