Someone with a tearful smile told me recently that I made her want to be a Christian again. Of course, I did no such thing. No more than St. Peter made Jesus rise from the dead by declaring him risen. He just found himself known and loved and forgiven and told the story. I'm just someone who stumbled upon an understanding of the Cross that wasn't all emotional blackmail and convoluted back room dealings with the devil, and onto a Christian social vision that didn't divide the kingdom of heaven into God's staff and God's clients. I caught something. This Gospel is infectious, and I got infected.
And now someone wants to help my book go viral. At least a little viral.
Some people call Mike Morrell the Forrest Gump of progressive Christianity. If something big is happening, he's there in the background somewhere.
Mike works with well-known and little-known authors alike, and has helped ignite conversation on titles ranging from Sara Miles' Take This Bread to Brian McLaren's A New Kind of Christianity. He was the only initial marketing on the breakout novel The Shack, which has gone on to sell 26 million copies worldwide.
Mike wants to do a campaign for my book through his networking outfit, a collection of some 1,100 bloggers and 100 podcasters he calls Speakeasy.
Here is the breakdown of what Mike is offering:
1) Create an Executive Summary of Life at the End of Us vs Them for my approval.
2) Send this summary to his 1100+-strong blogger network and a version to his 100-strong podcast and radio show host list
3) Send copies of the book to those requesting, their agreement being to blog about it within 30 days.
4) Retweet/share the best reviews to his personal social networks, 90,000 connections strong.
5) Send me a summary of results 60 days after our campaign launch, containing links to all reviews.
6) Run an excerpt of the book on his blog at MikeMorrell.org. He'd also like to send it out to his personal email newsletter, which has 25,000 subscribers. He doesn't do this for every Speakeasy campaign, but in my case, he thinks it would really resonate with his readers.
There is a lot of overlap between the themes of my book and the themes of Mike's own work. Mike's blog of "opti-mystic reflections on spirit, culture and permaculture" speaks to people who are returning to faith AND who are returning to the land. If there is a publicity expert who knows my tribe, it's Mike.
Mike's standard fee is $2,500 USD. He is dropping that by $1,000 for me, which I appreciate a lot. After putting thousands of hours and significant investment into the book, I am at a place where I feel that any further financial support for the book needs to come from a community beyond my wife and family. If I do this campaign with Mike, I will do it based on the support of people who have caught the vision of Life at the End of Us Versus Them and want to share that life with others.
James Alison tells me that the book is too good to rest in a backwater. I take that in the sense of the old Bible camp song lyric: "Hide it under a bushel - no!"
I would greatly appreciate your support in this campaign. If you are so inclined, please send a pledge of an amount you are willing to contribute to rempel.marcus@gmail.com. I will follow up with you from there. If pledges above and beyond the cost of the Speakeasy campaign come in, I can put them towards my podcast, The Ferment with Alana Levandoski, or towards the publication costs of an audio book, or towards another book tour (westward perhaps?). I will seek your input on this.
It makes me smile to think that I of all people am raising money for what is really an evangelistic effort. (I had a dream a couple weeks ago that a warm and friendly Billy Graham bought my book from me, despite my warnings that it might push his edges a bit - Ha!) I guess I am going with, "this little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine."
Thanks for helping me lift that light up to where people can see it.
Peace and all good!
Marcus
