Writing with a mission.

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Changing the Culture for Christ through Missional Creative Writing

We are in a culture war in America.  The Christian cultural norms of decades past have been replaced by a cabal of anti-Christian, pro-abortion, pro-homosexual, pro-trans-sexual, anti-democratic, anti-traditional family beliefs that are threatening the very foundations of our society in a very real sense.  It is right and just that the Church—the pillar of God’s truth in the earth—stand against this onslaught and shine the light of God’s truth in the midst of the darkness.  But our goal is not simply to stand for the truth, but to lead those who have been deceived into believing the lies of the enemy to instead embrace the truths taught in the Bible and the saving message of Christ Jesus.  To best do this, we should seek to stand for the truth in a winsome way, a way that can by-pass our true enemy’s defenses and plant the seeds of truth deep in the hearts and minds of those who have been deceived by his lies.  To maximize our effectiveness at this task, we need to set aside our shock, our outrage, and our dismay at the present state of our society and turn a critical eye to examining exactly how we arrived at this point in history in the first place.  How did a once predominantly Christian culture descend into the moral chaos of our present hedonistic society?  Did it happen by accident?  No, it did not.

Why Secular Culture Matters

Before we answer these two important questions, it is crucial to understand why it matters whether or not our secular culture embraces a Christianized worldview.  It surely doesn’t mean that the members of such a society are saved just because they may oppose abortion.  However, if the predominant secular culture’s view was that abortion was wrong, far fewer babies would have been murdered by this abhorrent practice. 

What the secular culture believes and teaches matters.  Culture defines significant beliefs and behaviors that affect everything from personal choices to laws.  Every group in society has a corresponding culture that shapes how people who belong to that group are expected to behave and what they are expected to believe.  If, for instance, you belong to the Muslim community, there are certain beliefs and practices that you are expected to adhere to as a part of that cultural group.  And the group will help enforce those norms and standards.  You won’t find a Muslim woman walking around in public without a head covering, for example.  The Muslim culture believes this is how Muslim women should dress, and the pressure and expectation of the community enforces this practice and encourages belief in it.

Here are some things that culture helps define for us:

1) Culture tells us what is important and what is not.

2) Culture tells us what is acceptable and good.  It tells us what ‘normal’ looks like in our particular group.

3) Culture tells us what is unacceptable, bad, and evil.  It tells us what beliefs and behaviors we should oppose, avoid, and resist.

4) Culture tells us what we should value in life.

5) Culture tells us what a hero looks like.  It tells us who we should aspire to be like and seek to become.

6) Culture tells us what Truth is.  It tells us how we should look at the world (i.e., it defines a specific worldview and encourages us to see life a certain way).

7) Culture tells us what lies are.  It tells us which beliefs and ideas we should ridicule and avoid and hold in contempt.

It is also important to note that the predominant culture in a society—a secular culture in our case—conveys these messages with the benefit of a megaphone.  It is often the loudest voice in the room.  And as such, it tends to have great sway over the society for good or evil.  If we want the message of Christ to be revered and the moral teachings of the Bible to be embraced and championed by our society, then it should be important to us to make every effort to ensure that secular culture embraces and champions these beliefs.  This is not an impossible task.  In the 1940s, 1950s, and to a large extent in the 1960s, the secular culture in America predominantly embraced Christian views on morality and revered the message of Christ—even though the majority were not themselves practicing Christians.

It’s true that a Christianized culture does not guarantee a culture filled with Christians.  Followers of Christ are individuals who have been transformed by an encounter with the living God and pursue ever-increasing intimacy with Jesus.  As we do this, we are transformed increasingly into His image—i.e., we become more like Him through the process of sanctification.  But let’s take a good look at what ideas embraced by a culture CAN produce by looking at our own present-day society.  Currently, the transgender movement is one of the darlings of our American culture.  Because it is now considered normal—even heroic—to be a transgender person, we are witnessing the following:

1) Social media is embracing this movement and encouraging young people to explore the possibility that they are transgender.  The encouragement and support these online communities provide to young people who are going through a natural period of confusion during puberty has swayed many to pursue changing their gender.

2) Laws have been passed in at least one state that allow children as young as 13 to medically transition to the opposite gender (i.e., to have serious gender-affirming surgery and/or hormone treatment) without their parent’s consent (Rantz, 2023).  Similar legislation is being considered in other states.

3) Those who oppose the transgender ideology are frequently castigated in the news, on social media, and at political events as being mean-spirited, hate-filled bigots.

4) Public schools increasingly embrace people who espouse transgender ideology and openly flaunt their transgender status, and public school teachers regularly read small children stories promoting the transgender lifestyle and encouraging them to embrace the possibility that they should transition themselves (City Journal, 2023).

I could go on.  The effects of our mainstream secular culture embracing transgenderism as normal, acceptable, and desirable are significant.  An increasing number of people (mostly children) have chosen to become transgender themselves and live by this ideology, many times making tragic, life-altering decisions to mutilate and alter their bodies to conform with their new beliefs (Veissière, 2018; French, n.d.).

