Join the Launch Team for “The Restoration of All Things”
I’d love your personal touch in sharing my book with the world.
The other day I saw an Instagram clip of Ann Patchett being interviewed about writing and book marketing. Patchett is an accomplished author and the owner of a large, independent bookstore in Nashville. The interviewer mentioned conventional forms of promoting a book, such as book tours, podcasts, and radio interviews. Then he asked Patchett, “What actually sells a book?”
“I can give you the definitive answer to that question,” she said. “It is not a book tour, an ad, a radio show, a television show, a celebrity book club pick. The only thing that actually sells books is a person reading a book and turning around to their friend and saying, ‘Oh my,* you have to read this book.’ Books are a word-of-mouth product like nothing else.” Then she added the insightful observation that she believes “the experience of loving a book is not complete until you have turned around and said to someone, ‘You have got to read this.’”
It’s interesting how similar her last line is to a famous C. S. Lewis quote. “I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment . . . . It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are.” Then he added, “The delight is incomplete till it is expressed” (Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms). Lewis gives several examples of completing joy by expressing joy, and the first example is about a book: “It is frustrating to have discovered a new author and not to be able to tell anyone how good he is.”
Fascinating, right? In all our ways of marketing our books and gaming the algorithms, the most important step in actually selling books is word-of-mouth: when one human likes something so much that they complete their joy by expressing it to other humans.
I think about this a lot in the context of promoting church events. Ministry leaders want their pastors to announce their events from the stage. And I understand why. It does help. But the main way it helps, I think, is by making the event legitimate in people’s minds. Knowing an event exists, however, is not the main reason people go to an event. I can tell you that the definitive reason that people go to a Bible study, a men’s breakfast, an evangelism seminar, or a women’s retreat is not an announcement from the stage or a blurb in the bulletin, but when one person turns to another person and says, “Will you go with me?”
And I guess, according to Patchett, this is what also gets people to buy books.
So, here’s my question: Would you be willing to help me get others to buy my book, The Restoration of All Things, by joining the launch team? I wrote the book to help offer more hope to people’s lives. And I don’t know anyone who couldn’t benefit from more hope.
I’m setting up a launch team to spread the word. You can sign up here.
When you join some book launch groups, the authors or publishers often give away copies of the book. I’m sorry, but I’m not in a place to buy books for fifty people. I want to do that! I just can’t.
Instead, I thought of two different “giveaway” options that I think most people might enjoy better. Everyone who joins the launch team will get either 1) a phone call to chat with me or 2) a personally recorded section of the audiobook.
If you choose the phone call, there will be no official agenda for the call. If you want to tell me something you liked about the book or didn’t like—or ask something about the book—then that’s great. I’ll be up for that. And if you just want us to get to know each other or catch up and talk about life and ministry and writing or whatever, that’s great too.
I know some of you who read my blog are friends and family, so a phone call might not be that special. Indeed, I know I’m not that special to anyone! That’s why I also have the option of a personally recorded section of the audiobook. Just pick your favorite section, and I’ll send you a recording of it with a personal note about that section. You can build a fire and sit and listen, if you like. Doesn’t that sound pleasant? (By the way, the publisher Baker Books hired a professional voice actor, as they are called, to read the book, which is why a reading of the whole book by me doesn’t exist. So you’ll have something no one else has.)
In summary, here are the requirements to join the launch team: A willingness to…
Buy and read the book
Share about the book on social media (and tag me if you want to)
Write a super short Amazon review
Most importantly, tell a real human about the book in a real, in-person conversation
Once you do that, we’ll just set up a 15-20 minute phone call to talk or I’ll ask you for your favorite section of the book so I can send you an audio file of me reading it.
Are you up for joining the team to spread the word? It would mean a lot to me if you did.
* If you watch the Patchett clip, know that she says OMG, which I omitted when I typed her answer.
** Photo by Dominic Kurniawan Suryaputra on Unsplash
Book Launch: Broken but Beautiful
I worked with Gospel-Centered Discipleship to collect a team of gifted writers to reflect on the beauty of the bride of Christ. The book launches today.
People have been pointing out church-hurt for a long time. Over fifty years ago, Martyn Lloyd-Jones wrote, “With much of this criticism of the Church one has, of course, to agree. There is so much that is wrong with the Church—traditionalism, formality and lifelessness and so on—and it would be idle and utterly foolish to deny this” (Preaching and Preachers, 8). I suppose we could grab similar quotes from the Reformation era or any era in church history. We can even find similar sentiments in the New Testament itself. “But in the following instructions I do not commend you, because when you come together,” Paul wrote to the church in Corinth, “it is not for the better but for the worse” (1 Cor. 11:17). Indeed, over two and a half thousand years ago, God told his people, “I hate, I despise your feasts, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies” (Amos 5:21).
Certainly, there is a lot of junk that happens in the local church. But please also remember that God still uses the church to bless the world in beautiful ways. He may discipline his church to make her more holy, but he loves his church. His sons and daughters are always his sons and daughters. God even calls the church his bride, dying to purchase her and make her radiant. And one day we will see her in all her splendor.
I worked with Gospel-Centered Discipleship to bundle some of our favorite essays about the beauty of the bride of Christ and put them into a book called Broken but Beautiful. The book launches today!
We adapted the book’s title from the first article by Glenna Marshall. She learned in deeper ways the beauty of the church during the unexpected death of a church member and the way her church served together in the days that followed.
