IVP - Behind the Books - April 2010 Archives

Blogging the John Cougar Way

Greetings from IVP’s friendly online publicist! Recently I offered some advice for authors about how to effectively use the tools that Amazon provides to their best promotional advantage. Today I’d like to talk a bit about good blogging technique, so that if you have a blog or are considering starting one, you can ensure that you’re not inadvertently irritating to your readers. And in an effort to make the advice a bit more memorable, I’ve included approximately ten tips for you in the song below.

I need a blogger that won’t drive me crazy

(I need a blogger that won’t drive me crazy)

I need a blogger that won’t drive me crazy

Someone who knows the meaning of,

uh Now don’t be lazy

Well I’ve been trolling the blogs in the mornin’

Reading through the many posts at night

I’m so fed up, my mind is all filled up

Hey I’m so tired of people not doin’ it right

Blogging without bein’ analytical

Failing to make any point concisely

And all them pundits tryin’ to be so political

Inflammatory hype that don’t worry ’bout the facts precisely

I need a blogger that won’t drive me crazy

Someone to teach me and show me the way

I need a blogger that won’t drive me crazy

Someone who knows the meaning of,

uh Now don’t be lazy

Well I’m hoping that you’ll write something new every day

You’ll stay on topic, provide helpful links, and focus (Keep it up!)

With a solid plan of what you’d really like to say

Instead of rambling on with hocus pocus, Please don’t make it up

I need a blogger that won’t drive me crazy

I need a blogger that won’t drive me crazy

I need a blogger that won’t drive me crazy

Someone who knows the meaning of,

uh Now don’t be lazy

(instrumental interlude)

I need a blogger that won’t drive me crazy

Someone to teach me and show me the way

I need a blogger that won’t drive me crazy

Someone who knows the meaning of,

uh Now don’t be lazy

You betcha

Earth Day equals Free ebook

Pop quiz: Do you know what today is?

• A. the 112th day of the year
• B. Jack Nicholson’s birthday
• C. Earth Day
• D. All of the above

Well as you might guess, the answer to the quiz is D, all of the above.

And as to why you should care, to celebrate Earth Day and empower people to do good to our planet, TODAY AND TODAY ONLY you can download a free copy of Julie Clawson's excellent book Everyday Justice: The Global Impact of our Daily Choices.

All you have to do is go here to download a copy of the ebook FOR FREE!

And if you don’t have a Kindle to read it on, you can simply download an app and read it on your PC. Happy Earth Day from IVP!

Making the most of Amazon

Attention all eager authors whose books have not yet released—this post is especially for you! You’ve finished writing your book and now you’re thinking about how you can best promote your book when it comes out (or you should be!).

So as IVP’s friendly online publicist, I’m going to do a series of posts that will give you some practical things you can start thinking about and/or doing right now.

First up? Five ways to make the most of Amazon.com …

1) Ask your friends to write positive reviews and then post them as “customer reviews” on your book’s page as soon as the book is in stock. According to Amazon’s data, a positive customer review is the #1 driver of sales, so having several positive reviews right from the start can have a disproportionately positive effect!

2) Encourage your friends, family and networks to pre-order your book, as the number of pre-orders will influence Amazon’s first order of your book, which usually occurs 2-4 weeks prior to the book’s release date. A larger number of pre-orders may result in a larger initial order.

3) Fill out your author page with all the relevant details at Amazon’s Author Central

This way if customers want to know more about who you are, they can easily find out. I believe you can also link your blog to feed into this page if you so choose.

4) Once your book is in stock, encourage lots of people to buy your book on the same day. This will give Amazon lots of data to work with, which will then enable them to do more customized marketing to similar potential customers.

5) Consider making a list or two on Listmania and include your book in the list (it’s a sort of: If you like this book, you might like these kind of a feature). Then whenever a reader seeks a book on your list, your list will (sometimes) appear alongside that book’s listing and they might read it and see your book. To create an effective promotional list, you should include some popular books that are thematically similar (e.g. top church leadership books).

Stay tuned for future tips on things like Twitter, Facebook, blogging and more!

A Good Friday

What happened on the cross is the magnificent mystery of the Christian faith. The implications for us and for the entire cosmos are more than we will ever entirely apprehend in this life. We at once mourn the necessity of the cross and celebrate in it God’s victory over sin, death, hell and Satan.

While there is mystery, deep mystery, this doesn’t mean we can’t know anything truly about the cross. There is much we can know with certainty. And there are misunderstandings we should avoid.

