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Leadership Journal (@Leadership_Jnl) has selected 10 books as the best of 2012 to nurture ministry leaders’ souls while equipping them for more effective ministry.

The Leader’s Inner Life category:

·         Pastoral Graces: Reflections on the Care of Souls by Lee Eclov (Moody)

·         Sifted: Pursuing Growth through Trials, Challenges, and Disappointments by Wayne Cordeiro (@waynecordeiro) (Zondervan)

·         The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business by Charles Duhigg (@cduhigg) (Random House)

·         Adventures in Churchland: Finding Jesus in the Mess of Organized Religion by Dan Kimball (@DanKimball) (Zondervan)

·         Dangerous Calling: The Unique Challenges of Pastoral Ministry by Paul Tripp (@PaulTripp) (Crossway)

The Leader's Outer Life category:

·         Center Church: Doing Balanced, Gospel-Centered Ministry in Your City by Tim Keller (Zondervan)

·         Deep & Wide: Creating Churches Unchurched People Love to Attend by Andy Stanley (@AndyStanley) (Zondervan)

·         Pursuing God's Will Together: A Discernment Practice for Leadership Groups by Ruth Haley Barton (@TransformingCnt) (IVP)

·         Your Church Is Too Safe: Why Following Christ Turns the World Upside-Down by Mark Buchanan (Zondervan)

·         Vision: Lost & Found: The Story of a Church That Got Stuck but Didn't Stay There by Tim Stevens (@timastevens) (Exponential)

Read this in full.

Also see our previous blogpost: “The 2013 Christianity Today Book Awards.”

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

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Two journalism professors from Christian universities have teamed up to make a short ebook for iPad or iPhone that uses interactive content to help new writers snag a byline.

A One-Step Guide to a Byline is designed for new writers who want to know the bare minimum for writing an article for the popular press. It uses roll-over features, an interactive quiz, and 8 videos to help writers succeed, says Michael Ray Smith, project director and professor of communication from Campbell University, Buies Creek, NC.

Smith joined Wally Metts (@wallymetts), director of graduate studies in communication at Spring Arbor University, Spring Arbor, MI, to make a fun, user-friendly book with enhanced content about the basics of writing. The “one-step” is finding the essential conflict that drives a good story.

Read this in full.

Also see our previous blogpost, “Guy Kawasaki's New Self-Publishing Instruction Book.”

Learn about SomersaultSocial, our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. 

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From an initial crop of 455 titles submitted by 68 publishers, Christianity Today (@CTmagazine) magazine selected for its 2013 Book Awards 10 winners and 9 notables that offer insights into the people, events, and ideas that shape evangelical life, thought, and mission.

·         Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism by Alvin Plantinga (Oxford University Press)

·         A New Testament Biblical Theology: The Unfolding of the Old Testament in the New by G. K. Beale (Baker Academic)

·         Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics by Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT) (Free Press)

·         Kingdom Calling: Vocational Stewardship for the Common Good by Amy L. Sherman (InterVarsity Press)

·         Center Church: Doing Balanced, Gospel-Centered Ministry in Your City by Timothy Keller (Zondervan)

·         Evangellyfish: A Novel by Douglas Wilson (Canon Press)

·         Summoned from the Margin: Homecoming of an African by Lamin Sanneh (Eerdmans)

·         Just and Unjust Peace: An Ethic of Political Reconciliation by Daniel Philpott (Oxford University Press)

·         Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis by Lauren F. Winner (HarperOne)

·         The Theology of Jonathan Edwards by Michael J. McClymond and Gerald R. McDermott (Oxford University Press)

Read this in full.

Also see our previous blogpost, "Christian Publishing's 2012 Best Book Covers."

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Learn about SomersaultSocial, our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. 

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Humor website The Onion (@TheOnion) “reports” a “news” article that only an editor or writer (or English teacher) can appreciate ☺:

Law enforcement officials confirmed Friday that four more copy editors were killed this week amid ongoing violence between two rival gangs divided by their loyalties to the The Associated Press Stylebook (@APStylebook) and The Chicago Manual Of Style (@ChicagoManual).

