The story behind Ben-Hur

One the most popular, most successful, most enduring Christian novels in American history, it turns out, was inspired by a man who made his career challenging, criticizing and arguing against religion.

At Slate, John Swansburg tells the story:

The train was bound for Indianapolis and the Third National Soldiers Reunion, where thousands of Union Army veterans planned to rally, reminisce, and march in a parade the New York Times would later describe as 'the grandest street display ever seen in the United States.' It was Sept. 19, 1876, more than a decade since the Civil War had ended. [General Lew] Wallace had grayed a bit, but still wore the sweeping imperial moustache he’d had at the Battle of Shiloh. 'Is that you, General Wallace?' the man in the nightgown asked. 'Won’t you come to my room? I want to talk.' 

Robert Ingersoll, also a veteran of Shiloh, was now the nation's most prominent atheist, a renowned orator who toured the country challenging religious orthodoxy and championing a healthy separation of church and state. Wallace recognized him from earlier that summer, when he'd heard Ingersoll, a fellow Republican, make a rousing speech at the party's nominating convention. Wallace accepted his invitation and suggested they take up a subject near to Ingersoll’s heart: the existence of God. Ingersoll talked until the train reached its destination. 'He went over the whole question of the Bible, of the immortality of the soul, of the divinity of God, and of heaven and hell,' Wallace later recalled. 'He vomited forth ideas and arguments like an intellectual volcano.' The arguments had a powerful effect on Wallace. Departing the train, he walked the pre-dawn streets of Indianapolis alone. In the past he had been indifferent to religion, but after his talk with Ingersoll his ignorance struck him as problematic, 'a spot of deeper darkness in the darkness.' He resolved to devote himself to a study of theology, 'if only for the gratification there might be in having convictions of one kind or another.' 

But how to go about such a study? Wallace knew himself well enough to predict that a syllabus of sermons and Biblical commentaries would fail to hold his interest. He devised instead what he called 'an incidental employment,' a task that would compel him to complete a thorough investigation of the eternal questions while entertaining his distractible mind. A few years earlier, he'd published a historical romance about the Spanish conquest of Mexico, to modest success. His idea now was to inquire after the divinity of Christ by writing a novel about him.

It took four years, but in 1880, Wallace finished his incidental employment. He called it Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. It’s one of the great if little known ironies in the history of American literature: Having set out to win another soul to the side of skepticism, Robert Ingersoll instead inspired a Biblical epic that would rival the actual Bible for influence and popularity in Gilded Age America—and a folk story that has been reborn, in one medium or another, in every generation since.

There may be something of a revival of interest in Wallace and his post-bellum Bible epic.

A conference at Rutgers last month featured some serious scholars inquiring into Ben-Hur, including Ed Blum, Brooks Holifield and David Reynolds. I've found surprising little on Ben-Hur, especially when compared to the amount of scholarship that has been done on the best-selling Christian novel immediate preceding Wallace's work, Uncle Tom's Cabin.

I'm interested because Ben-Hur regularly serves as a point of comparison for commentary on the success of Left Behind. At the height of its popularity in 2001, for example, there was one copy of the ninth volume of the Left Behind (the most-sold volume) for every 95.2 Americans. In 1912, when a new printing of Ben-Hur was the largest single printing in American history to that point, there was one copy per 95.3 Americans.

A lot of the comparisons are pretty vague, though, and only make generalizations about how popular Ben-Hur actually was. There's even less information generally given about how it was sold, how it was received, and so on.

Swansburg has done some helpful research, though, and put together key information about the 19th-century best seller:

Ben-Hur wasn't an immediate success. Sales were slow for the first few months as the book absorbed mixed reviews. With its story of a noble prince endeavoring to save his family and restore his good name (winning the heart of a humble but beautiful Jewess in the process), the novel resembled the romances Wallace had loved as a child, which had long since fallen out of critical favor. With its chariot race and sea battle, it shared something with the dime novels then enjoying wide popularity but no literary esteem. Always a lover of the bold stroke, Wallace had written out his final manuscript in purple ink, a color his critics would have found apt for some of the novel’s loftier passages.

