This month on our writers’ group blog, we have a delightful surprise for you–we’re going to share a potpourri of scrumptious goodies from our heart! Every day’s post will be entirely different from the other, whatever God places on each one of our hearts to share.
For starters, I’d like to encourage you to prayerfully consider manuscripts hidden away in your file cabinet that have not yet found a publishing home. Also, pray about ideas that have been germinating as seeds in the dark recesses of your soul but have not yet sprouted and sprung forth into the sunlight for anyone to see.
I had a number of manuscripts like this. Some written but after receiving countless rejections lay forgotten in my file cabinet. Others I felt God tugging at my heart to write, but I felt discouraged since I couldn’t think of any practical way to get them published. So I never ever bothered to write them down.
Until I discovered the wonderful ministry of blogging. God prompted me to take those writing projects and create each one as its own special blog. The result? An absolutely amazing world-wide ministry and astounding publishing opportunity!
One of my blogs is called One Hour Each Day. It was one of those books I’d never written down but felt God calling me to write. So once a week or so, I post on it about the importance of meeting with God one hour every day. I added a tracker from www.statcounter.com to see who reads it. Not many. But someone in the middle of China reads it each week. Someone in India reads it and e-mails me about how much it encourages him. Someone reads it in Australia and England and…the list goes on.
One of my blogs is called Scribes. Once again, it was one of those books I’d longed to write–a calendar with a photo, scripture, prayer, and devotion for writers. Now I’m writing it once a week as a blog and one day it will have enough entries to actually submit to a publisher for consideration.
On a couple of my blogs, I’ve had various publishing opportunities! A book editor was reading my blog about writing and offered me a book contract based on what I posted! A newsletter editor was reading my blog about writing and asked me to write an article for her writer’s newsletter based on one of my posts.
For another blog, I posted a book of devotions I’d written years ago but hadn’t yet gotten accepted. I posted each devotion as a separate day’s post. Since these were already typed into my computer, it only took a few hours to copy and paste into my blog and schedule them to appear automatically in the weeks and months ahead. In the middle of posting these, though, a publisher read them and e-mailed to tell me she’d be interested in having me send them her way for potential publication. So I shut down the blog and sent her the manuscript instead.
So how about it? Do you have manuscripts hidden away or ideas not yet written down? Create a separate blog for each one that God leads you to post. You could create a blog of children’s stories, a blog with all the chapters from your unpublished novel, or a blog of poems you wrote. The possibilities are endless. Then sit back and watch what God has in store in His plans for your writing!
-contributed by Nancy I. Sanders
