Most Mormon books, music and film are like little fish in a pond. Fortunately, consumers of these Mormon products face the same situation.
I think the idea behind the metaphor of fish in little or big ponds is something students face as they approach graduation and start trying to find some kind of success in the [...]

I follow a number of self-publishing email lists, full of authors either trying to get their manuscript accepted by a publisher or trying to publish and sell the manuscript themselves. Despite the almost uniform lack of financial success among these authors, nearly every author is in the middle of writing a new manuscript.
Why?

Mormon author Eugene Woodbury is continuing the experiment with giving away his work for free that he and I discussed in an April 20 Q&A. His new novel Angel Falling Softly will be published by Zarahemla Books this fall, but starting next month Eugene will begin posting a chapter of the novel each week.
Here is [...]

The April 2008 issue of Christianity Today featured an article on the changes that have affected Christian retail over the last two decades. The description is surprisingly similar to what has happened to LDS retailers — so much so that I thought the article’s claims bore some analysis here.
The article indicates that the CBA, the [...]

Since the Internet began to take off in the mid 1990s, there have been many attempts by Mormon entrepreneurs to translate various e-commerce approaches into something that will work for the Mormon market. For example, back in 2004 I discussed Latter Day Tunes, an attempt at an online MP3 store for the Mormon market. [...]

Although, not ranking with The Horse and His Boy, or The Last Battle as my favorite Narnian tales, Prince Caspian still holds a special place in my heart as part of C.S. Lewis’ repetoire of allegorical fairy tales. Perhaps it’s because the Narnia of that story has a different, wilder flavor than some of the other stories, [...]

When the LDS Church published its own edition of the King James version of the Bible in 1980, Church leaders claimed that it was a significant achievement. The edition included extensive and better organized footnotes than those in other editions of the Bible. It also featured a lengthy Bible Dictionary and a Topical Guide (originally [...]

There is something deceptive about success stories. You hear a story of someone else’s success, and it is sometimes hard not to assume that you can do the same.
Author success stories are no exception. For Mormons, Stephanie Meyer is the most recent example. She is just like so many LDS authors — a suburban housewife [...]

When my friend Marla told people in our 11th grade English class that she was Mormon, I assumed she must be in 2nd Ward. When she started passing out pamphlets with a picture of the Salt Lake temple titled “What Mormons Believe,” I was impressed with her gumption in taking opportunities to do missionary work. [...]

The New Play Project is performing the world premiere of national award-winning playwright Mahonri Stewart’s “Swallow the Sun,” a new play based on the early life of C.S. Lewis, author of “The Chronicles of Narnia,” “The Screwtape Letters,” “Mere Mere Christianity” and “Till We Have Faces.”
Although Stewart said that this play holds special significance for [...]

When I discover a new book-related service or resource, I always explore them with a great deal of hope — hope that this discovery will provide an answer the difficult problems I see in both the LDS market and in the woldwide market for books. Along the way I’ve discovered everything from Print-on-Demand printers like [...]

Last week I read my Easter gift from my parents: Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books by Aaron Lansky. It’s a remarkable, wonderful story (and the story is pretty much what’s in the subtitle of the book), but even more than that it’s a fascinating exploration of [...]

In priesthood meeting this past Sunday the photographers collecting photos for the ward photo directory stood up and talked about their project, and suggested, several times, that the photos might end up on the “Blogosphere.” After the third mention of “Blogosphere,” I replied (so everyone could hear):
“In the Church we call it the “Bloggernacle.”
To my [...]

The online magazine Slate recently posted Hanna Rosin’s review of Daniel Radosh’s new book Rapture Ready! Adventures in the Parallel Universe of Christian Pop Culture. Her (and Radosh’s) descriptions of Christian attempts to create safe knock-offs of popular forms of culture and entertainment will sound strikingly familiar to anyone with the slightest bit of knowledge [...]

For more on Stephenie Meyer and her work, visit Reading Until Dawn.
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The Time Magazine profile of Stephenie Meyer attempts to explain her work — the three Twilight books and an upcoming novel called The Host — by exploring Meyer’s Mormonism, claiming, in fact that although “the characters in Meyer’s books aren’t Mormons, but her beliefs [...]