Daily Beast: Evangelicals Scam the NYT Bestseller List

This morning, the Daily Beast published my article summarizing recent material I have obtained.
There is still more to develop on this story. For instance, it appears that the web of relationships involving Sealy Yates, Kevin Small, David Jeremiah and the Parrotts is longstanding. I hope to develop that part of the story more this coming week. As I pointed out in the post earlier this afternoon, Driscoll was a late comer to the party and an outsider to the club. Small is on the board of the Parrotts’ non-profit and Yates is on the board of Jeremiah’s Turning Point. Jeremiah credited Small’s publishing genius as far back as 2006.
It is hard to say if these folks will open up and reveal how all of this works.
Whether or not they do may depend on how much more media scrutiny develops. Christianity Today had a small blurb Friday linking to my blog posts. I think other stories are coming.
What I would like to see is a straightforward explanation from the agents, consultants, authors and publishers about the way they work the New York Times system. In the case of Driscoll’s contract, deception was involved. Has that occurred for the other authors? It appears that way but perhaps the agents, consultants, authors and publishers do not believe they are being deceptive. I would like to hear their side of it. Thus far, outside of a promise of a reply that didn’t come from Tyndale House, there have been no replies from those who have engaged in the best-seller campaigns.
When Mark Driscoll used this approach, his critics and the media were all over the story. Where are they now?
Yates and Yates have a significant cadre of authors they represent. Do all of them use ResultSource? I asked two of them but received no answer.
More broadly, I think the NYT Bestseller brand is tarnished by the actions of ResultSource. I asked the NYTs if they planned any kind of correction for those books proven to benefit from gaming the system, and the paper declined to comment.
On WORD-FM (Pittsburgh) last week, I was interviewed by Kathy Emmons. Her suggestion to the NYTs was to permanently ban any author caught cheating.
Clearly, this is a problem larger than evangelical authors but it appears that it would take evangelicals to change course given that some on the inside of this are within the camp.