Aim at 'spiritually interested' sparks 'The Shack' sales
A little novel written by an Oregon salesman and self-published by two former pastors with a $300 marketing budget is lighting up USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books list with a wrenching parable about God's grace.
First-time author William P. Young's book The Shack, in which the father of a murdered child encounters God the Father as a sarcastic black woman, Jesus as a Middle Eastern laborer and the Holy Spirit as an Asian girl, is No. 8 on the list.
Lynn Garrett, senior religion editor for Publishers Weekly, calls the book's success "most unusual. It's every self-published author's dream to start out this way and sell at this level. People are not necessarily concerned with how orthodox the theology is. People are into the story and how the book strikes them emotionally," Garrett says....