Commuter-driven bestseller

The Shack wracks up sales by recasting a personal spiritual odyssey unfettered by church life | Susan Olasky

The Shack, a first novel largely written on a commuter train to Portland by a sales rep for a tech company, has sold nearly 1 million paperback copies since its publication a year ago. Other recent Christian book sensations—The Prayer of Jabez, Left Behind, and The Purpose Driven Life—have had publishers behind them. After many publishers rejected The Shack, William P. Young (who goes by Paul) self-published it.

Young says that Christian publishers thought it too edgy and secular ones too religious—and neither, apparently, had a good feel for reader taste. The Shack sales have been propelled by word-of-mouth like that of 430 positive reviews on the Amazon.com site: "The BEST work of Fiction I have read in Years. . . . THE SHACK has changed my life. I don't want to say it has a power second only to the Bible, but others have said it and I feel that is true. . . . We now buy 'em by the case, and pass them out—much more fun than tithing . . . Right behind the Bible, this is at the top of my reading list. As soon as I finished, I wanted to read it again. . . ."