Yet what the critics dismissed the reading public soon came to love. Tracking book sales in the 19th century is an inexact science, but the Morsbergers, Wallace's biographers, estimate that Harper Brothers sold a million copies of the novel between 1880 and 1912; in 1913, Sears, Roebuck ordered a million more, at the time the largest book order ever placed. James David Hart's The Popular Book: A History of America’s Literary Taste (1950) cites a study conducted in 1893, which found that only three contemporary novels were held by more than 50 percent of public libraries. Ben-Hur was first among them, present in 83 percent of the collections surveyed. (The other two were Little Lord Fauntleroy and Ramona.) 'If every American didn't read the novel, almost everyone was aware of it,' Hart concludes.

Hopefully there will be more work done on this novel and its place in American history soon.

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Jerry Jenkins' vanity press

Jerry B. Jenkins is the consummate hack.

The man knows the Christian fiction market and he works it.

I'm not very interested in the moral and aesthetic disapproval that's normally implied by calling a writer a hack. I am quite interested in how book markets work, though, and especially how the Christian fiction market works. So I'm very interested in hacks. Hacks consciously and actively respond to the market as they find it. In some ways, they are just more pure. They're untroubled by fantasies that artistic quality correlates to commercial success, unbothered by the sense of aesthetic justice that insists artistic quality should correlate to commercial success. Hacks write for the world as it actually is.

Hacks write like it's their job.

They know that writing is their job, and they embrace that, and embrace all the marketing analysis and economic acumen necessary to succeed at that job. Jenkins, for example.

"I make no apologies for writing for the masses," he once said. "I am one of them."

He has always had an eye for the markets with mass potential, such as Christian children's series and Christian athlete biographies. He has authored or co-authored 220 books, by my count, or about 3.4 for every year he's been alive. Fourteen of those books have been New York Times bestsellers. He accepted the deal to co-author Left Behind where others would have balked (and did balk), and he wrote the first book of the series in under 24 days. Left Behind sold as many copies as Catcher in the Rye, and it's never been required reading for high schoolers. Jenkins stayed on for 12 more books, plus three prequels, and he cooperated with lots of spin-offs, including a series of 40 children's books. He was pretty consistently smart about how and where to push the franchise -- in one case, at least, smarter even than the people who actually made the marketing decisions.

So, when Jenkins takes up a new project, it's likely that that says something about the way the Christian fiction market is evolving. He's not necessarily innovative, but he's paying attention to the market, and responding to it. When that project, further, is explained specifically as a response to market conditions, it's especially worth noting.

His new project is a vanity press, Christian Writers Guild Publishing. They will be charging would-be authors nearly $10,000 to put their works in print.

Thus speaketh the consummate hack: this is the fiction market now.

His explanation for the vanity press -- which he doesn't call a vanity press -- is that authors now need well-established "platforms" to get published, and that the $9,995 will help aspiring writers get that platform. For the cost, Jenkins' group provides proof-reading, cover design, e-book formatting, an ISBN number, and a package of promotional material, "everything the writer needs for a successful book launch."

The vanity press does not itself sell the book, nor promote it, nor take any financial risk or responsibility for actual marketability, which is pretty much the definition of a vanity press.

Jenkins told Publisher's Weekly that "good, passionate authors are ignored because they're unknown," but that they can "prove their worthiness in the market."

There are a number of self-published authors who have became very successful that are kind of the model being promoted here. They chose an alternative route, built a fan base, "proved their worthiness," and became very successful. One noted recent example is Hugh Howey, who's self-published e-book sic-fi series Wool has become a phenomena. He reportedly has made as much as $40,000 a month while selling his e-books for as little as $1.99 apiece. Another is E.L. James, whose cultural juggernaut, Fifty Shades of Gray, started out as Twilight fan-fiction, available free online, and was then published by a vanity press, and was then picked up by a traditional publisher. In the Christian fiction market, the main example of this route to market success is William Paul Young. The first printing of Young's book, The Shack, was an edition of 15 -- photocopied at Office Depot. About one million copies of the book were sold before the rights were bought by a mainstream publisher.

