Help With Writing a Book Proposal

It's less than a month till the February 1st deadline for submitting a book proposal for the Bridge Book Awards.

To help people with their book proposals, back in December there was a webinar in which Rev. Grant Schnarr, author of a number of books, talked people through writing a good book proposal.

You can download the audio from the webinar here. The webinar is about an hour and 10 minutes long. The file is 52.3 MB so it takes a little while to download. It's in WMV format so, if you have a Mac (like I do), you'll need something to convert it so that you can play it. I used a free program that makes it so that you can play it in QuickTime called Flip4Mac WMV. This particular copy of the file expires on January 11th but I'm guessing that, if you ask nicely, I could probably get another one put up or you could just contact Kristine Medley directly (Kristine.Medley@newchurch.org, 267-502-4901).

I hope that there are lots of people working on book proposals. I wish that I had the time to submit something myself.

General Church Websites Get Shareable

A couple of General Church websites have recently gotten features that they should have had for a while—sharing tools and subscription tools.

If you go to newchurch.org, and you scroll down to the bottom of the homepage you'll see that you can now subscribe to the news feed, either by RSS or email. That means you'll be updated whenever there's new content on the homepage of newchurch.org. And if you click on one of the items, you'll see that you can now share it with other people via email, Facebook, Twitter, or a bunch of other services.

These features are also being rolled out to individual society sites like BrynAthynChurch.org. So if you want to stay up to date on a particular local society, or you want to promote an event that's happening at a local society, you now have more methods at your disposal.

The sharing features have also been implemented on NewChurchAudio.org so it's finally easy to send people a link to a sermon that you really liked. I happen to know that other improvements are also in the works for NewChurchAudio.org. I'll let you know when they've been implemented.

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While we're on the topic of subscriptions, I'll mention that I recently made it so that you can subscribe to New Church Thought by email. If you scroll down on the right you'll see "Get New Posts Emailed to You" and a box where you can put your email address and hit subscribe. And you might just want to subscribe (if you haven't already) because New Church Thought is about to get an exciting overhaul and you'll want to keep up. (If you do subscribe there's a chance that you'll receive some nonsense posts as I work on revamping things. Just think of it as finding a couple of 2x4s in your inbox—part of the excitement of remodeling.)

Book Proposal Competition

As a collaborative effort to generate dynamic book proposals and publications from aspiring authors, the General Church of the New Jerusalem and the Swedenborg Foundation, publisher of the theological works of Emanuel Swedenborg, are pleased to announce a new competition, called the Bridge Book Awards. The authors of the winning proposals will receive a cash award in the amount of $1,500, be honored at an awards ceremony, and be guaranteed a review by the Swedenborg Foundation Press editorial board with the possibility of publication.

There are 4 categories you can enter: The Afterlife, Living a Spiritual Life, Biblical Commentary from a Swedenborgian/New Church Perspective, and Swedenborg for Dummies.

Entries are due on February 1st, 2011 and must include an entry form, a query letter, a chapter outline or synopsis, and one to three sample chapters.

You can read more about what's required in the Entry Form (PDF) or in the news item about it on newchurch.org.

I'm excited to see what comes of this.