Self-Published Novel: The Shack

A little novel written by an Oregon salesman and self-published by two former pastors with a $300 marketing budget is lighting up USA TODAY’s Best-Selling Books list with a wrenching parable about God’s grace.

First-time author William P. Young’s book The Shack, in which the father of a murdered child encounters God the Father as a sarcastic black woman, Jesus as a Middle Eastern laborer and the Holy Spirit as an Asian girl, is No. 8 on the list.

 

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Published a year ago and promoted by snowballing attention on Christian radio, websites and blogs, The Shack ($14.99) is now in mainstream bookstores and Wal-Marts nationwide, and the trio behind it are talking to Hollywood about a possible film deal.

Aimed at the “spiritually interested,” the novel had an inauspicious start, says co-publisher Brad Cummings, who is still shipping books from the garage of his home in Thousand Oaks, Calif., and nearby mini-warehouses.

Young says that when he wrote the book in 2005, “my only goal was to get copied and bound at Kinko’s in time for Christmas as a gift to my kids.”

Until The Shack sales soared, he was a manufacturer’s representative for a technology company by day and did website design work on the side. But he had always been a writer, he says, who gave poems and stories as gifts.

He wrote the book to explain his own harrowing journey through pain and misery to “light, love and transformation” in God to his six children, ages 14 to 27.

Eleven years ago, Young says, he was hanging on by a thread, haunted by his history as a victim of sexual abuse, by his own adulterous affair, by a life of shame and pain, all stuffed deep in his psyche.

“The shack” was what he called the ugly place inside where everything awful was hidden away. The book is about confronting evil and stripping the darkness away to reveal a loving God within, he says.

Shortly after he finished the manuscript, Young read a parable book by Wayne Jacobsen, a former pastor who had turned to publishing his own spiritual titles.

When he discovered Jacobsen was doing a reading at a bookstore near Young’s home in Gresham, Ore., Young brought him the manuscript. “I was taken immediately,” Jacobsen says.

Even so, “Christian publishers told us it was too edgy, and secular ones said it was too Jesus-y,” Cummings says.

So Cummings and Jacobsen published it themselves, as Windblown Media, and all three embarked on a word-of-mouth, church-to-church, blog-to-blog campaign to get copies out.

Now, “there are 880,000 copies in print, 750,000 in distribution, and we’re talking to New York publishers,” Young says.

Lynn Garrett, senior religion editor for Publishers Weekly, calls the book’s success “most unusual. It’s every self-published author’s dream to start out this way and sell at this level.”

Why are so many heading for The Shack?

“People are not necessarily concerned with how orthodox the theology is. People are into the story and how the book strikes them emotionally,” Garrett says.

NPR: http://www.npr.org/templates/player/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=90664444&m=90664392

Author’s website: http://www.theshackbook.com/