Now I'll definitely buy your book.. . . ;-D

http://www.godvertiser.com

PopeCrunch.com available? :-)

My recent post The Gospel In Accordance To PC (From Mac)

Love your work always. Love the 8bit network idea and the battery integration for that brand, but for Church Crunch, it's not working for me IMHO {GASP! Did he just say that?}. Don't know if you necessarily need to have a visual tie-in back to the 8bit brand across your properties from a conceptual branding perspective.
My recent post The Gospel In Accordance To PC (From Mac)

Hey why so exclusive with the giveaways? {meaning...ignoring the majority of your audience which is PC based!}

FYI, http://www.thementoringproject.org/ is another Christian-based mentoring movement that's happening.

Jeff, thanks for the response. For churches/pastors, my guess would be that the revenue/profitability would not be one of the first issues. Most pastors encouraged to publish probably would not start out thinking that it would become a consistent side income stream, although you are right, it could. The thought of "back of the room sales" whenever you are guest preaching/visiting just doesn't sit right for most people in ministry I would guess.

Rather, I think if there were some solid examples of how publishing would help further a pastor's vision for his ministry, it would be helpful. Your original mention of publishing sermons is a great idea. Some others I can think of off the top of my head are compilation of sermons based on a specific theme (such as parenting), series (perhaps going through a specific book of the Bible), concerning specific characters (women of the Bible?), etc are initial thoughts. The church recipe cookbook is another great idea which has longevity, fund-raising capabilities and ability to have relevance/reach beyond the local church, especially if you are part of an ethnic-centric church and can pull together specific genres of recipes. Devotionals would be another great idea - pull together 30 short essays to guide people through Bible study and you have 1-month devotional book! If it is well received, you have found a repeatable format to pursue. In the end, somehow re-purposing all the great sermon content a pastor generates weekly would be a great place to start.

DJ, you mentioned what I believe is probably one of the biggest hurdles for 1st time authors to break through the inertia of writing and publishing a book. Thomas Nelson’s WestBow Press supposedly offers a $999 price level. LuLu and others are much cheaper, but perhaps include less services. ISBN numbers are cheap to acquire these days for $100-150 I believe – which is from my understanding one of the necessary things to get your books distributed, into Amazon.com, etc.

I believe the big variable is the marketing part. Self-publishers have to do all the marketing (but also reap all the profit) and I’ve seen some of these self-publishing houses include various levels of marketing collateral production & support in their offerings. So the question is do you go bare minimum and figure out how to push your book yourself? Or do you risk paying more without knowing concretely if the extra “marketing dollars” you are paying in the upsell from the publishing house is really worth it…

This one sounds silly, but is brings serious results:

PAY ATTENTION and MAKE EYE CONTACT with the person with whom you are you making conversation.

In our blackberry-world today, our presence no longer seems to be in the present. We are either texting while driving . . . or emailing while "watching the kids" . . . or talking on the phone while walking, driving, elevating (you know what I mean), and eating with other people.

As simple as it is, if you maintain some eye contact through your conversations and actually give 100% of your attention to the person across from you, the content and engagement seems to just go through the roof sometimes.
My recent post Sign of the Times

Michael, Thanks for the interview post. I'm a fellow linchpin I promise to read the book. If I win your free signed copy, I'd like to assemble a blogging project where we would divvy up the book amongst a dozen or more interested bloggers found on Twitter and the blogosphere and have each one blog about their respective assigned section of the book. If the response to the blog posts are decent, I'd like to pull them all together and publish them in a standalone book....a book about the book, also preferrable in epub format so that the it can be distributed to the Godin fans who download his Ideavirus book repurposed for the iPad via Vook.
My recent post The Gospel In Accordance To PC (From Mac)

It is interesting that Thomas Nelson and others are launching new imprints to attend to the self-publishing model. It is good news for self-publishing authors as the lines/credibility gap gets blurred when major publishers embrace this segment of the market. At the same time, LuLu, Amazon and other services that helped "user generated" content get published in the same form factor makes it increasingly enticing.

I think having a complete picture of all inclusive costs is one of the major hurdles for someone that hasn't gone through the entire process. $999 seems steep to the first time author to pay upfront without knowing if you'll also have to pay for cover design, editing, formatting, etc.