Mark Driscoll and Result Source: What About the Other Best Seller Lists?

By now, most people know that Mars Hill Church entered into a contract with ResultSource Inc. to place Mark and Grace Driscoll’s book Real Marriage on to the New York Times Best Seller List. World Magazine broke that story and then I posted the contract between MHC and RSI. Overlooked in the fallout from that story is that Real Marriage also made it on other best seller lists. According to the contract, this was by design.

Note that RSI pledged to attempt to Real Marriage on best seller lists published by the Wall Street Journal and the USA Today.

Although RSI was only obligated to make a top 15 placement on the NYT list, the other publications were mentioned as targets with expectation for success.
Initially the position of Mars Hill Church through spokesman Justin Dean was that the RSI-MHC partnership was an “opportunity” and an “investment.” Two days later, the MHC Board of Advisors and Accountability said the arrangement was “common” but “unwise.” Then, days later, Mark Driscoll said he initially saw the scheme as a way to market books but had come to see it as “manipulating a book sales reporting system” and thus “wrong.” He also said he was going to ask his publisher not to use the “#1 best seller status” on future publications. Quickly, the designation came off of his Mars Hill bio.
But what about the other best seller lists? Did he make those as well?
Consistent with the aspirations expressed in the contract, Real Marriage did make other best seller lists in early January and then as with the NYT list, the book fell off those lists after the campaign was complete. The book went to #3 on Publisher’s Weekly list, #8 on Wall Street Journal’s Nonfiction Combined list (week ending Jan. 8), and #38 on USA Today’s Top 150 Books (entered the list Jan. 12 for one week).  In contrast to his stance on the NYTs list, Driscoll continues to refer to those lists on his website:

At one point, this list also carried the #1 NYT best seller designation, so someone edited the page and decided to leave these placements alone.* Although the NYT best selling designation is more prestigious, another look at the contract demonstrates that the RSI scheme manipulates the efforts of several respected publications to estimate customer interest in books.
 
*Although these links are probably dead on arrival, there are multiple places on pastormark.tv where the NYT designation is still in place.
UPDATE: All links to pastormark.tv are now dead. I have copies of the pages but the current links go to a page that says, “We couldn’t find that.”
 

Media reports regarding the APA sexual orientation and therapy report

In addition to the separate posts on the topic, here is some additional coverage. If time permits, I may add a comment or two of opinion to them.

USA Today

Christianity Today

World Magazine

Mother Jones

AP Radio Network

Associated Press

Los Angeles Times

Southern Voice

The Advocate

Citizenlink, Day 1

Citizenlink, Day 2

Washington Times

Is the Evangelical center in Xenia, Ohio?

I liked this op-ed online at USA Today titled: “evangelicals you don’t know.” Written by self-described blue-stater, Tom Krattenmaker, the piece describes his visit to the HQ of Athletes in Actions, an affiliate of Campus Crusade for Christ. While he found differences in ideology there, he found a tone he did not expect:

Like the people I interviewed at Athletes in Action, Hunter is intent on changing the way we work through our still-real differences. Will it be in the now-popular style of a shouting match, where we listen only so far as it helps us plot our next incendiary retort? Or will we have a civil and respectful dialogue, one that employs our ears as much as our mouths?

I vote for the civil and respectful dialogue.