It’s been amazing to watch the success of The Shack, a paperback theological novel written by an unknown author and published by a couple of guys who only spent $200 on marketing and have just initiated their fourth printing since May 1st of this year. My wife manages a small Christian bookshop in South Wales and she has reached the point of needing to hire additional part-time staff just to keep up with the orders that are pouring in every day. When The Shack was first released, we volunteered to help distribute the book in the UK and Europe, but it appears that nearly 500 copies will have been sold by the year’s end from our small town of Pontypridd, Wales.
You might want to read Wayne Jacobsen’s article, Places I Didn’t Want to Go, as he shares a little of the buzz being experienced as he and Brad Cummings try to ride this incredible publishing phenomenon.
Daily we hear from people who feel their spiritual lives have been rescued from anger, doubt and frustration toward God and renewed a relationship of love with him. We’re hearing from celebrities who love this book and are endorsing it to their fans. We’re hearing from theologians of every stripe, some who want to use the book in seminary classes on God and suffering. We’ve also been contacted by major movie studios about purchasing the movie rights. We’re not selling those, by the way. The dream from the beginning was to make this into a general-release feature film that would offer our culture a view of God that religion has totally obscured. It looks like now we’ll get that chance.
And we hear from authors who want to work with Windblown Media or those who want to know the ‘secret of our publishing success.’We laugh. There is no secret. We did everything wrong with this book. We were just three brothers that wanted to take something we considered a gift from the heart of our Father and make it available to folks. The power of the story itself has swept people up with it. After reading it, many order cases to give to friends. So many people have blogged about it, and recommended it to their friends, that it just keeps growing by word of mouth.It is all just beyond us to comprehend, and almost beyond us to keep up with it. To all those who have prayed with us, and helped pass it along, please know how deeply grateful we are for your participation in this process.
Special thanks to William Paul Young, the father who simply wrote a story for his kids and talked about God in ways that have touched a lot of people. If you’re interested, you can read my informal review several months ago; and there are several other links there you might like to visit. Just in case you’re wondering, yes, that’s my photograph on Wayne Jacobsen’s blog. I granted permission for its use in their on-going promotional efforts of this wonderful book.
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I would love to get a copy of this book. I keep hearing about it, but do not know how to get hold of a copy down here in S. America. If your wife distributes it, could you send me a copy? I would of course be happy to pay for it (can I pay with USD credit card?) Please take this as a firm order. If this is possible, comment back and I will email you my mailing address. Thanks.
Sorry about the delay, Guy. We’ve been looking into the best way to get a copy to Ecuador. I think the best approach is to order directly from Windblown Media. They normally use USPS Priority Mail Flat Rate Envelope, which can hold up to 4 books (and believe me, you’re going to want several extra copies to give away to fellow missionaries) and it gets to you in less than a week. If cost is an issue, they might be willing to ship “surface rate” and it would just take longer to get there.
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