October 31st, 2007 — print on demand, publishing
I just saw this on Publisher’s Weekly in the article “POD House Steps into Acquisitions.”
By the end of November, Xulon Press, an evangelical Christian POD publisher, is expanding their services to include a new division focused on acquisitions.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. The world of publishing is about to be absolutely turned upsidedown.
October 30th, 2007 — blogtipping, thehighcalling.org
Mary has already traced this meme to the fifth generation. Impressive! I’m a delayed first generation post. The rules are self-explanatory, but you can read the details at Mary’s original post.
Quick: What were you doing ten, twenty and thirty years ago?
Do you want to know my answers?
October 29th, 2007 — thehighcalling.org
Reading Craver’s post about insane soccer parents, I got to thinking about competitive sports.
This weekend, I went to a preseason Spurs game against the Houston Rockets. It was the last game of preseason, and I’ve never seen anything like a preseason game.
Early in the game, the players were giving encouragement to <i>the opposing team</i> after good plays. Coach Popovitch gave one Houston player a big hug during an early timeout.
October 24th, 2007 — writing
Welcome, Christian Science Fiction and Fantasy fans! Once again, it’s time for another One Page Review, my audacious attempt to judge an entire book based on just one page.
October 18th, 2007 — writing
We finally put a promotional banner for HighCallingBlogs.com on the homepage of TheHighCalling.org, and I end up sick with strep throat for nearly a week. Figures.
Needless to say, I have some serious digging out to do now. I’ll do my best to give the blog some love soon, but it could be a bit.
October 15th, 2007 — parenting, thehighcalling.org
Donna Novitsky of Big Tent says her motto is “Go Big or Don’t Go.” But she also offers some interesting advice for working people with families in the Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar. (Click on this link to stream or download the one hour podcast, “From Venture Capitalist to Entrepreneur.”)
The moderator says she has a different worklife balance between her business and her career than most people he knows. Then, he asks her to explain to the students how she finds balance between her work and her family (which consists of a husband, two kids, and a cat).
Here’s Novitsky’s response:
Finding balance is probably one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do… When you have kids, everything changes. No longer is it solely your agenda, and they move at their own pace, and you need to adapt yourself to their pace. And so that’s just incredibly challenging because I’m used to being able to put in whatever hours it takes to get the A, whatever hours it takes to get another customer. Whatever hours. And now I can’t do that anymore.
One thing I discovered is that you’ve got to think of balance not in terms of a day or a week or maybe even a month. But balance takes place over a long period of time.
For instance, in 2006, I worked only a couple of days a week, spent a lot of time at home, got involved with the kids’ school, got them to make their beds when they go to school, got them to set the dinner table on a regular basis. Some little goals that I had for our family that take time and focus. Building that base allowed me to go at Big Tent, which is basically a 7 am to 7 pm role.
Between my husband and I, John now pretty much is home… So while I work really hard during the week, I also find some balance on the weekends, and I’m a dedicated world class soccer mom out there with the kids. You learn to juggle. You need to change the equation now and then, but who your life partner is is also a key part of that. And understanding yourself and your priorities is an important thing as you make those choices.
I don’t know Novitsky’s faith. But I think there is some real wisdom in this statement: Balance takes place over a long period of time.
Don’t try to balance your day. Don’t try to schedule your work and your relationships into a legalistic regimen of scheduled activities, duties, and obligations. No one needs another ten commandments of parenting.
After all, the law and the prophets come down to two commands. Love God. Love others. That’s it.
I love Monday mornings because now I can get to work. (Just like I love Monday evenings because then I get to be with my family.)
October 11th, 2007 — blogging, thehighcalling.org
As long as it has taken us to get this blog network started, I could just as easily call this post “The Boy Who Cried Blog!” But you know, we wanted to get as many kinks worked out as possible.
Listen.
There is a time for everything under the sun. A time to blog, and a time to comment. A time to write code, and a time to write poetry. A time to build a network, and a time to launch a network.
This is a time to launch.
AND I NEED YOUR HELP.
October 11th, 2007 — writing
In case you haven’t seen it yet, L.L. Barkat has a great article up at Christianity Today called “A New Kind of Body.”
She writes,
In the technology realm, a new kind of body is on the move. It does many of the same things as the body we’re used to, yet we find it with a click and a keystroke.
This new body, part of a major revolution, is the body blogged.
Go read it and see what you think.
October 10th, 2007 — writing
The verdict is still out on this one, but I’m still going to say it’s false. For now.
Blog tours certainly don’t create community unless that is a specific goal. I didn’t see many comments coming to me from folks on the tour. Mary didn’t either.
Again, CSFF is doing some good work creating community around a specific theme, but every month she encourages participants to comment on each other’s blogs. (Bonnie and Dee both have some experience running blogs first hand, too. I’d love to hear from them more in the comments back on the true false quiz post.)
Maybe we should change the purpose of our blog tours. Rather than trying to generate sales or raise awareness, we should perhaps rethink our goals.
Here are a few things to consider for the future:
It seems to me that bloggers have two things: community and content. The more we can help them achieve community by providing them content, the better we can serve them.
And that’s what life is really about: serving others over ourselves. Mary, Tina, and I did our very best to serve folks in the Authentic Parenting blog tour. The goal to sell copies of Mary’s book was as much about finding a specific measurement tool as it was helping spread the word about a book that genuinely helped us as parents.
October 10th, 2007 — writing
Blog tours can sell some books, but not at rates any better than regular direct mail. And getting the kind of audience you need for direct mail appears to be much trickier than we all thought it would be. 85 blogs participating in a tour just doesn’t translate into that much exposure, traffic, conversion, or sales.
Dee has a different approach. She apparently estimates that book sales will be 10%-20% of the number of participating bloggers. That’s the industry standard, she says. It’s an interesting approach.
Regardless of the sales figures, blogs can be a way to connect interested readers with the author. The original goal of a book tour was to let the author speak in person with his or her potential audience.
Blogs can allow interaction between writers and readers. For example, I told Michael Lindsay that the best thing he could do to encourage buzz about his book Faith in the Halls of Power, was simple. Just comment on the blogs that link to his Amazon.com page. We talked about how to set up an RSS notification for this in Technorati. (You may have noticed that he commented on my review last week.)
Also, if blog tours aren’t great at selling books, they may work to help authors develop relationships with potential readers. In the language of direct marketing and fund raising, blog tours could be an acquisitions tool to promote a particular newsletter. (Mary has two good newsletters: Inside Renewal and Relevant Prose.)
New from HighCallingBlogs.com
