Timothy's Thoughts

W riting a post for Girls Write Out , Kristin Billerbeck recently wrote, "As any author with tell you, reviews can be unfair, scathing and downright rude. As a writer of frothy, romantic fiction, it does make me wonder how such things can make a reviewer angry, especially when they get the book for free, but angry, some of them are." She went on to suggest that publishers should "nix these reviewers from [their] cache" and to say that she doesn't read most of her reviews because they keep her from doing what God wants her to do. She states, "every book that gets published has SOMETHING worth saying or the pub wouldn't have produced it. The reviews on the other hand? Cost a person nothing and no one holds a reviewer accountable for ugly, scathing words."   First, let me say that I mostly agree with her assessment of the situation. I'll also have to admit that I've been fortunate and haven't have many truly scathing reviews, but I don...

W hen you think about the 1,000,000 books published last year and the 1,000,000 more that will be published this year, do you feel like you’re fighting the tide? You want your book to succeed, but it is literally one of a million. Even with approximately 230 million book readers in US, the competition for book sales is tough. We can’t help but envy authors who are selling more books than we are. Or can we? I would like to submit that this envy is a result of having the wrong attitude. Imagine, if you will, that you are a rancher with many head of cattle. It is a cold winter day, so you have to go around and break the ice to give the cattle something to drink. You go to work doing that, but your son decides he will help. Of the ten watering troughs, you break the ice in three, but he rushes around and is able to get to seven. Do you envy him because he accomplished more than you? Of course not. The cattle will have water either way and you can get out of the cold sooner. Suppose we lo...

S trange though it may seem, I’m nearing completion on my work in progress. Last year, I worked on a novel for much of the year, decided the story wasn’t working and pulled an old manuscript out of the closet. I did significant rework on it, so I wasn’t sure I would publish a book at all in 2010, but on December 18 Mother Not Wanted was published. Tomorrow marks the one-month anniversary, so maybe I shouldn’t allow myself to feel that frustration that my post on Friday showed. But already I’m talking about releasing my latest work in progress. We aren’t even a month into the new year. It is to my advantage that this book is non-fiction. I’m optimistic that this book will sell more copies than Church Website Design: A step by step approach . If you’re keeping tabs, Church Website Design is my bestselling book and is keeping my publishing endeavors in the black. But the market for a book like that is much smaller than the potential market for this new book. This new book is aimed at s...

W riting is fun. Selling books is frustrating. I suppose the thing about writing is that you don’t have to rely on anyone else to accomplish your goals. Sure, you may have come critique partners or an editor who has some input into the project, but if they’re too busy to look at it, you don’t have to wait on them. You can keep writing and in time, the project is complete. Selling books isn’t that way. At some point, we put our books out there in the world. We want people to buy them, but there’s really nothing we can do. We tell people about our book. “Hey, here’s a link to Mother Not Wanted .” We beg people to buy the book, “Please, please, please, buy my book .” Of course, we don’t actually beg. We want to maintain the aloofness of being an author. We’re supposed to be above that. We aren’t, but we don’t want people to know that. We add a link to the book on our blog and our website. Surely, our blog readers will buy the book. We tell our friends and family about the book. Sure, o...

D on’t write the stuff that I don’t want to read, or so seems to be the admonition of Nick Harrison’s mom [ 1 ]. In what he wrote, he was talking about chapter length. Personally, I think chapter length is a rather arbitrary indicator, but we do need to be careful about writing stuff that people don’t want to read. I think we run into problems because we are trying to fill in the gaps. We aren’t really saying anything interesting, but we’re not willing to stop writing. In part, that could be because we’re looking to fill out a chapter. If our goal is ten pages per chapter and we are four pages in, our temptation will be to keep beating the dead horse until we get our ten pages. But being willing to end our chapters sooner doesn’t guarantee that we’ll eliminate the stuff people don’t want to read. I’ve seen books with whole chapters that I didn’t want to read. We often feel the need to explain things that don’t need explaining. On that note, I will end this post.

I s there no respect for the dead? Is there no respect for the great loss that our country has suffered? The dead weren’t even in the ground when people started trying to turn the Arizona shooting into something that would give them a political advantage. Why must we turn this tragedy into a fight over gun control? The great tragedy is that people went out to take part in the political process of our country and were gunned down because of it. We mourn because of this tragedy. Give us time to mourn. Can’t we set aside the political rankling for long enough for our country to reflect on this tragedy? The choice of weapon doesn’t matter. We should all be appalled that anyone would attack our country by attacking one of our elected leaders. Whatever the gunman’s reason for hating her, he not only attacked her and those around her, but he attack us and our country. This isn’t a Democrat or Republican thing, this is a United States of America thing. Let’s not make it anything other than tha...

L eadership is a favorite topic of people these days. I suppose we all want to think of ourselves as leaders and to feel in control. I follow a number of blogs, including that of Michael Hyatt. He often writes about leadership and I’ve noticed that some of the people who follow his blog write about leadership. There’s a lot to be said about leadership, but today I want to cover a topic on leadership that I don’t expect I’ll see on Michael Hyatt’s blog or that of most of the people who talk about leadership. To state it in the most simple terms, Leaders have no business drinking alcohol. I’m sure you recall that Paul gave the qualifications pastors and deacons in I Timothy 3 and Titus 1. Of the pastors he said “not given to wine” and of deacons he said, “not given to much wine.” And you may be thinking, “I know what it says, but I don’t really think that means pastors aren’t supposed to drink at all and it certainly doesn’t mean that other leaders shouldn’t drink.” You wouldn’t be alon...