Regina carefully set down her tablet on one of the steps and held her hand above her eyes, scanning the campus like she was sizing the place up for demolition. She bent down and made another tap or two with her stylus, then smiled brightly at Marianne. “We’ll be talking about becoming publicity-ready, and also market-ready.”

“Market-ready?”

“Remember what you said, about not being able to find a job?” Regina didn’t wait for Marianne to answer. “What if you didn’t have to find a job? Can you imagine selling enough books that you could support yourself, your family?”

“No,” said Marianne. The idea of a collection of poetry supporting a family sounded like a kind of suspicious trickery. Like stone soup.

Regina held up her tablet, made two taps with her stylus, and angled the screen for Marianne to see. “Do you know what that is?”

“A spreadsheet?” Marianne guessed.

“It’s a spreadsheet of best sellers,” Regina said, in a pleased, teaching tone that was at once impersonal and intimate. She tapped to show Marianne the way it was organized, a basket weave of numbers. “Organized by year.” Tap. “By genre.” Tap. “By sales region.”

Marianne squinted at the screen. “I have a mental block for charts and graphs,” she admitted. “It’s one of the intelligences. I was born without it. Sorry.”

“Well, to summarize,” Regina said patiently, “four years ago, the Christian share of the best seller market was six percent, averaged across genres, though it’s slightly higher in memoir. Two years ago it was nine percent. Last year it was twelve and a half. If you look back ten years, you see the same thing.” On the screen, she opened a graph that made a staircase pattern on the screen, the steps getting steeper at the end.

“What do you mean by Christian share, though?” Marianne asked. “I mean, couldn’t those Mormon vampire books count?”

“We did not count books by writers who happened to be Christian,” said Regina. “We counted only specifically, deliberately Christian-themed, Christian-messaged books, bought by Christians. Like the Resurrection series, or the WWJD novels.”

Marianne remembered seeing the author of the WWJD novel series on the Today Show. She had been a wild-eyed, unkempt woman who had come from somewhere Marianne had never been: Nebraska? Oklahoma? The premise was brilliantly boring: a choose-your-own adventure series for middle grade readers. At the end of each chapter, you were supposed to ask yourself What would Jesus do? then choose that option, but reading the books, choosing the less Jesus-y path, and guessing its outcome had also become a popular teenage drinking game. One teenager had died, and another was hospitalized—this was the reason Matt Lauer interviewed the author, and the reason Marianne knew the series.