If I Blogged...

Building Your 2010 Library :: Some Book Recommendations for Early Summer Reading

My competitive reading group posted their first quarter totals earlier this month. We got some serious readers this year… the leader actually read 23 books worth 8,311 pages.

Wow.

That was all in 3 short months.

After the first quarter totals, I placed 4th in pages read and 3rd in books completed. Sort of made me want to ramp it up and take my reading more seriously this year.

And I should, have lots of friends who are publishing lots of good books so far in 2010. And I’m so proud of them. In 2010 it’s getting harder and harder to publish.

In fact, some of the stats I’ve heard about getting published are discouraging for new, budding authors:

• there are over 300,000 manuscripts submitted to Christian publishers annually
• of those 300,000 manuscripts, less than 5% are accepted/contracted = 15,000
• of those 15,000 books, less than 5% are first-time authors = 750 (0.2% of all submitted manuscripts)
• the averaged book published in the US sells 250 copies a year
• the averaged book published in the US sells 3,000 copies in its lifetime

 Like I said though, have had some good friends publish some great stuff recently, so wanted to point you to some of these titles and encourage you to chase them down. 

• Thy Kingdom Connected: What the Church Can Learn from Facebook, the Internet, and Other Networks by Dwight Friesen
• A Brilliant Career by Bob Ginn
•  The Meeting of the Waters: Seven Global Currents That Will Propel the Future Church by Fritz Kling
• Divine Intervention: Encountering God through the Ancient Practice of Lectio Divina by Tony Jones
• A New Kind of Christianity: Ten Questions that are Transforming Faith by Brian McClaren
• Green Like God: Unlocking the Divine Plan for our Planet by Jonathan Merritt 
• The Longview: Lasting Strategies for Rising Leaders by Roger Parrott
• Free for All: Rediscovering in Bible in Community by Daniel Rhodes and Tim Conder
•  The Sexual Person: Toward a Renewed Catholic Anthropology by Salzman and Lawler
• The Wisdom of Stability: Rooting Faith in a Mobile Culture by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove

Also, I of course can’t wait for Phileena’s first book to drop… and, rumor is, it might even be out earlier than expected. Stay tuned…

• Pilgrimage of a Soul: Contemplative Spirituality for the Active Life by Phileena Heuertz

Happy reading. And hit me up with some titles if/when you come across stuff worth popping open and slugging through.