My Marketing Strategy for My Book, Christian Economics
I am going to share with you the logic of my plans to promote my book, Christian Economics. With the exception of Mark Skousen, economists have not been marketers. Skousen and I are exceptions.
First, I begin with an assumption: faith without works is dead. This comes from the epistle of James. It is not good enough to understand something; you have to apply it.
Second, in order to understand something really well, you have to teach it. Teaching is one of the best ways to learn any new field.
Third, there are not a lot of good teachers. They must be trained. They must be provided with training materials.
Fourth, as with any other movement or institution, it is wise to begin with Pareto's distribution. Here is how I will apply the Pareto distribution.
20% of the people who begin reading my book will finish it.20% of the people who finish my book will teach it to somebody else (4%).
20% of the people who teach it to somebody else will teach dozens (0.8%). These people are leaders.
Every institution is structured this way. There must be leadership. The best leaders start at the bottom. Leadership development should be bottom-up.
I am serious about Christian economics, so I am serious about generating leaders around the world who begin to implement the program in their local congregations. I want to infiltrate every Christian denomination with people who are effective teachers and who go on to become effective leaders. I assume that this is going to take at least a generation. I am willing to wait even longer, since I won't be around anyway.
Economists write for each other. This is true of most academics who write, which few do. Most academics are bone-lazy. They are bored. They teach bored, captive audiences, who are also lazy. They are overpaid. They are state protected: accrediting. In short, they are not people who launch intellectual revolutions.
Fifth, I want you to understand how I plan to implement the Pareto strategy.
FOUR EDITIONS
Student's Edition. I will write a short book of no more than 250 printed pages, and preferably no more than 200 pages. I will make this book available for free in many formats, including the Kindle format. I will certainly make it available in PDF. I will use the PDF to sell a paperback version of the book, but I do not expect to get a lot of sales initially.
I will produce a series of Sunday school lessons based on the book. This will be a series of 17 lessons. I will probably adopt this format in the future. It is possible to run three courses per year of 17 lessons each, with one Sunday left over. It is also possible to run four courses a year of 12 lessons each, with four Sundays left over. I will use the Sunday school lessons to generate interest in the book. I know that most people will not read a book, but if they are regular attendees of Sunday schools, they may view a dozen of the lessons, and will remember a little bit. I will use the Sunday school lessons to attract the next group of readers.
Teacher's Edition. This will go through the short book again, but I will triple the size of the original book by adding explanatory material that takes the reader beyond the first book. I want the teacher to understand a lot more than the initial book presents. He must become an expert, though not a master, in the basics of Christian economics. To do this, he is going to have to teach. In the text, I will handle questions that will probably be raised by anyone he attempts to teach. I am teaching him. But I also want him to teach others. I am in the recruiting business. I want agents to do recruiting one-on-one.
Leader's Edition. This will be at least twice as long as the teacher's edition. It will go into greater detail in terms of economic theory. It will also go into greater detail about training people to implement what they are reading. If the material in the books is not implemented in daily living, then it will not be adopted as life-changing. If it is not life-changing, then it will not change the world.
I will not make this edition available to the general public. I am going to create a Membergate website for the handful of people who want to go on to the next level. I will probably not charge any money, or only a few dollars, as a screening device to keep out the crazies. I am going to make it difficult to get an invitation to join the site. The screening will be crucial. I'm going to require the individual to create his own website in which he presents his own 17-lesson Sunday school course for his particular denomination. He can copy the basic format of my Sunday school course, but he has to put it in terms that will be effective in his denomination. I will also make certain that he is a member of a congregation. He must also provide a PDF letter from his pastor that he tithes 10% of his income to the congregation. I am not interested in getting people involved who are not under the authority of some local congregation. I am not after lone wolves. I want these people to be leaders in their congregations before I train them. I think anybody who gives 10% of his income to his local congregation is already a leader. His pastor takes him seriously. His pastor doesn't want to alienate him. His pastor is therefore probably going to give him considerable slack if he begins to recruit people within the congregation to my view of economics. Here is one of North's ecclesiastical laws: "Tithing covereth a multitude of idiosyncrasies." I am trying to deal with the age-old problem: "Bright lights attract large bugs." I don't want to attract large bugs. Church membership and tithing screen out large bugs.
Behind the membership wall, I will set up forums. I want leaders in the Christian economics movement to talk with each other. If one of them begins to go off the rails, maybe some of the others will pull him back on to the mainline.
I may never get more than a dozen people to join. But they will be skilled and dedicated people. I want to train a hard corps.
Scholar's Edition. Finally, I plan to produce a scholar's version of the leadership book. It will contain a lot of footnote material, plus arguments dealing with arcane topics that only economics professors bother with. I do not want to burden the others with this material. Basically, this book will be to shut the critics up. I don't expect to get a lot of professors on board. I do want to make it clear in terms of basic epistemology why I have broken with the prevailing humanist economic systems. I have already done this in Chapter 5 of the second edition of my book on Genesis, Sovereignty and Dominion, where I deal with the issues of imputation. There is no way for the humanist to solve the problem that was raised by Lionel Robbins in 1932: the scientific impossibility of making interpersonal comparisons of subjective utility. I will also deal with the twin issues of epistemology: randomness versus omniscience. Modern economic theory goes from pillar to post on how it evaluates the relevance of any economic theory: in terms of either its deviation from randomness or its deviation from omniscience. The doctrine of economic equilibrium is the classic example of a standard based on omniscience, which is inherently impossible. Economists adopt equilibrium theory to explain changes in the real world, despite the fact that the real world can never achieve equilibrium because equilibrium requires omniscience. The average reader doesn't care about any of this, and I can hardly blame him.
MARKETING
I see no reason for writing a book without having some theory of how to market the book. If it is an important book, I don't see any reason for not training other people to become recruits in promoting the book. This is the meaning of evangelism. The great master of this was Martin Luther, but Vladimir Lenin was good at it, too. Karl Marx was not good at it. But, through Lenin, Marx gained credit for taking over one-third of the world, 1917-1949.
My strategy is to go from the bottom up. That is why my primary targets are not tenured professors in tax-funded universities. I want to begin with the man in the pew. Actually, I want to begin with the man sitting in the dirt or on the floor of a small household church. My main targets are heads of families in Third World churches. They may be in India, China, sub-Sahara Africa, or Latin America. I am surely not targeting Europe. That is a lost cause in this generation and several more to come. Some small American churches may respond to my message, but the denominational hierarchies in the United States are so opposed to my kind of thinking that I am not naïve enough to believe that there will be a widespread adoption of my ideas within American churches. American churches screen their pastors by forcing them to attend college, and many denominations add three years of seminary to this. By that time, the pastors have been forced to run the gauntlet through academic humanism, kindergarten through early adulthood. Then they are forced to run another gauntlet through the studied irrelevance of the seminary curriculum. These are not my targets.
In any movement, there must be one-on-one recruiting. There must also be training. Economists rely on the university system to do the recruiting and training. I have written off the university system. As Jesus so aptly put it, let the dead bury the dead.