Katherine Briggs joins the podcast to discuss her new novel The Eternity Gatea fantasy novel about a handmaiden named Seyo who has a key that will unlock the fate of her kingdom. Along with discussing the novel, this conversation goes into Katherine's writing process and her thoughts on the pressure that writers face in today's publishing industry.
You can visit her website https://katherinebriggs.com/ to signup for her newsletter and read some of her short stories. Katherine is a friend and also the former teacher of two of my children, so I'm incredibly excited to be part of helping her to release her first book.
Episode 82 of the podcast features a talk I gave at Living Waters Church in Peoria, Illinois in 2019 about my book Celebrating the 12 Days of Christmas. I spoke about how Pentecostals have their own version of Advent, about the quirky saints days after Christmas day, and about some of the challenges in attempting to celebrate Christmas as an extended holiday rather than one day.
This episode also features an excerpt from Tent Theology, a new podcast that I am helping to produce and am a cohost on. Please give it a listen. The aim of what we are doing is to help renew the social and political imagination of Christians by following in the way of Jesus. Political theologian Dr. Stephen Backhouse is the main host, and he was a guest on the podcast a few years ago, where we discussed his biography of Soren Kierkegaard. Backhouse also has a ministry named Tent Theology which aims to help the Church engage with and learn theology from within their own congregation.
Here are all the places where you can purchase my book:
Amazon
Christian Book Distributors
Wipf and Stock
Barnes and Noble
Google Play
Faithlife
Cokesbury
Lagron Miller (Roman Catholic book, gift, and vestment store in Peoria, Illinois)
Thrift Books
Other related podcast episodes on Christmas:
Ep 79: Blair E. Clark and the Artwork for the 12 Days of Christmas
Ep 79: Dr. Michael Ward on C.S. Lewis, Paganism, and Christmas
Ep 71: Happy Pagan Christmas!
Ep 72: The 12 Days of Christmas, New Years, and Epiphany
Note: this article was created as a presentation for the 2020 Business of Art conference put on by Arts Partners of Central Illinois and held at Bradley University. This is the experience I have gained in getting my own book, Celebrating the 12 Days of Christmas, accepted and published. This is the third article in a series on completing a book from proposal to publication. The other articles are:
12 Days of Christmas Book Marketing Blitz!
How to Market a Book (as best I know how)
The buildup to the proposal
In my short career as an author (depending on what you mean by short), I have written one successful and one unsuccessful book proposal. Each of them took me months and months of preparation and work and both were essentially formatted the same. With the unsuccessful book I truly played the lottery, as it was written for a specific book series (33 1/3 with Bloomsbury) and was specifically about the band Arcade Fire's album Reflektor. With around 500 submissions, my proposal made the first cut to around 80 proposals, but it did not make the final cut of being accepted for publication. Knowing there was not much of a place in the publishing world for a book like this (at least that I could see), I regrouped and attempted to figure out what kind of book I could get published.
Note: this article was created as a presentation for the 2020 Business of Art conference put on by Arts Partners of Central Illinois and held at Bradley University.
This is the second article in a series based on my experience of getting my own book, Celebrating the 12 Days of Christmas, written and released, from proposal to publication.
The other articles are:
Here's How to Write a Book Proposal (as best I know how)
12 Days of Christmas Book Marketing Blitz!
The first two articles in this series detailed my approach to writing and getting a book proposal accepted by a publisher and then everything I did to market that book once it was published. This final article explains my approach to how I marketed the book.
Disclaimer: The suggestions in this article are in no way comprehensive!
NOTE: follow this link for my interview with David Leo Schultz, Brennan's director.
The weekend I watched Brennan the new biopic about the life of author/speaker Brennan Manning from director/writer/actor David Leo Schultz, was the same weekend we read the "Prodigal Son" passage from Luke 15 in my church. Jesus' parable of the son who squandered his inheritance through sinful and reckless living is a messy story, that ultimately is not about us at all—it is about the vast, unquenchable, and perplexing love of God. As a film, Brennan, starring Hal Alpert in the titular role, is equally as messy, centering around two real life prodigals wandering in the midst of their own journey, sometimes towards and sometimes away from the love of God.