There's a difference is a difference between self-publishing and a vanity press, but Jenkins' is kind of eliding the distinction. The promotional material for the press positions it as an aid to self-publication. Jenkins' claim is that his company can help aspiring writers follow this path to popular success, mostly by helping them produce a product that isn't as obviously terrible as most self-published fiction is. A decent edit job, a good cover, and a little marketing advice could make all the difference. Or so it seems is Jenkins' proposition.

That's the hope that costs $9,995.

Jenkins, of course, is not the only one who sees that the shrinking book market is accompanied by an expanding market of aspiring authors willing to pay for the chance to see their words in print. The Christian publisher Thomas Nelson -- owned by NewsCorp, FOX New's parent company -- has also recently launched a vanity press. Now, manuscripts rejected by the publisher may be referred to the WestBow division, where would-be authors can pay to have their books printed by the vanity press division of a major publisher. There's also a Catholic vanity press, which promises to provide "proper checks" to "ensure that authors' works are free from doctrinal or moral error," but which appears to charge extra for editing.

Many observers are skeptical of the self-publishing and vanity press models. Michael Ann Dobbs, at io9, writes that, "Once a sign of slightly deluded grandiosity, self-publishing now looks like a reasonable move for writers," but, still, even after these very public successes,

self-publishing landscape threatens to become a vast wasteland for authors too. They have few ways to get recognition and little to no support. They risk spending years trying to sell books no one seems to want, when a good editor or few more drafts could have made the books successful.

The numbers are pretty dismal. The average book published by a vanity press sells between 40 and 200 copies, according to Jane Smith of How Publishing Really Works. Self Publishing Resources reported that one vanity press with 10,000 titles had seen an average of 75 copies sold per title. If the would-be authors that use Jenkins' service have similar sales, they would pay between $50 and $200 per copy sold, recouping just a few dollars with each sale.

A survey of self-published authors found that over half of them never even sold $500 worth of books.

None of the reports on Jenkins' vanity press or the press' promotional material give any indication for how things would be different for the aspiring authors who use this service. It is true that those who get help with editing, cover design, etc., generally sell more copies than those who don't. Not $9,995 worth of more copies, though. Even if a lot of Jenkins' authors do better than half the self-published authors out there now and sell, say, 168 digital copies on Amazon at $2.99 each and make a gross of $500, they'll pay Amazon 30 percent of that, net $350, and still be more than $9,000 in the red.

This is a vanity press, too, so all the burden of selling will fall on the author, which has led some to call this whole thing a scam.

Victoria Strauss of Writer Beware doesn't use that word, but seems a little flabbergasted by the audacity of this enterprise. There's little to nothing in the way of a plan that would vault one into the ranks of a Hugh Howley or an E.L. James or a William Paul Young. She writes: "Can [Christian Writers Guild Publishing] really be expecting authors to pay nearly $10,000 for a path to publication that doesn't even get their books into retail channels? .... Even with distribution, $9.995 is a hell of a lot of money." According to Strauss, Jenkins' vanity press is expensive even when compared to other vanity presses.

The man who has himself has has more than 200 titles published by traditional publishers responded to such criticism when asked about it by a reporter from Christianity Today. He said the cost is "reasonable only for those who can afford it and want the quality we offer."

And it seems reasonable, of course, to those who believe that this is their way to prove their worthiness to the market, the money understood as a sign of good faith and fealty to the book market's gods.

There's not a market for all the Christian fiction books that are being written right now. But there is, clearly, a market of aspiring novelists willing to pay for the chance, the promise, the hope, of breaking into the little market that there is. Readers may not be consumers, but with a vanity press, books aren't the product, authors' ability to call themselves authors is the product. And there's a burgeoning market for that. This is the first conclusion about the market for Christian fiction that can be drawn from the new project of the always-saavy Jerry Jenkins: there's money to be made off of those who want to be the next Jerry Jenkins.

There's also a constriction of opportunities for traditional publishing. Publishers are just making fewer bets on the unknown, these days. Christian fiction publishers especially.

