Pray for My Publishing

Pray for My Publishing

I apologize that this writing is so wordy. But I do not know how to better communicate the width and depth of the challenges I face.

I need your prayers. I have been struggling to publish online an ebook about prayer. I guess spiritual opposition would not be a surprise. I mean it is not like I am teaching another way to make an omelet or how to better organize your closet.

Soon I will face an important set of challenges. Next week I will be taking a long Word document and then using an online service I will convert it into an ebook. I have attempted to publish like this several times before in the past and I did not succeed. The fault was not the online service but my own mental, emotional and spiritual issues. I got about this far and quit or got distracted.

Let me provide some context to this issue.

God graciously led me to a loving church community in 1975. There Jesus Christ gradually performed my drug rehab over the course of 18 months. There I learned to pray earnestly. I sought God to reveal His will for my life. I had made a mess of my life at 21 years old. As an answer to prayers I clearly felt that the will of God was for me to become a writer. That impression came to me when my mind was still scrambled due to the side effects of the drug abuse. God worked in me to give me back my right mind.

Over the course of these decades I have been writing steadily. There are those who must play their musical instrument. There are those who must draw or paint. For me, I must write nearly every day or I feel out of balance mentally and emotionally. Every week I write many pages. Others have said that they noticed the improvements.

After my drug rehab, God led me to hear the gospel message on a Christian radio station. I came to faith in Christ on January 16, 1977 at 23 years old. Shortly after that I felt the call of God on my life and I responded positively. What followed was another season of intense prayer to seek His guidance. All I wanted then and now is to know the will of God and do it well. Then I felt strongly impressed that it is God’s will that I would become a publisher as well as a writer. That answer to prayers was super clear.

If a person seeks to become a dentist or a nurse, then there are career paths need to be followed to get the training and get the legal approvals. But to become a writer and a publisher the career path is not well defined.

At first I sought to get a job in the publishing industry. But those doors were closed. As I prayed, I felt God reply that I need first to learn about people and the Bible. I have been learning about those for decades.

Along the way I kept practicing writing. Most of my writing for years was to request prayers. It has been a wonderful way for me to learn how to be open, honest and unpretentious. I recall during the 1980s I used electric typewriters and photocopy machines. The amount of prayers I could request was limited to the amount of money I had for copies and postage. So you can imagine my delight when email came along. I did not have to spend so much time, energy and money to mail out 7 to 12 letters every few weeks. Gradually my requests for prayer included Bible teachings or words of encouragement and exhortation as short articles.

I recall when my brother told me about blogs for the first time. My reaction was, “Who would want to use that?” Well it turns out that I have been using them steadily ever since. I have many blogs that are basically collections of useful links with my comments. I also have many blogs that archive my emails and lessons.

Besides blogs I also have many websites and some online videos. And I consider all of these as forms of publishing.

Nearly all my material online is Christian centered. I seek to inspire, instruct and equip others.

All along the way I have been mostly self-taught. I did take some courses at this community college to learn the basics when the Internet was brand new in the mid-1990s.

I continued to pray and request prayers. Little by little God revealed His vision and game plan for ministry. This changed in minor ways over the years. But at the core it always involved sharing resources with Christians so they could find and fulfill their ministry. It included ways to weave together the various digital technologies to make a way for people online to collaboratively create educational modules. Besides Christian education materials there will also be practical lessons about agriculture, animal husbandry and literacy to serve those in developing countries.

The Lord led me to invest many hundreds of hours over the years to learn about Internet marketing. This will prove useful for the ministry. And it could have proven useful for me to earn an income online. But that is when I discovered that I have had some a deep seated fear of success as well as a fear of failure.

I fear success because it is possible that I might compromise my Christian values and go back to the drugs, alcohol and promiscuity that dominated my life before rebirth. I fear failure because after becoming successful and ministering to many I could relapse. That would be shameful and painful. I would hurt many that had trusted me. These dual fears are in me because when I was a very young and impressionable believer a few ministers were caught in blatant sins and lost their ministry. I was hurt then and I do not want to hurt others.

