Adventures in Blogging a Book Continue!

On July 9th, I posted about a possible new writing adventure that I was quite excited about: blogging a book! In that post, I talked about the resources I used in developing my ideas (especially How To Blog a Book by Nina Amir), and my first “baby steps” in this new venture. Several of you let me know that you shared my excitement and that you were praying for this new initiative. Thank you!

In the past two months I’ve taken quite a few steps in moving this project forward from idea to reality:

• developed a complete table of contents, and then revised it; and then revised it again;
• wrote half a dozen blog posts to play around with length, tone, and topic;
• wrote a proposal for the editor;
• discussed the project in a fair amount of depth with the editor;
• shared the proposal and four blog posts with a small group of the target audience for feedback;
• researched recent books that have developed from blogs or websites;
• met with the Editorial and Marketing teams at Pauline Books & Media to explore what blogging a book means: benefits, risks, issues to keep in mind, etc.

And during that meeting, they decided right then and there to accept the project!

As the author, I don’t usually meet with the Editorial and Marketing teams at a decision-making meeting for a project that I’m proposing to write–and normally, I wouldn’t recommend it. But this meeting was so much fun, with about 15 people in the room who were all interested in helping this book be the best it can. I left the meeting totally energized and excited.

The name of the blog is still being researched (titles are not a strength for me, but I think I came up with several good suggestions). Hopefully a name will be decided upon in the next few weeks, which is when I’ll put up the blog page. I can give you a clue about the topic, though: I’ll begin the new blog on November 30, the first Sunday of Advent and the opening of the Year of Consecrated Life (November 30, 2014-February 2, 2016). (Feel free to guess in the comments!)

I will still continue blogging at Windows to the Soul, but instead of posting more often as I’d been planning to do, I’ll continue posting here once a week during the next year. However, I’m delving deeper into my studies and reflections on the theology of communication, so I may not be able to help posting here a little more often!