Mainstream secular cultural beliefs matter.

Now, let’s examine what it could look like if we put the shoe on the other foot, if we were to succeed in flipping the cultural norms in Christ’s favor.  Here is what we could be experiencing in our society if that happened:

1) Social media is embracing Christianity and encouraging young people to explore the possibility that they should convert to Christianity.  The encouragement and support these online communities provide to young people who are going through a natural period of confusion during puberty sway many of them to explore faith in Christ Jesus.

2) Those who oppose Christian moral standards and beliefs (such as those promoting the current transgender movement) are viewed in news and social media, and are characterized in movies as being out-of-touch, immoral, and their beliefs undesirable.

3) Christ followers and Christian ideology are increasingly embraced by public schools and public school teachers.  Small children are regularly read stories promoting a moral, Christian lifestyle and encouraging them to embrace the very real possibility that they should consider becoming Christians themselves.  Reading from the Bible and study of this great book is once again considered an essential part of public school education.

I observe that when the mainstream secular culture embraces the idea that following Jesus is normal and even desirable, more and more people will be exposed to the good news of Jesus Christ and will choose to become Christ followers themselves, which will help in a significant way to accomplish the primary mission of the Church.  This is not a theory; we have seen it happen in our own culture less than a century ago, nor is it an impossible task to see our culture transformed for Christ again.  If the enemy can pervert our formerly Christianized secular culture so that it became the morally decadent secular culture of today—and this without God’s help and assistance, then, with God’s help, we can certainly re-take the ground that has been lost and succeed in transforming the present secular culture into one that embraces Christ and Christian values once again.  But we must apply ourselves diligently and wisely to the task if we are to succeed.

How Did We Get Here?

I submit to you that there are two primary causes for the present moral decay in our culture.  The source of our present cultural decay can be traced back many decades to a time when the Church chose to abdicate its responsibility in the fields of secular public education and secular entertainment.  This was a two-fold critical mistake on the part of the Church.  As we retreated to our Christian fortresses of solitude, where we continued to educate Christians and where we created entertainment for Christian audiences, the vacuum we left behind was filled with radical and un-Godly people who took advantage of the opportunity we gave them to almost completely shut out Christians from these two important fields.  Today, it is nearly impossible to espouse Christian beliefs in either secular educational environments or the secular entertainment industry without encountering strong resistance.  Actors who cling to Christian beliefs are virtually exiled from the secular entertainment industry, and educators who do manage to graduate from secular universities with both a degree in education and their Christian beliefs firmly intact are more and more rare.  As a result, our children are fed on a steady diet of anti-Christian values in both the classroom, where they spend the bulk of their waking hours during the week for the majority of the year, as well as on the devices and in the venues where they entertain themselves with popular secular music, movies, and online content.  This has produced a generation of people whose worldview is vastly different than the Christian worldview presented in the Bible.  It has produced a culture that is openly antagonistic to God and His message, as well as His messengers—all Christ followers.

The morally corrupt beliefs and attitudes that I mentioned at the beginning of this essay that are at the forefront of our present cultural decline have been birthed largely from the seeds sown by educators in our schools who have poisoned the minds of our children for decades and their counterparts in the entertainment industry who have done the same in their various arenas of influence.  Slowly but surely, they have used these two powerful tools of engagement to undermine the belief in God and the moral foundations taught in the Bible and replace them with their own version of the truth.  The youth in our churches may have a genuine relationship with God, but most of them are marinated in an anti-God secular culture day after day in their schools and in the entertainment they consume.  Many of them struggle to believe that homosexuality or trans-sexuality is harmful, let alone sinful, and many of them similarly find it difficult to believe that Jesus is the only path to salvation—all because of the powerfully persuasive cultural influences of education and entertainment that they are immersed in every day when they are not in a purely Christian environment of the Church.

Through yielding the field of entertainment and education to the secularists, we have allowed the culture of our nation to be groomed to embrace an anti-Christian, pro-abortion, pro-trans-sexual/LGBTQ, anti-woman, and anti-God worldview.  As a result, many in the Church have adopted the world’s value system while claiming Christ as their Savior.  Yet, beyond their acceptance of Christ as Savior of their souls, He often is not Lord of their belief system, their worldview, much to the detriment of the advancement of the gospel.

Many in the Church recognize we are in dire straits.  Many recognize the current manifestation of false and un-Christian beliefs that now permeate our society at every level is a problem that needs to be confronted.  Yet there is a struggle to discern an effective way to address the situation and lead our society back towards Christ.  Many churches are pushing even harder for their own members to buckle down on living out their Christian morals but flounder without an effective strategy for evangelizing the culture they live in, often offending the culture unnecessarily and alienating the very people they are trying to lead to Christ.  Some churches have sought to reduce their interaction with secular culture and maintain a segregated Christians-only society untouched by the secular world and thereby fail to engage with a world that desperately needs Christ.  Others, unfortunately, have abandoned the moral truths of the scriptures and have embraced many of these un-Godly lifestyles and beliefs, creating a bastardized version of Christianity that seeks to win converts by endorsing the sin as well as loving the sinner in one, big, happy family, with disastrous results.

