Week Six

I genuinely thought for a while that I'd been a bit too ambitious with my Bible idea for the presentation, but then I realised the logical thing to do was to just pick one publication and find as much information about that as possible. (I don't know why I didn't think of that earlier, but better late than never!) So I decided to research the publication process of my Bible, the New International Version of the Every Day Devotional Bible, with notes by Selwyn Hughes, published by Hodder and Stoughton.


As the presentation is a minimum of ten minutes, there's quite a lot of time to fill and a lot to talk about. I plan to take a few minutes to talk about the history of the Bible and it's different versions in general, and then talk in detail about the publication of the new international version. I think the Bible is an interesting choice because it is obviously different and isn't just published by one publisher. I found an article from the December 18 issue of New Yorker magazine, called The Good Book Business: Why publishers love the Bible, which sums up why I am so interested in Bible publishing...

"The familiar observation that the Bible is the best-selling book of all time obscures a more startling fact: the Bible is the best-selling book of the year, every year. Calculating how many Bibles are sold in the United States is a virtually impossible task, but a conservative estimate is that in 2005 Americans purchased some twenty-five million Bibles—twice as many as the most recent Harry Potter book. The amount spent annually on Bibles has been put at more than half a billion dollars." 

After the presentation is over, I'm going to start my creative piece. I have to admit that I haven't given it too much thought yet, as I've been focused on other work. However, with the presentation out of the way, I can start to construct my piece without worrying about other Writing for Publishing work. 

Source
Daniel Radosh, 2006. The Good Book Business: Why publishers love the Bible. [online]Available at: <http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/12/18/061218fa_fact1> [Accessed 6 March 2011].