An Intersection of Podcasts and Books

It has been awhile since I have written here. My love for writing and reading has not ceased, it has merely taken new form. I have been quite busy focusing on a variety of projects that I’m excited to share with you.

Table of (Mal)Contents Podcast

A friend and colleague of mine, Aaron Armstrong had started up a friendly podcast a few years ago called Reading Writers. He developed a nice following by interviewing other authors to explore the craft. He asked me to join him for Season 3 I believe because we loved talking about books and wanted to make it more of a giving adventure through our conversations. A few highlights from Season 3 include:

• When good books become great movies
• How reading fiction makes us better readers (and writers)
• Seeing the books we read as part of our biography

Now we are into Season 4 and we invited our friend Barnabas Piper to join us as well. Barnabas brings a level of honesty (or some may say snark) that it demanded a name change. After all we were on a quest to reinvent ourselves. Behold, we are now the Table of (Mal)Contents. Here are a few episodes I recommend to you.

• Books that should have been TED talks. Often we see books that have a core idea but could be summed up much better and shorter medium like an article, blog, Facebook post, or a fifteen minute TED talk.
• We answer Goodreads questions like “If you could transport into any world of a book you love, which would it be and why?” and “Describe yourself in book characters.”
• An interview with Leif Enger, author of the acclaimed Peace Like a River and his most recent novel, Virgil Wander. 

Books.LifeWay.com

Every now and then at work you get an opportunity in your job to truly do something you love that goes beyond the everyday enjoyment. It is not that I don’t love marketing, I just love the fact that I get to influence people through the life-changing nature of books. I am a book evangelist. In April we launched a new website devoted to cultivate a greater love for books. Here are a few articles that I have written or encouraged friends to write.

• Reading in Gratitude: When Books Become Your Biography
• Why You Should Read About Great Lives
• The Book That Made an Astronaut
• Five Reasons You Should Read Children’s Books

I’ve also dabbled in writing for LifeWay Men. Here are a few articles I’ve written this year to encourage men in the Church.

• Five Ways We Learn by Teaching in the Church
• How God Uses Resilience in Men

See you again soon.

 

Today’s Publishing Business: The New Abnormal

Is it your dream to write a book and see it published?

I’m asked often about how to get published. It’s an exhausting process but I’ve spent the past year as a consultant paying closer attention to how a book gets “discovered”. I’m witnessing publisher after publisher downsize or run out of business. It is too often blamed on the rise of ebooks.

The rulebook has been thrown out.

The game has changed for all of us.

There is great value in a publisher but you need to start looking at the world differently.

You can’t just write a book, have someone publish it, get it placed on a random bookshelf in a store, and then hope it all works out. That may have worked in Fox & Sons Books in the movie, You’ve Got Mail, but it doesn’t work exactly like that anymore. That is dial-up thinking.

Take a look at this new Kickstarter project for the book, Off With Her Heart by Amy Dale. This is a great example of a way to fund a book and build an early audience around it before launching it to the world. Basically when this will be published, there will be evangelists ready to promote it since they already believe in it. This becomes and extension of a writer’s platform. Traditionally, a publisher would have to invest a lot of money in time and placement to ensure a book’s awareness is created.

My publishing friends, this is one of the new ways to find hidden talent in writers.

This is not business as usual. It is the future, now.

Here is the good news. A book still lives or dies based on word of mouth. That is the genius of a deal like this with Kickstarter because it leverages  passion through anyone’s sphere of influence. Seth Godin is doing it. Steampunk Alphabet by Nat Iwata did it. The businessperson with the idea around the corner is doing it. Amy Dale is doing it. Word of mouth has never changed but the ways to share information is changing before our eyes. We must embrace it.

As Billy Beane put it in Moneyball,

Adapt or die.

Open your eyes to discover what is new. Leave the old playbook behind. You can do it. We all can do it.

That means you!

• The writer
• The publisher
• The dreamer

What Kickstarter project are you most inspired by?