But there is a better way.  There is a way that we can both maintain Biblical standards in the Church and also be a more powerful and effective influence on our culture to embrace Biblical truths and moral standards.  And this plan is revealed by analyzing how we arrived here in the first place.

The winning strategy to transform our culture for Christ is for Christ-followers to become a significant and powerful force in the fields of secular education and secular entertainment once again.  We can transform our culture FOR Christ using the same tactics that were used to lead our culture AWAY from Christ.  This is not some plan that might work to transform our culture.  It is a plan that has worked to transform our culture already.  And it will work to transform our culture again to turn our nation TOWARDS Christ Jesus if we will stand together and use the tools at our disposal to help make it happen.

The Role of Missional Creative Writing

One powerful tool available to the Church to help shift the culture back to Christian values and point people to Christ in both the entertainment and educational fields is missional creative writing.  By harnessing the creativity of those God has called to be writers for Him, we can take advantage of a wide-open door of opportunity to advance the gospel and, at that same time, help to shift the secular culture back to Christian values.  By organizing and helping to guide this process, in the same way that a good coach can help a team maximize its strengths and shore up its weaknesses, local churches can help empower this generation of Christian writers and content creators to advance the kingdom of God.

It is important at this point to clarify what missional creative writing is and is not.  It is not writing by Christians that is created for a Christian audience.  The majority of ‘Christian fiction’ and other Christian works are not missional in nature.  This is especially true when it comes to fiction.  As a former Christian bookstore manager, I can attest to the fact that the vast majority of what is considered ‘Christian fiction’ wouldn’t appeal to today’s secular fiction reader.  Missional creative writing is creating works of fiction and non-fiction that are designed specifically to attract secular readers and expose them to the good news about Jesus Christ in ways that they find appealing and want to read.  Delving into the mechanics of how to do this is beyond the scope of this essay, but it is an important distinction to comprehend as we proceed.

Missional creative writing is about storytelling.  It is about telling a story that engages the minds and hearts of those who hear it and nudges them towards the values and beliefs that the storyteller wants the audience to embrace—a Christ-centered message of hope, salvation in Jesus, and Biblical morality and worldview.  Consider this quote about storytelling from Steve Jobs, founder of Apple Computers and the man largely influential in the explosion of the Pixar movie company into nationwide prominence.  In 1994, years before Pixar launched their first film, Steve Jobs said this: 

“The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller. The storyteller sets the vision, values, and agenda of an entire generation that is to come… and Disney has a monopoly on the storyteller business. You know what? I am tired of that [expletive], I am going to be the next storyteller.” (Byrne, n.d.)

Let that sink in.  Steve Jobs’ prescient statement is very revealing, and the Church should sit up and take notice.  Steve Jobs understood something that the Church has forgotten for far too long.  The group of storytellers a society listens to, “. . . sets the vision, values, and the agenda” of that society.  At the time, Disney was the king of the heap as far as who told the stories to our children—whether they were children of Christians or otherwise.  Show any person who grew up in that era a list of the Disney movies released in those years, and you will be hard-pressed to find someone who hasn’t seen several of them during their formative years.  As of this writing, this is still true today.  Yet, this is the same company that has long championed the LGBTQ agenda and used their films and products to encourage children and adults to embrace the same while presenting a world in which God is absent to our children.

Steve Jobs succeeded in challenging that status quo, of being the David who took on Goliath.  Pixar became a force to be reckoned with in the movie industry, going on to successfully challenge Disney’s prominence.  But the messages in the Pixar films of that era weren’t pushing a message for Christ or a God-centered worldview or championing Biblical morality.  So, essentially, the narrative hadn’t changed much.  And, by the way, Disney didn’t stand by and do nothing.  They recognized the power of the Pixar brand and eventually bought the company themselves.  So Disney—a Godless, anti-family, pro-LGBTQ agenda company—remains the loudest voice in the movie storytelling business, continuing to speak their vision, values, and agenda to our children and lend their significant influence to shape the society of tomorrow into their own Godless image.

The stories we listen to and come to believe in define who we are and the direction of our very lives.  Whether the story is fictional or not, if it is told in a powerful way that connects with the masses, it can bring either great peace and deliverance or untold suffering and destruction to countless millions.  A few examples follow—all of which have changed and continue to change history around the world in varying degrees for both good or evil, depending on the work in question:

Mein Kampf – Hitler – Millions upon millions of people died needlessly because of Hitler’s fictional belief that the Jews and other non-Aryan peoples were the source of his country’s economic and social ills.

