LetsMoveToTheMoon

God, Technology, and Things That Make Us Want to Move to the Moon

Publishing Companies Are Getting it Right

September 30, 2008

This post is a result of some recent interactions I’ve had with two major Christian publishing companies: Zondervan and Thomas Nelson. There are three main things I’ve been impressed with, which I’ll expound on now.

First, I was surprised a few weeks ago to find Michael Hyatt, CEO of Thomas Nelson, on Twitter. I believe I’ve mentioned this in the past in passing, but I wanted to make a point of it here. Hyatt also frequently posts on his blog, From Where I Sit, which I often find informative and interesting. Thomas Nelson maintains a list of their employees who blog, found on their Company Bloggers page. This kind of interaction with the public really impresses me, and I hope to see more executives taking this route in the future.

Secondly, yesterday I was contacted by Megan, a web manager for Zondervan, in response to my recent post on the National Pastors Convention. She humbly and helpfully informed me of several options which I had overlooked in my original examination of the National Pastors Convention website. I was extremely surprised to receive a personal email (it certainly appeared as though it was not an automated message, as it included direct references to some of the things in my post) from someone from Zondervan, especially so soon after my post had been written. I responded to her email, and she even followed up to that response. I quickly added a note to the post mentioning this.

Lastly — and I’ve mentioned this before — I was lucky enough to be included in a group of reviewers for Scot McKnight‘s upcoming book, The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible. Scot posted about this opportunity on his blog, as I discussed in the past, and I jumped on it. Zondervan’s purpose in doing this was to give 20 bloggers a chance to read and review the book. I was soon sent a copy of the book with the task of reviewing it and posting about it on my blog. I’ve had it for about 2 weeks now, and I expect to be done with it very soon.

This is by no means a summation of all that these or other publishing companies are doing on the Internet. I just wanted to discuss how I’ve been affected by their online efforts in the last few weeks. I’m excited about these types of online endeavors, and hopefully we’ll see much more of this in the future.