Behind the Scenes

Original (somewhat ugly) cover

“Podcasting Church” was the culmination of a dream. I had thought about writing it for some time, but said I’d do it some day.

November 1, 2010, I read a blog post that was talking about procrastination. I wish I knew where that post was because it really made sense to me. It said that we procrastinate because we believe that our future selves will be more reliable to do a thing than our present selves. Then it said that if our present selves never do a thing, we’ll never be trustworthy in the future to do it. I decided that I was going to write the book I’d had in my head for a couple of years and I was going to do it immediately.

November 2, 2010, I wrote the Introduction. I received immediate feedback from my Mother-in-law that it was a good start. That’s the encouragement I needed and I was off.

November seemed like a good month to do this because it’s “Write Non-fiction in November,” “Write a poem a day,” or “National Novel Writing Month” (aka NaNoWriMo). You can read more about that at the NaNoWriMo site. The challenge was to write 1,667 words a day for each of the 30 days in November. That works out to just about 50,0000 words. It’s tough, but doable.

It turns out that 1,667 is a lengthy, but normal blog post, so I wrote each of my chapters as a blog post. At first, I wrote them all in WordPress, but later switched off-line, uploading each post individually. As I was writing, I created chapters (each post was about the length of one) and started organizing them. To this day, I’m still surprised to find “Podcasting to the Unconvinced” so late in the book because I wrote it so early in the process (11/9).

Midway in the process I decided that I would self-publish this book and see what happened.  I decided to use CreateSpace.com which is owned by Amazon to publish the book.

Forty days after I started, the rough draft was done.

Now I needed to make the cover.  I had a couple of ideas, but settled on a picture of a smaller church from behind the pulpit with a computer, mic, and headphones ready to podcast.  I created one and uploaded it to my facebook fan page and asked for feedback.

Months of editing followed.  I found that my wife’s cousin was a skilled editor, so she did the work.  I received the second proof (I knew when I saw the first one that it still needed work) and unboxed it:

I returned to CreateSpace and hit the “publish” button.  June 2, 2011 — seven months, to the day, after I wrote the first word — I published it.

Paul