“At this time we have reason to believe the killings were gang-related and carried out by adherents of both the AP and Chicago styles, part of a vicious, bloody feud to establish control over the grammar and usage guidelines governing American English,” said FBI spokesman Paul Holstein, showing reporters graffiti tags in which the word “anti-social” had been corrected to read “antisocial.”

The deadly territory dispute between these two organizations, as well as the notorious MLA Handbook gang, has claimed the lives of more than 63 publishing professionals this year alone. Officials also stated that an innocent 35-year-old passerby who found himself caught up in a long-winded dispute over use of the serial, or Oxford, comma had died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

The Globe and Mail’s (@globeandmail) John Barber (@JohnBarber14) thinks “the true dinosaurs of the new age are authors.”

Once happily enclosed in the “stables” of publishers willing to nurture and develop their talent, even if they never wrote a major bestseller, droves of so-called “mid-list” authors now find themselves roaming among the ever-present throng of wannabes flogging unpublished work in an indifferent market. And that throng is most likely to produce tomorrow’s bestsellers, even if they begin life as obscure, self-published digital texts that, only after they find a following, are taken up and heavily marketed to mainstream prominence by major publishing houses.

Many mid-list authors have fallen victim to increasingly sophisticated, widely available sales data, according to agents and publishers. Publishers can now assess every author’s lifelong sales thanks to such services as Nielsen Bookscan in the United States and BookNet Canada.

And once reduced to pure numbers, those track records determine the fate of proven writers looking for cash advances to begin their next books. “Everybody knows the numbers now,” Toronto literary agent Denise Bukowski said in an interview. “You can’t lie about the numbers.” Retailers don’t order books from authors whose previous work sold indifferently, she added, so publishers respond by cutting them loose.

Read this in full.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Learn about SomersaultSocial, our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

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Author Mark Sullivan (@MarkSullivanBks) shares his learning experiences writing novels with James Patterson. Sullivan says, “I thought I knew what I was doing when it came to commercial fiction. Working with Patterson, however, I discovered quickly that I didn’t.”

Characters, especially heroes and villains, were to be thought about carefully. They had to be human, above all, and then we had to subject them to terrible ordeals that took them to the brink of their capacities and beyond….

Exposition was severely limited. The old adage—show, not tell—was critical, and the element of surprise was paramount….

The sum of this advice was to sacrifice all for the story and the characters. Outlines were trusted navigational charts, yet we were free to sail in other directions as the novel evolved. But if you were going to change something, it had to be a terrific change….

Read this in full.

Also see our previous blogpost, “James Patterson Explains Why His Books Sell Like Crazy.”

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Learn about SomersaultSocial, our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. 

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And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

The Oxford Dictionaries (@OUPAcademic) USA Word of the Year for 2012 is GIF (pronounced with either a soft or hard “G”). GIF the noun has been around for years. GIF the verb (“He GIFed the highlights of the debate”) is derived from GIF the file extension.

“The GIF, a compressed file format for images that can be used to create simple, looping animations, turned 25 this year,” notes Oxford University Press’ Katherine Martin, “but like so many other relics of the 80s, it has never been trendier.” (Listen to Studio 360’s (@Studio360show) “'Tis the Season for GIF-ing.”

Word of the Year runners-up include Eurogeddon, Higgs boson, MOOC (massive open online course), nomophobia (anxiety caused by being without one’s mobile phone), super PAC, superstorm, and YOLO (you only live once). Oxford Dictionaries also announced its British “Word of the Year”: omnishambles. Officially defined as a situation “characterized by a string of blunders and miscalculations.”

Read the USA Word of the Year announcement in full.

Read the UK Word of the Year announcement in full.

In its 23rd annual words of the year vote, the American Dialect Society (@americandialect) selected "hashtag" as the 2012 word of the year. Hashtag refers to the practice used on Twitter for marking topics or making commentary by means of a hash or number symbol (#) followed by a word or phrase (#WOTY12).

