Medicine for Mouth Disease

When Mainstay Ministries produced six broadcasts per week (for twenty years), taped one television show per day (for six years), mounted 137 pastor’s conferences per year, we also had our own publishing arm. Teams of pastors came into our offices to help us put together an annual 50-Day Spiritual Adventure (which some 350,000 people used yearly), and because ministers asked for it, an annual Advent preaching series. The Christmas season is one of the busiest times of the year for the professional minister and his family, so we were pleased to be able to serve. The month before Advent began, it was not unusual to see two to four USPS delivery trucks backed up to the warehouse loading dock. You can imagine how satisfactory it was to have them take off, completely filled with our product.

I’m the author of some 23-or-so books, and publishing being what it was, I rarely had the final say on a title, on a book cover, and sometimes had to negotiate about some content between the frontispiece and the bibliography back page. Although I was involved in the publishing arm at Mainstay Ministries, the nitty-gritty decisions of page size, design artist, copyright page, spine size were all up to the editorial team, so those ultimate considerations did not involve me.

The publishing world, however, has taken a huge change. This has been forced upon it by the rise of digital publishing, by authors self-publishing their products, by e-books and by the fact that even if a house does pick up your book, the marketing of it is pretty much a matter of how well the author knows how to leverage social media.

I am in the midst of republishing one of my own books. I never liked the title. I hated the cover, and I felt that when the book was published, it got lost in the publicity campaign rewarded to another well-known celebrity who had experienced some sort of conversion. My publishing house went mad for the celebrity and my little book, which their team named You Are What You Say: Cure for the Troublesome Tongue, got lost in all the hoopla. This is not sour grapes; it’s “just the facts, ma’am.” Just the facts.

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