The Communist Manifesto – Karl Marx – Marx’s poisonous, anti-religious, and ignorant belief that religion was the opiate of the masses and that humankind could, by themselves, create the perfect world created a framework for human suffering unparalleled in human history.  The fiction that humankind could, as an act of their will, lay down the sinful nature to which we are all prone and live solely for the good of others without the power of a redeeming Savior was fool-hardy.  Yet, Lenin, Stalin, Mao Tse Tong, and a host of other leaders embraced this fiction as fact, killing between 60 and 100 million people so far as a result—depending on where you get your numbers—and enslaving millions more in a life of poverty, despair, Godlessness, and totalitarianism.

The Koran – Muhammad – The religion of Islam is founded upon the fiction contained in the Koran.  Many of those who cling closely to the more violent teachings contained in this book have started wars in which many people needlessly died and have enslaved millions in lives of forced servitude, robbing them of their freedom.  Many believers in Islam, following the teachings of the Koran, have as their goal in life the complete eradication of the Jewish people and either forced conversion or annihilation of all Christians.  This fictional book has changed history—and not for the better.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin – Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel helped in a significant way to influence public opinion for ending slavery in the United States of America.

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis – A great example of missional fiction for the secular marketplace written by one of the twentieth century’s greatest authors.  This series of books depicts the salvation story as an allegory and acquaints secular readers with C.S. Lewis’ work, influencing many of its readers to explore Lewis’ other works that are blatantly Christian and convey the salvation message.

The Bible – the followers of Jesus – The true story of God’s exuberant love for His greatest creation—humankind—and His radical plan to save us from ourselves by sending Jesus to die for our sins and restore the relationship with the Father.  While the only work of non-fiction in our list, it is truly the greatest story ever told.  In the Bible, Jesus Himself used parables—fictional stories—to illustrate many of the truths about the kingdom of God and lead people to put their faith in Him. 

 To harness the tremendous influencing power of missional creative writing to lead our secular society to Christ and the true freedom He alone offers, we must find a way to create quality works that non-Christians will happily read and get them into the hands and ebook readers of non-Christians.  Yet, today, Christian writers of fiction are all but shut out of the secular publishing market.  The publishing industry has long been left-leaning and has become increasingly so in the last two decades.  Routinely publishers and agents mention on their websites and profiles that they are looking for trans-sexual and LGBTQ characters in the works they represent and publish.  A sampling of recently published fiction in the secular market over the past several years will return a high percentage of works featuring trans-sexual and/or LGBTQ characters in a positive light, where these lifestyles are celebrated as normal or heroic, and where Christian characters frequently appear as the villains, cowards, weak-willed, child molesters, or abusers of others in one form or another.  Alternatively, you may also encounter in these works a so-called ‘Christian’ character who embraces sinful behaviors (especially homosexuality and trans-sexuality) as being accepted by God.  You will be hard-pressed to find a single instance of a Christian character in today’s secular fiction who actually represents the character and message of Christ.  These depictions have a far-reaching effect on how Christianity, Christians, and harmful sinful behavior are perceived by our society. 

Many of the largest publishers of Christian books are now owned by secular companies (Zondervan, Thomas Nelson, and Multnomah to name a few).  The situation brings to mind the scriptural admonishment to not be unequally yoked.  How can a publishing company supposedly dedicated to publishing books with a solid Biblical message be controlled by non-Christians?  It leaves little hope that the managers of these Christian imprints—Christian though they may personally be—are free to follow the Spirit’s leading in creating cutting-edge missional Christian fiction designed to influence secular readers.  On the contrary, these companies were specifically purchased by their new secular owners because their materials primarily appeal to a Christian audience, and these secular publishers want to tap into that financial market.  They don’t need their Christian imprint cross-marketing to their secular fiction readers—they already have large sections of their businesses devoted to those markets.  They would in essence be competing with themselves—not a smart financial decision and one that would likely be shut down before it made its way past the editorial board.

  The non-religious book industry is between a 10 to 13 billion dollar a year industry in the United States, depending on how you tally it up (Statista, 2023).  The religious book industry—both Christian and otherwise—drew in somewhere between 750 million to 1.2 billion dollars in 2022 (How Religion Publishing Became a Billion-Dollar Industry, n.d.).  It is fair to say that non-religious people are not the ones buying the books in the religious section of the bookstores.  Many of these presses don’t even have representation in the majority of secular bookstores.  If we can get missional creative writing into the secular sales marketing pipeline—and do so with quality materials that appeal to the secular market—we can reach a much larger market of people than is currently being reached by the Christian publishing industry.  Additionally, we can do so with materials that are crafted in such a way that they will lead people to Christ and Christian values in much the same way that Disney films have led our children away from Christ and Christian values in recent decades.  The wide door of opportunity is standing before us if we will but apply ourselves to the task.

If we are to succeed in doing our part as Christ’s ambassadors on earth to help turn our nation back to God, we must re-engage in secular culture in a way that will begin shifting secular beliefs towards Jesus, God, and Christianity by engaging the imaginations of non-Christians.  One of the most powerful ways to do this is through entertainment. The goal of creating a missional creative writing ministry is to use the gifts, talents, and abilities of Christian writers and creative artists to help facilitate a cultural shift towards God by producing quality writing and entertainment for the secular market which…

a. Encourages critical thinking from a Christ-centered worldview regarding the challenges and opportunities facing our world;

b. Promotes a positive view of God’s interaction with humanity;

c. Promotes a Biblically-based moral lifestyle that values sexual purity;

d. Celebrates the values of honesty, justice, equality, freedom of speech and expression, and democracy for both sexes and all races; and

e. Provides easy access to a clear presentation of the gospel either in the work itself or as part of the back or front-matter material of the work.

