First known adoption as a college textbook
I just found out that “Developing Teen Leadership” has been adopted as a textbook at Lancaster Bible College for their course PAS 517 titled “Leadership Issues in Youth Ministry”.
Nook edition available
An edition of the book for the Barnes & Noble Nook ebook reader is now available as well.
Kindle edition available
The Kindle version of the book is now available!
Published
I’m glad to announce that the book is officially published and now available on CreateSpace. It could take another week or so for it to appear on Amazon.com.
A Kindle and Nook conversion of the book is in progress.
We’re going for a rather slow launch of the book – as it will take another couple of months for the information to propagate through the entire book distribution network, so the real marketing effort won’t start until probably mid-April.
This is, of course, somewhat backward from traditional publishing where you try to build up lots of excitement to generate initial sales and get the book placed into stores, but in this case it seems to make more sense to wait until availability in the distribution network is good before investing a great deal of effort in marketing.
Book cover chosen
Finding a good cover for the book turned out to be both easier and harder than expected. The easy part was using 99designs.com to run a contest for the book cover. The hard part was choosing from among some really great options.
In the end it came down to three choices. One was a light beige cover with balanced stones on the cover – a somewhat zen-like cover. The second had a dark blue/violet cover and showed a group of silhouetted figures climbing a stair of puzzle pieces while carrying a puzzle piece. The third was the one chosen, with largely white background and a graphic of teens jumping.
All three are great covers. The choice was ultimately influences by the reactions of the groups that we surveyed during our selection.
The beige/stones covers was well received. “Tranquil” was the word used most often to describe it. Ultimately it was discarded because tranquility wasn’t really the idea we wanted to communicate.
The blue/puzzle cover was my own favorite. The graphic did the best job communicating leadership. This cover generated the strongest feelings among those polled – both favorable and unfavorable. It was also the most popular among the teens surveyed. It’s biggest weakness was difficulty in reading the title at thumbnail size.
The cover chosen was a very close second favorite for me personally. The graphic, though it doesn’t directly convey leadership, is very positive and exciting. The book title is easy to read even in thumbnail size. But what ultimately swung the choice was the reaction of the adults surveyed (particularly the group of youth group advisors) – it was the favorite of many, and none of them disliked it.
There were quite a few great designs, and one thing is certain: I’ll be using 99designs.com for future book covers without a second thought.