If you’re a word lover, also see our previous blogposts,

• “'Lolz', 'Ridic' and 'Mwahahaha' Added to Oxford Dictionaries Online”
• “Scrabble Champion Named”
• “The Story of English in 100 Words”
• “A Future of Fewer Words?”
• “Word Warriors' 2012 Top 10 Expressive Words”
• “Words of the Year 2011”

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Learn about SomersaultSocial, our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. 

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On NPR Books (@nprbooks), correspondent Lynn Neary explains how self-publishing, once considered to have a negative connotation, has now become a legitimate endeavor.

Read the transcript in full.

The Wall Street Journal similarly covered the topic in its article, “’Vanity’ Press Goes Digital.” And read The Globe and Mail's "Goodbye vanity: Self-publishing goes mainstream."

Also see our previous blogpost, “Guy Kawasaki's New Self-Publishing Instruction Book,” and others in our Self-Publishing archive.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Learn about SomersaultSocial, our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. 

Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Publishers tab.

In her Op-Ed article in The New York Times (@nytopinion), Stanford (@Stanford) anthropology professor and author of When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship With God, T. M. Luhrmann raises some interesting points that apply to biblical fiction, Bible-based movies, and creative storytelling in sermons. She says:

Most evangelicals describe the Bible as literally true. Yet for many, “literally” often means “keep what’s there and add details to make it vivid.”

I am an anthropologist, and in recent years I have been exploring a kind of American evangelical Christianity that seeks to enable its followers to know God intimately. These evangelicals talk about the Bible as if it is literally true, but they also use their imagination to experience the Bible as personally as possible. They talk about getting to know God by having coffee with God, or asking God what shirt they should wear in the morning. A man from Horizon Christian Fellowship in San Diego told me that “the Bible is a love story, and it is written to me.” It is a style of evangelical Christianity with many followers: perhaps a quarter of all Americans....

I am no theologian and I do not think that social science can weigh in on the question of who God is or whether God is real. But I think that anthropology offers some insight into why imaginatively enriching a text taken as literally true helps some Christians to hang on to God when they are surrounded by a secular world.

First, this way of knowing God involves what social scientists would call “active learning.”.... Second, these practices make the experience of God personally specific....

Read this in full.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically design your online brand presence.

Learn about SomersaultSocial, our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. 

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At the recently held LitFlow-Thinktank (@LitFlow) in Berlin, publishing pundit Jane Friedman (@JaneFriedman) said publishers must demonstrate their continued relevance in light of current technology that minimizes the barrier to entry for authors to publish their own books apart from depending on established publishers. She said:

Publishers, for the first time, have to earn their keep by providing a value that extends beyond production and distribution — and possibly even editorial direction. The biggest problem that authors must solve for themselves, year after year, is (1) staying competitive, current, and discoverable in a shifting digital landscape (2) having the right tools to be effective and in touch with their readers, and (3) having a strong network of connections that helps them better market and promote. All of these things are well within a publisher’s ability to assist with, only they haven’t been putting any resource into providing such assistance. They have been focused on their own corporate problems of shifting to a digitally enabled business, and squeezing as many sales as possible out of their mastery of print book sales and distribution. Most of the thinking is centered on self-preservation. But I’d like to suggest that the best self-preservation measure of all is becoming a house that’s known and respected for — in the eyes of its authors — being an active, long-term partner and resource. By empowering each author to do better, the publisher is ensuring more sales over the long run.

Friedman suggests 3 ways publishers should add value to continue attracting authors:

1. Create an author collective, where authors assist each other in branding, marketing, and promotion.
2. Make available an author education program of 101/evergreen education in the form of white papers, webinars, tutorials, screencasts, Q&As, and events.
3. Devote at least one person full time to nurturing author development and community.

Read her presentation in full.

Listen to her presentation.

Also see eReport’s (@nztaylor) coverage, “How publishers can stay in the game.”

See our previous blogposts, “Guy Kawasaki's New Self-Publishing Instruction Book” and "Publishing Must Reinvent Itself."

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you publish and market your ebooks and pbooks.

Learn about SomersaultSocial, our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. 

Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard, especially the Publishers tab that includes links to self-publisher services.