Storming the Gates of Our Culture for Christ

We currently have a wide open door of opportunity to engage with the masses of non-Christians in our society through the publishing industry that was not possible until recent decades.   The rise and expansion of the electronic book and ebook marketplace, the extremely low cost of entry to publish and distribute both ebook and quality paperback books around the world through major online and brick-and-mortar retailers, and the ubiquity of electronic devices making these materials available to the masses offer an incredible opportunity for spreading the gospel through the unique and powerful ministry of missional creative writing.  Combined with the tremendous power of social media, with which these materials can be marketed to the masses without needing the costly advertising budgets required to reach large audiences in the past, we have a truly golden opportunity in front of us.  We don’t know how long this arena will remain so accessible and so open, and we should not waste time in maximizing this advantage.

Imagine, if you will, a trained group of Christian creative writers who are generating high-quality books, podcasts, blog posts, articles, short stories, audiobooks, and a host of other written and recorded materials—all of which appeal to the secular public and which are not perceived as being overtly Christian in nature, but yet are steadily pointing their readers towards Christ in creative ways.  Now imagine a cadre of believers who are helping to point readers to these materials through online reviews, tweets, likes, follows, and other social media applications, sites, and methodologies, creating a growing volume of social marketing material that lifts the visibility of these materials to a public that is ever-hungry for entertainment and enlightenment.

Now imagine a Christian publishing organization rallying behind these authors and creators, helping to equip them and train them, consolidating the marketing landscape to magnify the reach and volume of the advertising effort, and being a creative factory where the best of these writers and creators naturally bubble to the top.  If pursued with excellence, this can lead to missional creative works beginning to appear with frequency on major secular best-seller lists like the New York Times, USA Today, et al, showing up in trade publication charts for top-selling authors and books, and even being stocked on the physical bookshelves of major retail outlets across the United States and beyond.

A movement that accomplished all of this would be a tool God could and would use to move the needle of cultural values towards God, thereby encouraging many millions of people who have in the past been averse to even thinking about God in a positive way to take a chance on engaging with Jesus with a positive mindset.  The increased exposure and cultural acceptance of Christian values would result in more people opposing abortion, seeing a Christian spiritual alternative to problems instead of only a secular non-Christian one, viewing Christ and Christians positively, and welcoming Christian materials once again into our public schools.   If past history of such cultural shifts is any indication, it would also move the appetites of entertainment consumers away from the highly sexualized pro-LGBTQ standards of today’s secular publishing and movie industries towards offerings embracing more wholesome Biblically-endorsed values (Peterson, 2018).

Make no mistake about it.  At the end of the day, the publishing and movie industries may want to push their ungodly agendas, but they can only do so much without making money.  As Disney is beginning to learn in recent days, if they push these agendas farther than the culture will stomach, financial disaster follows.   Ultimately, secular entertainment companies will follow the money and the public sentiment and tone down or remove their ungodly prurient content altogether if the public votes with their feet to embrace quality pro-Christian value alternatives. 

The Church needs to be the loudest voice in the room when it comes to speaking to our culture.  We can become so once again, and developing a strong missional creative writing ministry can help make that goal into a reality.  The impact of such a ministry can be monumental.  We are already seeing the rise of quality movie alternatives that are challenging the status quo of Hollywood with pro-Christian value offerings that appeal to a secular public and are not seen as ‘Christian-only’ products.  Now is the time to get behind creating the same environment in the publishing industry.  With commitment and perseverance, we have the tools available to us to shift our culture back towards Christ and Christian values.  A strong missional creative writing movement can lead multitudes of people to find salvation in Jesus and help our society enjoy a host of benefits ranging from fewer abortions to safer neighborhoods with less crime.  Let’s join together to help this generation of Christian writers and creative artists spread the gospel and change our nation for Christ.

For an example of what a Christian missional YA novel looks like, visit https://cwells.net/egalitarius

Bibliography:

Byrne, D. (n.d.). Steve Jobs’​ lesson about Storytelling. www.linkedin.com. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/steve-jobs-lesson-storytelling-dave-byrne?articleId=6694940202449956864

City Journal. (2023, March 23). The real story behind Drag Queen Story Hour | City Journal. https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-real-story-behind-drag-queen-story-hour

French, D. (n.d.). The Tragic Transgender Contagion. National Review. https://www.nationalreview.com/2016/08/transgender-teens-parents-rapid-onset-gender-dysphoria-doctors/

How religion publishing became a Billion-Dollar industry. (n.d.). PublishersWeekly.com. https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/religion/article/89000-how-religion-publishing-became-a-billion-dollar-industry.html

