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Home » Archives for Dan Balow » Page 10

Dan Balow

Reader’s Digest Centennial

By Dan Balowon February 9, 2022
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This week we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the first edition of Reader’s Digest with one of their most popular jokes as voted by readers:

A turtle is crossing the road when he’s mugged by two snails. When the police show up, they ask him what happened. The shaken turtle replies, “I don’t know. It all happened so fast.”

Perfect.

For those who browsed and read Reader’s Digest regularly, among the articles and book condensations, you might remember:

Believe It or Not!
Humor in Uniform
Quotable Quotes
Word Power
Picturesque Speech
Life in These United States
Personal Glimpses
Laughter
Things to Come
Points to Ponder

and many more features making it interesting reading for young and old.

During a tumultuous time in the magazine publishing world over the last 15 years, Reader’s Digest is still around, navigating two bankruptcy filings and currently publishing monthly in over twenty languages with monthly circulation over ten million, far below its historical circulation peak, but still substantial.

In a sense, Reader’s Digest was like a print website in a pre-Internet world. In it was something for everyone: long- and short-form content; continual updates to maintain interest; and, overall, a hopeful message. (By the way, you can subscribe at $10 for one year, $15 for a two-year subscription.)

Past editions of Reader’s Digest are like time capsules of the last century. Founders and first publishers DeWitt Wallace and his wife, Lila Bell Wallace, married in 1921 when both were in their early 30s. They started the magazine in 1922.

Lila’s father was a Presbyterian minister, and she attended the University of Oregon. DeWitt Wallace’s father was a professor at Macalester College in Minnesota, eventually becoming its president. DeWitt initially attended Macalester before finishing his bachelor’s degree at the University of California, Berkeley.

DeWitt was in the US Army in The Great War, wounded and spending four months in a French hospital. While there, he passed the time reading magazines when the ideas started spinning. By February 1922, shortly after marrying Lila, the first edition of Reader’s Digest was mailed to subscribers. The rest is history.

Both DeWitt and Lila were active philanthropists, with DeWitt giving much of his fortune to Macalester College and Lila giving a reported $60 million in her lifetime to organizations like the Metropolitan Opera.

Reader’s Digest had a generally conservative political slant, focusing on traditional virtues of patriotism, courage, and service to others. The regular stories and sections on the military undoubtedly stemmed from DeWitt’s personal appreciation for those who served.

And, yes, humor.  From the January 1950 issue:

Victor Borge, describing his adventurous boyhood in Denmark: “Once my father came home and found me in front of a roaring fire. That made my father very mad, as we didn’t have a fireplace.”

Happy 100th birthday, Reader’s Digest.

www.rd.com

(The image above is from the Reader’s Digest Centennial page, https://www.rd.com/article/100th-anniversary.)

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Category: Publishing History

The Grand Canyon of Crossover Writing

By Dan Balowon January 27, 2022
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A number of Christian writers desire to write a book published by a large publisher focused beyond the Christian market. The motivation and focus are well-intentioned, amplifying a Christian message to the larger world. But while the author has this desire to reach a broader audience with a message of hope, companies that publish to the general population have an entirely different agenda, which …

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Category: Book Business, Marketing, The Publishing Life

God’s Timing vs. Ours

By Dan Balowon December 22, 2021
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With Christmas coming soon, we pause to remember what happened a couple thousand years ago. Of course, we know the whole story. The King of heaven was born, lived and died, resurrected and returned to the Father where he came from, all over a period of about 33 years. We can read a lot about his life, family, teachings, friends, followers, and foes in the pages of Scripture. But if we had a …

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Category: Personal, The Writing Life, Theology

Publishing in the Dark

By Dan Balowon December 9, 2021
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The story of the elephant and the blind man is told in many religious traditions. Even business seminars have found value using it to make a point. As the story goes, depending on what part of an elephant a person touches without seeing the whole, that forms their opinion of what the entire animal looks like. This same process could be applied to many things. A customer’s one-time experience with …

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Category: The Writing Life

Project Gutenberg

By Dan Balowon December 1, 2021
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Fifty years ago today, at the age of 24, Michael Stern Hart of Urbana, Illinois, founded Project Gutenberg. It was the world’s first digital library, using technology that would eventually help create the Internet. Michael invented ebooks. An interesting guy, his parents were both professors at the University of Illinois. He graduated from U of I in two years with a degree in Human-Machine …

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Category: Historical, Publishing History

What’s Your Platform Identity?

By Dan Balowon November 18, 2021
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A mistake for authors is defining their author platform as a list of people to market their next book on social media. Can you imagine a pastor of a church looking out over their congregation during a sermon and primarily thinking who among them would make good contacts when the new building finance program is announced the following week?  Maybe some do, but I cannot imagine a worse way to …

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Category: Platform

Writing Rocks and Hard Places

By Dan Balowon November 10, 2021
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Many writers find themselves caught between fulfilling their creative writing desires and activities that pay living expenses. More often than not, they are different things. Throughout history, highly successful authors had other vocations while they developed their skills for writing books. If you go online and search for “day jobs of famous writers,” you’ll discover the only thing they have in …

Read moreWriting Rocks and Hard Places
Category: Career, The Writing Life

The Purpose of Christian Books

By Dan Balowon October 28, 2021
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A number of years ago, I recall listening to a sermon when the preacher spoke about all the problems the Israelites had while traveling through the wilderness for forty years after leaving Egypt. He was semiapologetic for the simplicity of the morning’s lesson. The Israelites kept forgetting God. Next time you read the book of Exodus, think about how the Israelites could have walked from Egypt to …

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Category: Inspiration, The Publishing Life, Theology

Why the Hurry?

By Dan Balowon October 20, 2021
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A common experience for every literary agent and publisher is having a conversation with an author who would like a book published “as soon as possible.” Frankly, it is for this purpose the author-services publishing industry was established, because of all the things that characterize traditional publishing, speed is not among them. Traditional publishers have a certain number of books they want …

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Category: Career

The First New York Times Bestseller List

By Dan Balowon October 7, 2021
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Ninety years ago, on Monday, October 12, 1931, the New York Times published their first book bestseller list. There were nine titles shown, five fiction and four nonfiction. That month was an interesting time in US history. The president of the United States was Herbert Hoover. The Great Depression was still changing everything, marking a second year since starting in late October 1929. Al Capone …

Read moreThe First New York Times Bestseller List
Category: Book Sales, Publishing History
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