This isn't entirely new. It's always been the case that Christian fiction presses have been incredibly cautious and tended to put their resources into known commodities. Series have always been popular, new names have always struggled for recognition, and there's always been strong support for established genre fictions and a great leeriness of anything that doesn't have an established audience (i.e., market). But with the book industry as a whole suffering, those tendencies have become even more acute.

Add to that the third thing that can be concluded from Jenkins' latest project, the reality that's inducing angst among publishers and aspiring authors alike: it's just not clear that there's a standard model for success in publishing, anymore. As late as the '90s, it seemed clear what worked. There were paths, routes. Popular fiction publishing seemed like a business with rules, and there was a belief it was possible to know who had the potential to be the next Steven King, the next Danielle Steel, and possible to know what to do with a book that had that potential to launch it into the upper echelons of bestsellerdom.

Jenkins, for one, knew what those rules were, and followed those rules, and reaped his success. He embraced his inner hack, and was willing to do what he had to do to move books.

Now it seems like no one knows what the rules really are. Those who are willing to offer a sacrifice to the market don't know what sort of sacrifice they should be making. If someone tells them the required sacrifice is $10,000, that's at least can seem like a definitive answer.

The bestselling authors of the last decade on the other hand don't seem like they offer models for success, but really seem to be flukes. Stephanie Myer's story is the most traditional, but even it depends on a bit of an accident, where the person who reviewed the manuscript for the agent didn't realize the book was significantly too long and should have been rejected out of hand. E.L. James' path to success is stranger and less likely to serve as a decent model than Meyer's; Steig Larson's success doesn't really seem easily emulatable; and Hugh Howley does not even appear to know how he did what he did, much less what someone else should do if they wanted to do what he did. It all seems very anarchic, right now, like no one knows exactly what one has to do to get a chance to prove worthy of the market.

Which is why some will willingly do what a consummate hack says, and pay that hack $10,000, since he at least has a history of knowing the market and really working it.

Even if "working it" now means selling a different sort of fiction.

But to see how he does it is to see something state of the Christian fiction market right now.

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What can be learned from repeated misprints in journal citations

Mistakes, misprints, and typos are easy: a transposition of characters can happen with the slip of fingers;  a word can be added or dropped from a quote with a shift of the eye. These things happen.

The way these things happen, their frequency and their patterns, may also be important.

As M.V. Simkin and V.P. Roychowdhury argue in a 2002 paper, "misprints in scientific citations should not be discarded as a mere happenstance, but, similar to Freudian slips, analyzed."

In that paper, pointed out recently by demographer Conrad Hackett and historian Yoni Applebaum, claims that mistakes made in scientific citations can tell us something about academics' work. Simkin and Roychowdhury, from the University of California, Los Angeles, look at the way certain mistakes in citations are repeated, copied, and spread. They identified one paper, for example, that had been mis-cited 196 times. Out of those 196 citations that did not exactly, correctly reproduce the information of the original paper, 78 made exactly the same mistake. There were identical misprints in more than half of the cases where there were misprints. That is statistically improbable, according to Simkin and Roychowdhury, if everyone were reading the original paper. It's just not plausible that 78 different papers made exactly the same mistake.

They argue that these 78 identical misprints of a single source are, rather, reproductions of a mistake.

Simkin and Roychowdhury reported that they found a dozen cases of this, and from these sets of identical mistakes they attempt to work out a method to mathematically estimate the percentage of people who have not read the work that they cite. Their conclusion:

Up to 80% of those who cite popular academic journal articles have never actually read them bit.ly/14FSf3H (h/t @conradhackett)
— Yoni Appelbaum (@YAppelbaum) February 17, 2013

There are some questions raised by this conclusion. The paper is ambiguous on some points. For example, is it reasonable to think that accurate citations are being reproduced at the same rate as inaccurate citations? Also, does it hold that because one oft-repeated citation was re-cited without examination of the original that that is also true for less common citations? If it's true that 80 percent of those who cited a particularly popular paper didn't actually read that paper, does that mean that, therefore, 80 percent of all citations are second or third hand? Or that 80 percent of authors always do this? It's not clear to me that there's an argument that these particular cases are representative of all cases of citations. There are good reasons to be skeptical of a strong version of this claim, such as,

