What Does It Mean to Blog for God’s Glory?: Our Book’s Backstory

Our book Blogging for God’s Glory in a Clickbait World releases today.

Six months ago, when I picked November 3 as our publication day, I certainly wasn’t thinking about the fact that it was also the day of our presidential elections. But it happened, or I should say, it is happening—today.

I’ve never shared the backstory to our blogging book, but I’ll tell you now that the book started with my friend and coauthor John Beeson before either of us knew it would be a book.

Five years ago I wrote down a series of questions for John to ponder as he launched his blog. Actually, I didn’t write them. I used my phone’s voice-to-text feature to record my stream-of-consciousness thoughts while my children played in a McDonald’s PlayPlace. I cleaned the questions up a bit, sent them to John, and we talked on the phone for ninety minutes. A year later, I polished those questions brighter and wrote them into a blog post. I hoped the questions would help others launch blogs that would glorify God. I feared, however, only five people would read the post. After I submitted the article to two different online publications and received rejections from each, I suspected editors also thought only five people would read the posts. But then I submitted it to For The Church, who published the article in the spring of 2018.

Tim Challies shared a link to that post on his blog, and from there, Bill Feltner, the host of the show His People on Pilgrim Radio, saw the link and asked me for an interview to discuss Christian blogging. The interview made me wonder if there could be more to this topic than a few blog posts and an interview could cover. Eventually I circled back to John with the idea for this book.

I’m thankful for John running this race with me. John, when we began the project I never expected the book would become such an expansive resource for bloggers. Thank you for being a friend, encourager, and someone to swap stories with of blogging lows and blogging highs. I could not have written this book without you, and I wouldn’t have wanted to.

Alexandra Richter has poured over each word in each book I’ve written, and most of my published articles. Alexandra, I confess, I never know when to write who or whom, so I avoid writing sentences that feel ambiguous. But I know that if I did write a sentence that needed a who or perhaps a whom, you’d know when I needed which. And thank you for caring as much, if not more, about the theology as the grammar. Speaking of grammar, thank you Russ Meek and Cassie Watson for also helping us catch the little mistakes that make a big difference.

I’ve never had an acknowledgment section in my books; I think I feared the cliché of it all. Expected or not, I want to say thank you to my wife, Brooke. There would be no books or blogs without your blessing.

Below is the table of contents and full book cover. John and I would be overjoyed if you bought a copy of our book (Amazon). Thanks for all the encouragement along the way.

Please Join Our Book-Launch Team: 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:

1. Once the book launches, post an honest review on Amazon (and Goodreads, if you have an account) within the first week of the launch;

2. Help us catch any small errors in the book (i.e., not a full-edit of the book);

3. 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.

4. 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