March 2008
Dear Friends,Having fought along side us through your prayers or giving, you will find this report exciting and rewarding! By February 19, The Design of Life had been out for three months-its first quarter. Enjoy with us a little of the buzz and action highlights.
Sales Are Great!
- The Design of Life is selling terrifically at Amazon.com. Throughout most of its first quarter, its sales rank (among all Amazon books) has been in the top 10,000, finishing that 3-month period at #8,029 in sales (that's out of more than a million)!
- In addition, it has frequently placed in the top 10 books in Amazon's biological and scientific categories, ranking # 1 in two of them, including technical and professional science books on developmental biology, and ranking # 2 in a 3rd category. It has held these, or nearby rankings, throughout most of the quarter.
- Working with specialists in Canada and India, our web site for the book features a blog that now averages 221 visitors a day, and climbing - not bad for a young blog!
The Potential to Accelerate Sales is Excellent
If we extrapolate the current sales rate (over 1200 copies within 3 months of the November 19 release) out into the future, we will sell out the initial print run of 10,000 copies within 2 years. Is this a realistic projection? Indeed, it is.- As this second quarter began, The Design of Life was chosen as a membership offering to the Conservative Book Club! That's a block sale of 500 books.
- A well-known publishing house is loaning us their 7,500-name buyer's list, a rich resource for marketing the book to those with a demonstrated interest in intelligent design.
Bill Dembski spoke on intelligent design to roughly 200 people at a venue just off Times Square in New York City following a private screening of the movie, "EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed.". The book sold well at the event, which was sponsored by King's College.- Since February, the co-authors have been guests on more than 60 talk shows across the country. On "Darwin Day" (celebrated on February 12 by committed Darwinists), Michael Medved hosted Jonathan Wells and took only hostile questions from callers. What a pleasure it was to hear the excellent answers Jonathan gave to absolutely every one! (Isn't it amazing what just two Ph.D. degrees and a career teaching and conducting research can do!?)
Readers Love this Book!
Of course, the greatest potential for increasing sales momentum lies in the quality of the book itself. Typical among the many reviews posted on various sites are these:- A professor of cell biology and biochemistry calls the book "an excellent review of the growing evidence for intelligent design," adding "Its 30 pages of footnotes allow one to document the text (something that is critical for me). I am now checking the references and so far they support the authors' conclusions. For me this work is fascinating reading."
- In her review of The Design of Life, Mindy said, "This is the one! It is the gold standard of intelligent design books. If I had to pick a book out of all the ones written about the definitive ongoing debate between intelligent design versus neo-Darwinian evolution, choosing this one would unquestionably fill the bill."
- Microbial geneticist Ralph Seelke remarked, "Darwinists have complained for years about the stubborn refusal of the American public to embrace Darwinism. The Design of Life will by no means end this disagreement. It will, however, serve long and well as an encyclopedic source for those stubborn skeptics of Darwin."
. . . Or Most Readers, That Is!
But with every positive review comes a harsh attack from the Darwinists, who are now more threatened than ever and are energized by the growing popularity and influence of evangelists for atheism, such as Richard Dawkins. They are trying very hard to conflate intelligent design with creationism (ruled unconstitutional for public school classrooms in the 1987 case, Edwards v. Aguillard) to keep it out of the intellectual mainstream and out of American education. But in a shared story with AP on Feb. 26 this year, the Dallas Morning News reported that "intelligent design is being advocated in various states as an alternative to either evolution or creationism." And indeed it should be, for ID is solid science, not religion. (Granted, there are religious implications behind the patterns in nature that point to an intelligent designer just as there are major implications to the opposite position). But hostility to such implications is a woefully inadequate justification for suppressing the evidence for ID and preventing young people from learning about it. Clearly, we are in an enormous struggle, but friends, we are on the winning side!
What is Our Mission for This Book?
The Design of Life is a force unleashed to achieve two major missions. First, it aims to release the nation's bright young minds from their thralldom and subjugation to an entrenched monopoly. This will happen if we deliver more and better quality information to them. Many people have asked if the level of The Design of Life isn't too challenging for high school students. But bright students, high school and college, will be reached by the hundreds of thousands if they encounter a full court press advancing a cutting edge case from friends and peers who themselves are reached by the book, by viral marketing, blogs, podcasts, RSS feeds, and from teachers and university faculty, who have rethought the question.Second, it aims to expose the enforced orthodoxy of scientific research itself by a case strong enough to reach the first-line minds of science and of their peers in other professions. This will be done by the impact of cutting edge ID research, such as that reported in The Design of Life, thus making deep inroads into the intellectual mainstream, until now the domain of scientific materialism. (Another force unleashed on this mission is a documentary to be released April 18 in theaters across the country, Expelled! No Intelligence Allowed. More on this in our next letter.)
The Design of Life is has the "right stuff" for these two missions. But to accomplish them, we must conduct an aggressive campaign, adding to our growing web presence, professional shows, advertising, author interviews, targeted sales, published articles, and more. The sale of many print runs-70,000, 100,000, or more books-would vastly increase the probability of bringing academic freedom to science classrooms. And for this to occur, we must accelerate the sale of the first print run. Our plans to do this include exhibiting our book at strategic professional trade shows this summer:
- BookExpo America Convention in LA, May 29-June 1
- BookExpoCanada Convention, June15-16
- Faculty Commons Conference, June 27-29
- The International Christian Retail Show, July 13-17
The enthusiastic response to the book in the early going, combined with the strong marketing program and technology-savvy marketing team bode well for the book over its lifetime, supporting a high expectation for its success. However, the most important thing to discern is the proportional nature of this great opportunity. Taken together, these strong, demonstrated factors constitute a lever to greatly expand the rate of sales and therefore the influence and impact of the book. The more we can put into the winning sales methods, the greater will be the book's impact.
In addition to significant marketing expenses, we must enlarge our tiny "platform" at FTE with bigger allocations for printing, a new computer, software upgrades for existing computers, additional office furniture and equipment, and a curriculum research and administrative assistant.
We Need Your Help Once Again
The greater the resources we invest now in these winning strategies, the greater will be the influence of these arguments for design. But we cannot aggressively pursue them with our current resources. For this reason, we need your help urgently. How grateful we are that before we could send you even a single chapter of the book, you acted on your trust in us, supporting us generously with your means. But we have reached a turning point: Now you can see its strength and quality for yourself. And a fundamental change has occurred in the Darwinism vs. intelligent design debate. The book is out, and its science and arguments are being examined in many places around the world.Please stay in the battle with us by:
- making as sizeable a contribution as God enables, and by
- buying a copy for yourself, and/or a friend or relative.
Sincerely,
Jon Buell
President