It seems that my subconscious has come up with a clever strategy. If I never succeed then I will never face those temptations to relapse and I will not fall from success to disappoint others like I was. There is some crazy logic there. It is a major factor in why I have remained so poor for so long after researching so much, planning so much, requested prayers so much and attempting to launch the ministry so many times.

An important part of the vision for ministry is for future ministers to learn how to earn a passive income online through harnessing digital media to teach. There are several online teachers that have guided thousands of people to find their online niche. Then they were able to leave their boring corporate jobs to work from home while earning much more than before. There are all kinds of options for delivering the content including: blogs, videos, online courses, webinars and ebooks.

Today there are bi-vocational pastors that work a job part time and pastor part time. What the Internet allows is the opportunity to gradually grow a following online of customers that could pay the cost of living for future church planters and missionaries. I had told this to many seminary students when I was there but none made it happen. Then I realized that I need to lead my by example. I need to learn how this is done through trial and error. That will both give me credibility and many valuable insights.

What the online teachers say is to choose a subject that you are passionate about and that you will be willing to continue doing without any outside motivation. The passion will connect with others at a deep level and it will keep you going.

My cash flow has been very thin for a long while. God has made a way for my modest bills to be paid as I have lived at the homeless shelter for ten months. Frankly I have gotten tired of barely making it from week to week. I have prayed about getting a job, but I have not had the motivation to do that.

While considering my current condition I recalled the possibility of earning income by publishing online.

What I had been motivated to do during these ten months has been to write prayers. And I have written some psalms. I have gladly shared copies with friends for free. Yet I came to recognize that there are those who might value them and could pay me a small amount for a collection of them.

So I have recently turned my attention toward gathering these materials into an ebook format. This involved going back to the archives of the prayers and psalms that I had shared already. There was far more material there than I had expected. I have been gradually going through each one to edit and polish it. I have been arranging these using an excellent software for writers named Scrivner.

When I started down this path about a week ago I expected to have been done by now. But the volume of material in the archives was 3 times as much as I expected. That means much more work for me and more blessings for my readers. I request your prayers that God will anoint me in this season of editing.

Also I will be including some images from the public domain to spice up the publication. I had done that before with a few of my other online publications. Pray for God to guide me as I seek and find the suitable images. Then I will need to crop them and insert them into the manuscript.

Then comes the technical hurtle. I will upload that manuscript to LeanPub. The servers there will convert it into formats so it can be read on smart phones, tablets, readers and computers. I can set the price for my ebook and offer discount coupons. The service only charges 10 percent and that is far less than other services.

I will create a basic website with a simple web address. From there I will link to this ebook and future ebooks. I have enough materials on my blogs to create 3 more ebooks by just gathering and editing..

I might create a Facebook page to promote these too.

Then I can use business cards, flyers and evites to spread the word about the options.

I must take great care to come from a place of seeking to serve others and not seeking success. When I have thoughts and feelings of greed then my creativity shuts down.

By faith I believe this could gradually grow a passive income steam for me. It is called passive income because after it is online then the automated systems do all the promoting and sales. The income gets sent to the bank account without needing to do anything.

Getting over this set of challenges is important for me. During the coming years I hope to publish many more ebooks. I already have the outlines and rough drafts for them. Plus when I will make writing and publishing online a healthy habit then it will eventually grow and income to pay all my bills. It will give me the credibility and insights I will use to lead others to do the same.  

Lord willing sometime next week I will complete the ebook and begin to promote it to friends. I will give them the coupon code to get it for free. Then I will ask for their prayers and feedback. I will use their comments and edits to make improvements before I promote it to the public. That is how I can get around my other internal obstacle of perfectionism.

THANKS for all your prayers.

There is no way I could have gotten this far except that many have prayed for me over the decades. And there is no way I will reach those in the future unless I continue to request prayers.

God will answer prayers in His time and in His ways. He will get all the glory.