Prophetic Message or Great Saleable Product? - Gyapong

There's lots of great advice out there for authors who want to find out how to write query letters and land a publishing contract. There's also lots of great advice on how to make your manuscript a saleable product and how to sell yourself as a brand.

There is nothing wrong with this. In fact, I've benefited a great deal from much of this advice. But three years ago, when a group of us started The Master's Artist, we felt a need to get away from the barrage of material that was focused on sales and marketing.

We wanted to provide a place of encouragement for writers who 1) want to follow Jesus with all their hearts 2) who want to pursue excellence in their art--without worrying about what the sales folks will say. I believe God may be calling some of us to write but postpone our dreams of publication or popularity. Will we still answer the call?

Today over at The Master's Artist I posted a blog tour interview with Mary E. DeMuth who is promoting her latest book Authentic Parenting in a Postmodern Culture.

I believe Mary, like our own Sheila Wray Gregoire and Keith Clemons and N.J. Lindquist to name just a few, (who have all been profiled over at The Master's Artist), is a prophetic voice. And because of that she runs into snags. When she attended the giant Christian retail show in Atlanta recently, she was told some bookstore owners are balking because they reject the word postmodern in the title. Postmodern means relativist and nothing more. In Mary's book, she admits she used to equate postmodernism with poison. But whether we like it or not, our culture is shifting. It's better we know what's going on and prepare our children for it, she writes.

How do you keep on keeping on when you feel like a voice crying in the wilderness, where you are so ahead of the curve that no one wants to put your book in their stores, or accuses you of things that have nothing to do with the message between the covers.

Mary is also a novelist and her beautifully written stories (Watching the Tree Limbs and Wishing on Dandelions) resemble To Kill a Mockingbird more than they do the bestselling Christian Romances on the wall of my local Christian bookstore. Alas, that means they don't easily fall into a definable, brandable commodity. But they are good. They deserve to be read.

The Master's Artist will be undergoing some changes in the near future. Some key people are leaving to pursue other things. That means we have to re-examine our vision and whether what we have been doing for the past three years is still needed. If you want to know more about the vision that has inspired us, Mark Bertrand and Jeanne Damoff have both written wonderful essays on What is a Master's Artist.

If you've never stopped by The Master's Artist....how about checking us out...and if you like us, tell us whether you see a need for us to carry on.

I hope we can continue---to encourage writers who are called to be prophetic rather than popular, to encourage keeping an eye on God's calling to create art that may or may not make a great product. As I said starting out, nothing wrong with striving to write a saleable manuscript, keeping your audience in mind. But the audience God has in mind may not be born yet. Do we need to think about that?