In journal articles, 80% of authors include citations to articles they probably haven't read, suggests study. bit.ly/14FSf3H
— Conrad Hackett (@conradhackett) February 17, 2013

This is a very bold interpretation of the evidence being offered. It is not a misrepresentation of the authors' arguments, but it's nevertheless a very strong claim that may not be completely supported by the study.  A more cautious interpretation of Simkin and Roychowdhury's argument might be that there is a class of citations that are copied and reproduced by scholars who don't take the time to search out the original source.

If one sets aside the question of whether or not these citations were copied without consulting the original, and thinks about this research as just examining how citations are propagated, a stronger and more important conclusion emerges. This is the conclusion that Simkin and Roychowdhury reach in a later paper on the same subject. There, they claim "Our analysis of misprint propagation provides the evidence that citation copying dominates the dynamics of the network of scientific papers" (emphasis original).

There may or may not be evidence that eight out of 10 journal article authors are not doing due diligence with as many as eight out of 10 of their sources, but the way misprints are reproduced does demonstrate something important about the way information spreads.

The more apt metaphor for these misprints that are being reproduced might be genetic mutations. Simkin and Roychowdhury describe the errors as Freudian slips, but that's not quite right. A slip of the tongue may reveal much, but it's not repeated and reproduced.

The suggestion implicit in these studies is that these mistakes are important, but not that they're important in and of themselves, necessarily, but important in how they demonstrate the functioning of information networks. What is visible, with these repeated mistakes and misprints, is the way that academic information is not distributed in a way that's simply linear and unidirectional. Units of information, represented by citations, are not actually, mostly, passed from the original source to a recipient, but from a source to multiple recipients, who are then also sources for other recipients, in a multidirectional, webbed process.

As Simkin has elsewhere argued: "a paper that already was cited is likely to be cited again, and after it is cited again it is even more likely to be cited in the future."

To a certain extent, this is obvious. After all, in our own era of techno-social networks, the operations of some networks are readily apparent. It's easy to see that Conrad Hackett's tweet about this paper was retweeted more than 30 times, and one can trace a transmission line quite simply, from, say, this blog post to Yoni Applebaum's tweet to Hackett's. This is how the data from a paper published more than a decade ago spreads. While it's less apparent that the 32 journal articles that cite this 2002 paper about citation also can by this information in this fashion, it's plausible to expect that similar sorts of networks were at work.

Despite the common appearance of such networks, though, and the apparent ways that information is distributed, i.e., reproduced, it's commonly forgotten.

One way that this is ignored in my own area of study is that readers, in my case specifically readers of contemporary Christian fiction, are thought of as singular. There are assumptions of isolation: readers reading what they read all by themselves, individuals, completely detached from any social processes. This isn't always true, but it's often the case that the ways in which readers are networked and connected are ignored. There's still a persistent practice of thinking of texts as transmissions of information from the author to the reader, in a simply, linear, unidirectional process.

A fuller understanding of what has to happen for an individual reader to read a text can reveal a lot of detail that would otherwise by mystified.

As Robert Darnton has written, there is a "communications circuit," a cycle through which books, and also more generally texts, "come into being and spread through society." Darnton argues that the history of a text should be broadened to include not just the author and the reader, but the author, the publisher, the printer, the shipper, the bookseller, and the readers. None of these agents are acting in isolation, as kind of pure individuals. When a reader reads, all of these other agents are also at work. The reader is always part of these social contexts and processes, these networks -- though, Darnton notes, "Reading remains the most difficult stage to study in the circuit that books follow" -- and also there are networks of readers.

The dynamics of such networks, as Simkin and Roychowdhury say, often dominate, which is to say they go a long way in determining who reads and how.

This is true, too, for academic readers, and can be traced in the way academic information is distributed. The reproduction and propagation of misprinted citations is one interesting way to see that.

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