Peterson, D. (2018, April 11). How the Catholic Church censored the Golden Age of Hollywood. Vox. https://www.vox.com/videos/2018/4/11/17224220/catholic-church-censorship-golden-age-hollywood-hays-code

Rantz, J. (2023, February 10). Rantz: WA laws now allow teen gender reassignment surgery without parental consent. MyNorthwest.com. https://mynorthwest.com/3296653/rantz-washington-laws-permit-teen-gender-reassignment-surgery-parental-consent/

Statista. (2023, June 19). Book publisher sales revenue in the U.S. 2012-2022, by category. https://www.statista.com/statistics/303621/books-sales-revenue-category-usa/

Veissière, S. (2018, November 28). Veissière: Why Is Transgender Identity on the Rise Among Teens? PsychologyToday.com. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/culture-mind-and-brain/201811/why-is-transgender-identity-the-rise-among-teens

Free-eBooks.net – a good place to post your permafree book.

Many indie authors know that having a permanently free book (a.k.a permafree) available for readers to download is a great tool to use when building your mailing list and garnering new readers for your books – especially if it is the first in a book series.  But for many new authors, the problem is knowing how to go about making people aware of the fact that your free book is available at all.  No matter how good your work is, if people don’t know about it, they won’t read it.

Alas, I am a relatively new author, having just released my second fiction book – The Tucson Prophecy.  This book is now permafree and is the prequel novella to my full-length paranormal thriller novel The Seer (The Seer is now available for pre-order through a variety of retailers and being released for sale on November 11, 2016).  When I released my book, I had ZERO people on my mailing list, and a pitifully small following on my Amazon author page, Goodreads author page, and blog (read less than about fifteen followers all-told).  So my big challenge was (and is) HOW do I make people aware of my permafree book so they will give me a chance as an author and possibly buy my book The Seer when it comes out.

Enter Free-eBooks.net.  Now, as a matter of full disclosure, I have already listed The Tucson Prophecy for free on a number of retailers, even getting up as high as #13 in the top 100 free books on Amazon.com for my category (yeah!).  I have also reached out on social media and even handed out fliers to people on the street advertising The Tucson Prophecy.  All this activity had netted me a total of  eight sign-ups on my email list as of yesterday.  In keeping with the great indie tradition of never resting on my laurels, I next set my sites on putting my book on the free ebook list sites.  Through my research, Free-eBooks.net came up and I decided to give it a go.

I uploaded my permafree ebook 23 hours ago, and already I have 4 downloads from Free_eBooks.net and someone else just signed up on my email list.  Not bad, in my opinion.  Now, I have no way of knowing if the recent email list sign-up was from my listing at Free-eBooks.net, but it encouraged me to keep plugging away at making more and more people aware of my free book via the free ebook list sites.  So here’s to all of you indies out there.  Keep writing great books, and give Free-eBooks.net a try!

Happy writing,

C.L. Wells

Should authors say ‘NO’ to Amazon’s KDP Select Program? (part 1)

I’m an indie author.  I published my first book last year on Amazon’s KDP Select program.  For those of you who don’t already know what KDP Select is, it is a program whereby you, as the author, agree to make your ebook available exclusively through Amazon for at least 90 days.  In return, you get the following:

  • Preferential promotion through Amazon’s KDP Select promotional advertisement program.
  • Detailed sales and readership statistic reporting not available to titles that are not in the KDP Select program.
  • Ability to run promotional pricing, including free giveaways, which are not available to non-KDP Select titles.
  • Promotion to Kindle Unlimited users as part of their ‘free’ reading program, thus exposing you to a sizable group of readers who may not otherwise see your book through the other advertisement methods.

Sounds good, right?  Amazon is the largest online book retailer, and they are agreeing to give you preferential marketing status so that your book is advertised to a much wider audience than it otherwise would be.  What’s not to like?  Well, actually, there’s a lot not to like.

Mark Coker, creator of the ebook distribution site Smashwords.com, gave an interview as part of the Indie Fringe 2016 conference on the top trends of the publishing industry.  It is a great interview that I highly recommend.  You can watch it here.  In that interview, he discusses KDP Select.  He had many good points to make, but I want to drill down on just two of them in this post.

  1. The KDP Select program effectively buries all independently published books that are NOT in KDP select in an advertising black-hole.
  2. The KDP Select program is training one of the largest indie reader groups in the world to expect to read books for free, thus undermining sales of indie author titles and ultimately de-valuing indie author ebook titles en masse.

The combination of these two effects is having a negative effect on the indie ebook market.  In order to get premium access to Amazon’s customer base for a new ebook, authors are being asked to give their books away for practically free to a large segment of would-be book buyers (Kindle Unlimited users).  You will get some limited financial reimbursement for this from Amazon, but only for pages actually read, and at a much lower reimbursement than what the book’s selling price actually is.  To add insult to injury, Amazon actually won’t agree to the reimbursement rate until AFTER the sales month ends.  You are effectively surrendering your right to sell your ebook at the selling price you want to this large group of ebook customers.  These readers, whether they like the book or not, will certainly not then BUY the book that they have just read for free.  So, if you sign up for KDP Select, you are effectively discounting your book to the point that you will likely not make much money on this large group of users.