The classic book on the topic is no doubt John Stott’s The Cross of Christ. It has been out for over twenty years now and continues to prove to be an invaluable meditation on the central event of the Christian faith. Here are some selections (presented here without ellipses) from Stott’s pivotal chapter, “The Self-Substitution of God.”

How then could God express simultaneously his holiness in judgment and his love in pardon? Only by providing a divine substitute for the sinner so that the substitute would receive the judgment and the sinner the pardon. We sinners still of course have to suffer some of the personal, psychological and social consequences of our sins, but the penal consequence, the deserved penalty of alienation from God, has been borne by Another in our place, so that we may be spared it.

The key question we now have to address is this: exactly who was our substitute? Who took our place, bore our sin, became our curse, endured our penalty, died our death? To be sure, “while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom 5:8). That would be the simple, surface answer. But who was this Christ? How are we to think of him?

The first proposal is that the substitute was the man Christ Jesus, viewed as a human being and conceived as an individual separate from both God and us, an independent third party. Those who begin with this a priori lay themselves open to gravely distorted understandings of the atonement and so bring the truth of substitution into disrepute. They tend to present the cross in one or other of two ways, according to whether the initiative was Christ’s or God’s. In the one case Christ is pictured as intervening in order to pacify an angry God and wrest from him a grudging salvation. In the other, the intervention is ascribed to God, who proceeds to punish the innocent Jesus in place of us the guilty sinners who had deserved the punishment. In both cases God and Christ are sundered from one another: either Christ persuades God or God punishes Christ. What is characteristic of both presentations is that they denigrate the Father. Reluctant to suffer himself, he victimizes Christ instead. Reluctant to forgive, he is prevailed on by Christ to do so. He is seen as a pitiless ogre whose wrath has to be assuaged, whose disinclination to act has to be overcome, by the loving self-sacrifice of Jesus.

It is true that the sins of Israel were transferred to the scapegoat, that “the LORD laid on him,” his suffering servant, all our iniquity (Is 53:6), that “it was the LORD’s will to crush him” (Is 53:10), and that Jesus applied to himself Zechariah’s prophecy that God would “strike the shepherd” (Zech 13:7; Mk 14:27). It is also true that in the New Testament God is said to have “sent” his Son to atone for our sins (1 Jn 4:9-10), “delivered him up” for us (Acts 2:23; Rom 8:32), “presented him as a sacrifice of atonement” (Rom 3:25), “condemned sin” in his flesh (Rom 8:3), and “made him … to be sin for us” (2 Cor 5:21). These are striking statements. But we have no liberty to interpret them in such a way as to imply either that God compelled Jesus to do what he was unwilling to do himself, or that Jesus was an unwilling victim of God’s harsh justice. Jesus Christ did indeed bear the penalty of our sins, but God was active in and through Christ doing it, and Christ was freely playing his part (e.g., Heb 10:5-10).

We must not, then, speak of God punishing Jesus or of Jesus persuading God, for to do so is to set them over against each other as if they acted independently of each other or were even in conflict with each other. We must never make Christ the object of God’s punishment or God the object of Christ’s persuasion, for both God and Christ were subjects not objects, taking the initiative together to save sinners. Whatever happened on the cross in terms of “God-forsakenness” was voluntarily accepted by both in the same holy love that made atonement necessary. It was “God in our nature forsaken of God.”

The Father did not lay on the Son an ordeal he was reluctant to bear, nor did the Son extract from the Father a salvation he was reluctant to bestow. There is no suspicion anywhere in the New Testament of discord between the Father and the Son, “whether by the Son wresting forgiveness from an unwilling Father or by the Father demanding a sacrifice from an unwilling Son.” There was no unwillingness in either. On the contrary, their wills coincided in the perfect self-sacrifice of love.

Our substitute, then, who took our place and died our death on the cross, was neither Christ alone (since that would make him a third party thrust in between God and us), nor God alone (since that would undermine the historical incarnation), but God in Christ, who was truly and fully both God and man and who on that account was uniquely qualified to represent both God and man and to mediate between them. If we speak only of Christ suffering and dying, we overlook the initiative of the Father. If we speak only of God suffering and dying, we overlook the mediation of the Son. The New Testament authors never attribute the atonement either to Christ in such a way as to disassociate him from the Father, or to God in such a way as to dispense with Christ, but rather to God and Christ, or to God acting in and through Christ with his whole-hearted concurrence.

This is the mystery on which we meditate and which we celebrate.