As I think back to my own life, I think of a time sixteen years ago when my oldest son was born. The birth did not go well. There was an evening and morning of hard labor, after which the umbilical cord wrapped around my son’s neck, and they did an emergency c-section. Mom and baby, in the end, were fine—praise God. But recovery from the trauma induced by a night of labor and the emergency surgery lasted weeks. Then postpartum depression bit like a rabid dog that wouldn’t let go. But before postpartum, right when we got home from the hospital, everyone got the flu, including everyone who came to stay with us and help. Yet this is the time, my wife and I often say, that we learned when the church was the church. So many people helped and cooked and cleaned and cared. They sat with my wife when I eventually had to go back to work. We no longer live in that same city, but we saw God’s blessings in that local church so strongly that a dozen years later we named our youngest son after that church.
In the providence of God, somehow you’re reading this email. If your heart is in a season of disappointment with the local church—maybe you’d even use the word hate to describe how you currently feel about the church—we hope these stories will minister to you.
I put the table of contents for the book down below, so you can see all the authors and the entries.
You can buy the book on Amazon’s website, here. If your church would like to purchase books at a significant bulk discount, when you buy twenty on the publisher’s website, they are only $5 each! You can do that here.
As an author with a small platform, it would mean a lot to me if you’d buy a copy and consider leaving a short Amazon review. Those reviews help a ton. Seriously. And the review only needs to be a sentence or two.
* * *
Table of Contents
Preface | Benjamin Vrbicek vii
She Is Broken, and She Is Beautiful | Glenna Marshall 1
Missing Church Is Missing Out | Timothy M. Shorey 7
How God Humbled Me through a Church I Didn’t Agree With | Lara d’Entremont 11
The Dearest Place on Earth | James Williams 17
The Unexpected Blessing of a Rural Church | Stephanie O’Donnell 21
The Local Church Helps Rid Me of Morbid Introspection | Chrys Jones 27
The Church Is Not a Meritocracy | Jessica Miskelly 33
A Family of Redemption for Children of Divorce | Chase Johnson 39
The Warmth of the Local Church for the Suffering | Brianna Lambert 45
The Singles Among Us Deserve a Better Church Culture | Denise Hardy 51
Love Your Church Anyway | Heidi Kellogg 57
For the Love of Liturgy | Erin Jones 63
God’s Good Design of the Local Church | James Williams 69
Finding Beauty in the Local Church in Our Age of Social Media | Cassie Pattillo 75
The Hands of Grace | Amber Thiessen 79
How the Church Shapes Us on Our Faith Journey | Rob Bentz 83
On the Other Side of the Church Split | Abigail Rehmert 89
Dear New Mother, Embrace the Body of Christ | Lara d’Entremont 95
The Gold Mine in the Local Church | Chrys Jones 101
The Local Church Is a Sandbox | Timarie Friesen 105
Unless the Seed Dies | Tom Sugimura 111
Redeeming Love Has Been My Theme and Shall Be Until I Die | Timothy M. Shorey 115
Epilogue | Jeremy Writebol 119
Notes 121
Author Bios 123
About Gospel-Centered Discipleship 127
Resources from Gospel-Centered Discipleship 129
Please Join Our Book-Launch Team: Blogging for God’s Glory in a Clickbait World
We’d love your help spreading the word about our book Blogging for God’s Glory in a Clickbait World.
Bloggers around the world publish millions of posts each day, many written by faithful Christians who want to honor God with their words but struggle to know how. Christian bloggers need guides to lead them through the basics of setting up a blog—everything from affiliates and algorithms to widgets and WordPress. They need a mentor to help them become a godly landlord of their internet real estate.
My friend John Beeson and I wrote the book Blogging for God’s Glory in a Clickbait World to help bloggers do these very things. In the book, we explain where the spiritual stamina will come from to serve a small readership faithfully and how to steward attention in a way that honors God in a world that seems to only celebrate chasing profit and pageviews.
Tim Challies, the godfather of evangelical blogging—or the blog-father as he is sometimes called—is writing the foreword to the book. The book is available for pre-order on Amazon.
For the last week or so, we’ve been asking friends who had heard about the book if they’d consider joining the launch team. So far nearly fifty people have joined. John and I are super happy. But we’d still like your help too.
Starting today, we’re inviting others to join the launch team (here). [update: link removed]
Just to be clear: you do NOT have to be a blogger to join the launch team. Maybe you like to share interesting ideas on Facebook, or maybe you work in marketing or graphic design. We think you’d enjoy our book, and we’d love to have you on the launch team. But perhaps none of that is true of you. Perhaps you just happen to like the work I do on this blog or John does on his blog, and you’d like to support us. That’s great too. We’d love to have you on the team.
For those willing to serve on the launch team, we will send you a digital version of the book in early October to give you time to read it before its November 3 launch.
If you join, here is what we hope you’d commit to do:
Once the book launches, post an honest review on Amazon (and Goodreads, if you have an account) within the first week of the launch;
Help us catch any small errors in the book (i.e., not a full-edit of the book);
The day before the book launches we’d ask you to purchase the Kindle version of the book on Amazon at the reduced price of $0.99. Buying the book gives a “Verified purchase” tag affixed to your Amazon review. This helps to protect your review from being removed as fraudulent. Any review helps, but Verified Reviews boost the book in the Amazon store.
When the book launches share the book on your social media accounts.
That’s it. Pretty simple.
If you would like to join, please fill out this quick Google questionnaire (link). [update: link removed]
Thank you,
Benjamin