Now, let’s say you take your book OUT of the KDP Select program after the first three months.  Your $3.99 ebook is now positioned to make money hand over fist, right?  Wrong.  Now, all those Kindle Unlimited users, who have likely already read your book for free, don’t want to pay to read it.  Additionally, all the other books still in the KDP Select program are showing up in searches ahead of your book.  Thirdly, your book is no longer new, further negatively impacting your search result standing in the coveted ‘new books’ searches.  Your options?  Lower your price even more in order to compete against a game stacked against you, or re-up for KDP Select.

Ask yourself, all things being equal, why would anyone want to buy your ebook for $3.99 on a market flooded with thousands of new ebooks a week when they could either a) read a similar book for free as a member of the Kindle Unlimited program, or b) find dozens of other books on the same topic listed before they even see your book, that they could buy for the same price?  The answer?  They probably won’t buy your book unless you are an author known to them or your genre is so small or niche that you happen to be on the first few pages of their search results.

The net result is that if you DO sign up for KDP select, you are 1) automatically lowering your per unit sale profit by a huge margin, thus undercutting your overall profitability, and 2) contributing to a system which is rigged by Amazon to ultimately force all indie authors to lower their per-unit prices in order to compete.  In a game rigged like this, where even a book priced at $0.99 is too pricey, nobody wins.

Is there an upside to all of this?  Yes, there is, and that will be the subject of my next post. 😉

 

The ‘mission’ of Fiction with a Mission

Book imageEvery revolution needs clearly stated goals, so I offer this as a humble start to a writer’s revolution (which I hope will become a culture-wide, industry-wide movement).  Having been fed up for years with the moral depravity that is foisted upon us in the guise of entertainment, I have decided to do something about it.  So, without further delay, here is the Creative Writing with a Mission / Fiction with a Mission mission statement:

Our mission is to use our gifts and talents as writers and creative artists to help make the world a better place, by producing quality writing and entertainment for the secular market which…

  • encourages critical thinking regarding the challenges and opportunities facing our world;
  • promotes a positive view of God’s interaction with humanity;
  • promotes a moral lifestyle that values sexual purity;
  • celebrates the values of honesty, justice, equality, freedom of speech and expression, and democracy for all genders and races; and
  • promotes and supports worthy causes by raising social awareness and providing direct material support for these causes.

Our creative standards:

In keeping with our mission, we commit to our audience that we will refrain from using vulgarity and graphic sexual descriptions in our fictional writing and other entertainment creations.

For those who are interested in joining with me in this endeavor, here are some steps you can take to help:

  • join the mailing list
  • download some of my books, read and share them, and post a review to one of the sites where you purchased it
  • keep reading this blog for new developments/action items

 

Sex in Entertainment

Recently I was watching a series drama on Amazon Prime.  The show had a decent plot, was interesting, and kept me engaged.  Suddenly, there was a scene of a graphically sexual nature in the midst of the story.  It added little, if anything, to the plot, but there it was.  Whether watching a TV show or reading a novel, this experience is commonplace in today’s entertainment industry.  In fact, it has become so prevalent in entertainment developed for the adult population in our culture, that if your favorite show or fictional reading material doesn’t contain sexually graphic material, then it is probably either written for children, written specifically for a faith-based audience, or is a reality TV show dealing with hunting in the Alaskan wilderness.

This is one of the reasons that I started writing fiction with a mission.  I believe that, like me, there are many people who do not want their entertainment to be frothing over with naked men and women cavorting like fleas in heat.  If Jane and Bob are having sex with each other and it is significant to the plot line, then there are many ways to get the point across without spending five minutes showing them in the act (or describing the same in graphic detail as is often the case with the written word).  Frankly, in most cases, many of these storylines seem to strain to include such episodes, and often in a way that does little to move the narrative of the story along.

There are many reasons I oppose using descriptions and images of graphic sexuality (i.e. pornographic material) as entertainment.  As this is a blog post and not a research paper (or one of my novels) I will mention just one (Covenant Eyes, Inc., 2015, pp. 22-23):

In 1982 and 1984, Dr. Dolf Zillmann and Dr. Jennings Bryant conducted an experiment with 80 male and 80 female college-age participants.100 These were divided into three subgroups, and each group was shown 4 hours and 48 minutes of media over a six-week period: (1) the “Massive Exposure Group” was shown 36 non-violent pornographic film clips; (2) the “Intermediate Exposure Group” was exposed to 18 pornographic film clips and 18 regular films; and (3) the “No Exposure” control group was shown 36 non-pornographic film clips.

….Porn seemed to condition participants to trivialize rape. Participants were asked to read about a legal case where a man raped a female hitchhiker and then recommend a length for the rapist’s prison sentence. Males in the No Exposure Group said 94 months; the Massive Exposure Group said 50 months (nearly half that of the No Exposure Group).

