In November of 2007, I began work on a manuscript. It was to be about the teachings of Jesus, and what they mean for the twenty-first century Christian, particularly, the Christian baptized into the Catholic tradition. It was to trace Jesus’ instructions to His apostles and disciples through the four gospels, gleaning from them the paradoxical Wisdom of the incarnate Word of God, the Son of God, “the kingdom of heaven” here on Earth.
Over the ensuing months and years, as new ideas — some, no doubt, prompted by the Holy Spirit — came and went, it morphed into Jesus’ Six Keys to a More Perfect You, a step-by-step recipe designed by Him to make us holy by showing us how to seek and find the Father’s will for us, and convert it into loving, merciful action on behalf of the less fortunate, whom Jesus called His “little ones”.
The more I read the gospels, the more I began to get the message. In His short ministerial span of three years, Jesus gave us, in His sayings and parables, everything we needed to know about how to do the Father’s will for us in order to prepare ourselves for His return when — as He explained in the parable of the Last Judgment — He would judge us according to our merciful works toward others and admit us or not admit us into the everlasting rapture of participation in the loving comradery of the Father, the Word/Son and the Holy Spirit. That’s when it all came together, and, finally, I finished the manuscript.
Then came the hard part: selling it to a publisher. Three or four times, I prepared book proposals, and sent them off to Catholic book publishers; three or four times, I received polite emails of rejection. It was depressing. So much hard work, so little appreciation.
Not long ago, a writer friend gave me the one-word solution: “Kindle”, she said. She had discovered the joys of self-publishing online at dtp.amazon.com, and her computer-savvy husband helped her to upload her manuscript onto the site and voilà!, the Amazon people processed it, and an eBook was born.
I, too, with the help of her husband, uploaded my manuscript, and waited not so patiently for less than a week until I was notified that I was the proud author of a new eBook. Jesus’ Six Keys to a More Perfect You was a literary reality! God be thanked and praised!
If you’d like to see my eBook on the Amazon.com site, just click the link “Jesus’ Six Keys to a More Perfect You” under the heading “MY BOOK PAGES” at the top of the right-hand column of this page.
About My First eBook
Jesus’ Six Keys to a More Perfect You presents Jesus’ teachings on the six keys to living an active, relational spirituality through merciful service to needy others in this time and place. Each key demonstrates how to transform yourself, step-by-step, into the effective agent for positive change in this world that your Creator designed you to be.
Developed and taught by the greatest authority on positive world-change, Jesus’ Way will inspire you, as it has inspired untold billions over the past twenty centuries, to grow in Christ-likeness for the betterment of humankind and the extension of His Father’s kingdom on earth.
Additional features of this book include practical ways in which you can serve the less fortunate right in your own community, contact information for specific charitable organizations and suggestions about further readings on these six keys to your own spiritual perfection.
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In ensuing posts, I’ll get more into the details of formatting and publishing eBooks. It’s not as easy as I expected, especially when I was publishing on three different sites, each with formatting requirements unique to its eReader(s). And then there was the headache of performing all the editorial, publicity and legal tasks usually handled by the staff of a print book publishing company.
Once you get the hang of it, though, it is well worth the effort.
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