Author Tip: At our best, we’re a community of authors sharing the good news with readers
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I smiled this week when I received my weekly email newsletter from author Ken Whitt, whose new book God Is Just Love is a faith-filled love letter to families who are exhausted with all the bad news in our world these days. (If you would like to receive Ken’s free, inspirational “Whittlings” emails, once a week, visit his website at https://tracesofgodministries.com/ and sign up.)
At our publishing house, we love working with authors who write regularly online because our mission is to launch books by men and women who are engaging in positive ways in our “national conversation.” (NOTE: We’re proud of all those authors, but listing all of them would fill this column and that’s not my main “author tip” this week. So, I’m focusing on the example of Ken and Larry here.)
The “author tip” this week is this: We now have published work by more than 200 authors and contributing authors over the last 15 years and we know from experience that each author has a significant audience that they could choose to share with other authors.
A little online hospitality goes a long way. Ken Whitt just did that, this week, which made me grin warmly. He intentionally crossed online communities with Larry Buxton, author of 30 Days with King David on Leadership.
Our authors—and our readers—have often heard us express our core values, including:
- “Good media builds healthy community.”
- “A book is a community between two covers. Developing a successful book project should manifest the community within its pages—so that it becomes a larger community waiting to receive the book.”
- “Our authors are a community.”
We really do believe these things, and have since our founding in 2007. What pleases us is seeing those connections organically forming among our authors and readers. In 2021, perhaps because of the enforced isolation of this pandemic, we have more author interaction than we can recall in recent years.
Ken is one of many authors who take these core values to heart. Regular readers of our ReadTheSpirit.com weekly magazine have seen other news items pointing to various ways good news about our books spreads across the Internet and social media.
Want another recent example? We published the following news item on the front-page of ReadTheSpirit in February:
JOURNALIST BILL TAMMEUS recently launched his own new book, Love, Loss & Endurance. He’s very busy with his own media outreach about that book. However, Bill also took time this month to publish a thoughtful review of Ken Whitt’s new book, God Is Just Love. Bill emailed us this week to report, “I’m telling my readers about Ken’s book in this new column.” When you visit Bill’s website to read that new column, his review of Ken’s book appears just after two other fascinating news items that you’ll likely want to read as well.
This column is a big “Thank you!” from the Front Edge team to Ken, Bill, Larry—and to all of our authors who truly contribute to building that community we keep talking about.
To everyone across our network of friends: Please, go and do likewise.