Our culture’s obsession with graphic sexuality as entertainment is often a contributing factor in sexual crimes, such as rape.  For that reason alone, we should seriously consider reversing this trend as a society.  I, for one, have had enough.  I am starting a revolution in the entertainment industry, and I hope you will join me.

One reason I write novels is that I believe I can tell a darn good story and I enjoy doing it.  Another reason is that I have had enough of being bombarded with sexually-saturated storylines in what passes for entertainment, and I intend to help provide an alternative source of entertainment to counter-act this trend.  One of the commitments I make to my readers is that my fiction will NEVER contain graphic sexual descriptions.

So, I challenge my fellow-authors to join the revolution!  And if you want to read good fiction WITHOUT graphic sexual material, then I invite you to read one of my books.

Cheers!

C.L. Wells

Reference:

Covenant Eyes, Inc. (2015).  Pornography Statistics: 250+ facts, quotes, and statistics about pornography use.
Retrieved from http://www.covenanteyes.com/pornography-facts-and-statistics

 

South Carolina Writer’s Group

I just started a meetup for authors in the Charleston, SC area.  You can get the details at http://www.meetup.com/South-Carolina-Writers-Group.  I started the group for the purpose of creating a network of authors (and their supporters) who will partner together for the purposes of:

  • Writing and publishing great fiction/non-fiction
  • Building an author platform
  • Gaining exposure as an author

The group is aimed primarily at independent authors (a.k.a. indie authors), but we welcome all authors and their supporters.  One of the central ideas behind this group is that we can accomplish more together than we can individually.  By pooling our knowledge, experience, and enthusiasm, we can help each other achieve our goals as authors.

We will fulfill the purposes of this group by engaging in the following (not an exhaustive list):

  • Presentations/discussions on the process of writing, publishing, building an author platform, and gaining exposure as an author.
  • Networking with other authors/author supporters for the purposes of supporting each other in the writing process, and trading services (e.g. beta reading, editing, critiquing, cover design, author website/blog development, marketing support, et cetera).
  • Providing a knowledge base of resources for every stage of the writing process including idea development, writing, editing, publishing, and marketing.

Cheers!

Christopher

WordPress blog changes

I’ve been working on the website and am anxious to get back to writing the second novel in the Supernatural Gift series – The Messenger.  I recently finished chapter 8.  If you want to receive free advance eBook copies of some of my work, just sign up on the email list.  Currently, I’m offering a free PDF of the first five chapters of book 1 in the series, The Seer.  You can sign up here.

I’ve been plugging away with the new Corel Paintshop Pro X8 software, trying to come up with a decent header image for this site.  It’s not as simple as it seems as I must accommodate for larger screen devices like PC’s and Mac’s, as well as tablets and smart phones.  I think I finally have a good header – at least for now.  I’ve changed themes as well to a more professional looking theme (at least I think so) .

Until next time, take care, and keep reading/writing!

Christopher.

 

Censorship

As an author and a freedom-loving American, I am opposed to censorship.  Even though I may not agree with your opinions about something, I still believe you have the right to express those opinions.  I believe in the competition of ideas, that if all ideas have an equal platform, that ultimately the best ideas come to the top and we are all better off for it.  Unfortunately, not everyone shares this viewpoint.

Recently I began hearing about censorship at Facebook.  After seeing more than one news story on the topic, I have decided to discuss the topic here.  Facebook is a private company, so they have the right to post or not post content as they see fit.  However, it appears they are selectively and deceptively censoring the content of people who do not agree with the political viewpoints of their founder – Mark Zuckerberg.  Their actions appear to include deliberately limiting and removing functionality from the pages of Facebook’s political and ideological opponents.

If you use Facebook, as I do, you should be aware that they are potentially censoring your friends and contacts from viewing data and information that you post to your account or that you may attempt to view on other’s accounts.   I have linked to an article below that discusses numerous specifics about this alleged censorship that you will likely find very informative.  I wanted to sound the alarm so that you are all aware of what is apparently going on.  While Facebook denies all wrongdoing, in the face of growing evidence it is increasingly hard to believe their denials.

Forewarned is forearmed.  Here is the article referred to above.

Peace,

CW

Inaugural Post

Greetings world!  This is the first post of my new author blog.  I will be using this forum as a place to post some of my work for others to enjoy/review, links to my new and previous books, as well as a place to write on life as an independent author and the writing process in general.  This will be a journey together as I navigate the world of independent publishing and marketing.  Writing good fiction is (I am discovering) only the first step in the process of becoming a commercially successful author.

Along the way I hope to share some information and insights that will help other authors, as well as to build community with and learn from you and the other readers/contributors to this blog.  So let’s get started!

Step one in our journey is me building this site!  I still have to add an email list widget, post some pictures from my first and current book project, and a host of other things that I probably haven’t even thought of yet.

I hope you will come back to check on my progress and keep in touch.

Cheers!

Christopher.

Get the first 5 chapters of The Seer – FREE

 

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