Timothy's Thoughts

W hy do writers write? It would be funny if it weren’t so sad, but I often hear people talk about taking up writing to make money. I was listening to the radio a few months ago and they were doing a career makeover. They had a guy on the show who had been laid off and they were taking him through a process of finding something else he could do. After some reflection, he decided that he could become a writer. I have no way of knowing what became of him, but I doubt he is out there making a living from writing. Most writers, even those with publishing contracts, don’t make enough from their writing to make a living. So why do it if we aren’t going to make money from it? I think it has as much to do with the dream as the money. All writers are dreamers. Even though it may be unrealistic for us to believe that we’ll be able to quit our day job and just write, many of writers have that dream. Daydreams are a funny thing. They aren’t quite as effective at creating memories as an actual exp...

And whatsoever ye do, do it heartily, as to the Lord and not unto men – Colossians 3:23 I don’t know how many times I’ve looked at that verse. I knew what it meant and I don’t know that what I’m going to say today does anything to change that understanding, but I had reason to give it special thought the other day. I heard someone telling a story about a man who was doing some work that no one else would ever see. He reached the end of what he was doing, looked at it and tore it apart. A younger co-worker asked him why he did that, since no one would see it and it was good enough. The man said that he wasn’t doing the work for other people or even himself, he was doing it for God. I think we have a tendency to think about how forgiving God is and we think that he will be willing to overlook the flaws in what we do. We think of him like a grandmother who will hang her grandchildren’s artwork up like a masterpiece, even though it is crude. But let’s think about that. Is that the prope...

R ecently, Michael Hyatt listed what book consumers look at on his blog. They are as follows: Title Cover Back cover Flap (hardcover books or book with “French flaps”) Table of Contents First few paragraphs of the book’s content Price Notice that price comes last. This is important because potential buyers have already decided they want the book before they look at the price. They’ve already assessed the value and see something worth having and now they are asking whether that value is worth the price. This is actually very good news for those of us who have chosen to self-publish. The POD printing process costs more than offset printing. It uses higher quality paper and the overhead isn’t spread across as many books. Because of this, most self-published and small press books cost more than books published by major publishers. We may choose to reduce the price of our self-published books to be the same as those produced by major publishers, but by doing so we may prevent ourselves ...

W atch and wait, do you know the difference? The Bible calls for us to do both. We are to wait upon the Lord, but we are to watch for his return. To wait is to delay with expectation. We pull up to a stop light and we wait for it to change. We have the expectation that it will eventually turn green. When we wait upon the Lord, we have the expectation that he will give us some kind of guidance on how we should proceed. But it also brings us to a halt. We delay our action until we know what the Lord wants us to do. To watch has the expectation, but not the delay. To watch is to be vigilant. When the light turns green, we watch for the guy who isn’t going to stop for the red light and the pedestrian who is still in the intersection. If they are there, we take a different action than if they aren’t, but watching doesn’t prevent us from taking action. The same is true of watching for the Lord’s return. The Bible tells us that no one but God knows when that will happen, but we are to wat...

I received a shock the other day. I did a search on Amazon.com for books I had written and I found this book among the results. D. F. Magruder wrote this book and I published it, but I didn’t assign it an ISBN and I offered it at cost on Lulu. Now, with no input from me, they are offering it for sale on Amazon.com. I’m not opposed to that. I had been thinking about assigning it an ISBN so that I could list it on Amazon.com. Even though D. F. Magruder made every effort to get accurate information from the churches, I’ve heard rumors that one church thinks something is inaccurate about their church, so I was hoping to resolve any issues like that and release a second edition of the book rather than reprinting the first edition. But this will work too. What this tells me is that for you guys looking for a self-publishing company, Lulu is trying to be a more viable option than they were before. Even with books like this one, which doesn’t have an ISBN assigned, they are attempting to m...

I don't know who started it, but I keep seeing this work in novels published for CBA that is driving me crazy. It is a phrase as much as anything and it seems to appear in the first chapter quite frequently. At first, I thought it was a suspense novelist thing. I saw Brandilyn Collins use it and then I saw it in a Love Inspired Suspense book, which made me wonder if that author had copied it from Brandilyn Collins. But it also appears in Lonestar Sanctuary by Colleen Coble. "Rick watched the feeble horse try to feed, and he fisted his hands. (Emphasis mine) I'll tell you what. If I see this phrase many more times, you won't find me fisting my hands, you'll find me fisting a podium. Given the context of the sentence around it, I think what these writers actually intend to say with this phrase is that he clenched his fists. Granted, a secondary mean of the verb fist, according to Merriam-Webster online is to clench into a fist, but the primary meaning is grip wit...

There are a lot of good points in this video that apply to book writers of all types.