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The Steve Laube Agency

Helping to Change the World…Word by Word

The Steve Laube Agency

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Helping to Change the World Word by Word

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An Author’s Journey

By Dan Balowon October 25, 2016
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I wanted our agency client Scott Douglas LaCounte to guest-blog today because of the anniversary it represents (see below) and how God worked through the publishing process and journey to encourage a writer and his family.

 8775659_origScott is quite modest. He is the head librarian for the Southern California Institute of Technology. Years ago, he was a regular contributor to the popular Christian humor magazine “The Wittenberg Door.” He has given presentations on mobile application development at several conferences, and is the author of a number of books on mobile app development. Scott appeared periodically on the Christianity Today “Ignite Your Faith” online area for youth among a number of other projects.

 What I liked about Scott when I offered him representation was his commitment to writing in whatever form needed for the message. After all, not everything needs to be in a long book.

 Today’s blog is about his journey with twists and turns, but behind it all, God was there. (Read to the end. It is worth it.)

 Guest Blog – Scott Douglas LaCounte

Platform. It can make or break a writer.

But what happens when you don’t have a platform? Are you destined to stay forever at the bottom of the slush pile sometimes known as the trashcan?

When I sold my first book, Quiet, Please: Dispatches From a Public Librarian, I had no problem at all finding an agent; I sent query letters to six agents and didn’t get a single rejection; that book started as a series of blogs for McSweeneys.net, and, it turned out, I had established a platform without even knowing it.

I followed it up with a self-published YA series called The N00b Warriors, which went all the way to #1 on Kindle’s bestseller list; this happened when Kindle was new and writers were just beginning to understand what this meant to self-publishing, so the market wasn’t quite so crowded.

For my next book, I wanted to break away and try something different: write about my faith. My wife was pregnant with our first child, and as I looked at her bump, I wondered how I would explain why I believe to my son one day.

Christianity wasn’t so hard in my youth. But as I aged, it seemed to get more…extreme. Crazy Christians were everywhere spewing hatred out of a gospel that was full of love.

Millions of Christians were walking away not because they felt God had let them down, but because Christians had let them down. One day, I knew my son would ask why I believe when so many Christians seem to be not so Christian.

#OrganicJesus was born out of this question. It was my attempt to explain the real history of the gospel to a generation born in a world where Christianity sometimes felt a little unloving—a generation that questioned how God could be real when so many Christians were deeply flawed. Christians who say hurtful and horrible things and use the Gospel to back up their agenda.

While I was still working on an outline and sample chapters, my son, Mordecai Max, died in childbirth. It was a cord accident that doctors would never be able to explain with any other rationale than “freak accident.”

I didn’t have the doubts or anger that typically follow tragedy. In the place of anger, I had a pen. While working through grief, I wrote the book that my son would never get to read because there were still people who needed to hear its message.

Writing it was the easy part. The hard part: platform. I had spent the duration of my writing career not really thinking about the word. I had built it effortlessly. But this book was something new—having a bestselling YA series and a blog series from ten years ago wasn’t the kind of platform agents and publishers would be looking for—especially when both of those things were in a completely different genre and the readers wouldn’t necessarily follow me over.

Before a publisher would look at it, I needed an agent; more than an agent, I needed someone willing to shepherd the work even though my platform was limited and I had never published a Christian book. In short, I needed an agent who was willing to bet against the odds.

As I worked on the proposal, I thought a lot about platform. Platform takes time. Years, even. Did I really have the endurance to spend five years working on platform before going to agents with this idea for a book that may or may not be relevant in five years?

I thought about how I could build a platform around the book; I thought about how I could make the book itself social and sharable. I added to the narrative sharable images, social responses, games, polls—dozens and dozens of things that would pull the reader out of the book and onto the Internet. It was an experiment. It was different. I needed an agent who was willing to see it for what it was and take a chance on it. Dan Balow was that agent.

Dan took the book, helped me develop a book proposal and patiently knocked on the door of nearly every English speaking publishing house.

On the one-year anniversary of my son’s death (October 2, 2014), I signed a contract with Kregel Publications to publish #Organicjesus. (Book link here)

The journey continues; in March 2016, I signed a contract to write a second book with Kregel…the same week I found out my wife was pregnant again.

Epilogue

cqzuwm5yJust before midnight on Thursday, October 13, Scott’s wife Diana delivered little Miko Rey LaCounte. She was born a couple weeks early and small (less than six pounds) but she was in hurry to join the family and get into her cool nursery, so who can blame her?  Here’s a link to her nursery. (They are into Star Wars) 

Dad, mom and the newest LaCounte are doing well.

 Diana LaCounte is part Japanese, and Miko means beautiful child; Rey is a form of ray. So they like to say she’s a beautiful ray of light from God.

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Category: Agents, Creativity, Guest Post, PlatformTag: Agents, Creativity, Platform

Announcing “The Christian Writers Institute”

By Steve Laubeon October 24, 2016
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I am very excited to announce the launch of The Christian Writers Institute! Come visit at www.christianwritersinstitute.com. Over three years ago I began thinking of the need for a place where writers could find the best teachers all in one spot. The idea percolated for awhile until this year when its development began in earnest. It is great to see it finally become a reality. This new online …

Read moreAnnouncing “The Christian Writers Institute”
Category: Book Proposals, Career, Christian Writers Institute, Conferences, Craft, Creativity, Editing, Get Published, Grammar, The Publishing Life, The Writing LifeTag: Christian Writers Institute, education, writers conferences, Writing Craft

Fun Fridays – October 21, 2016

By Steve Laubeon October 21, 2016
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I want Dug to come to my house. But our cat might not appreciate a talking friend.

Read moreFun Fridays – October 21, 2016
Category: Fun Fridays

Littered with Errors: Can Typos Kill You?

By Tamela Hancock Murrayon October 20, 2016
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We’ve all done it – typed “here” for “hear” or “you’re” for “your” – especially when we’re dashing off a quick email or meeting a deadline. I don’t know of an agent or editor who’ll reject a submission based on one or even a few typos, particularly if the material is so compelling the reader can’t resist losing the afternoon in your book. However, not all errors are typos. This becomes apparent as …

Read moreLittered with Errors: Can Typos Kill You?
Category: Craft, Editing, Grammar, LanguageTag: Editing, Grammar, Language

Creativity Sparks

By Karen Ballon October 19, 2016
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Thank all of you for the blessing of your shared thoughts, encouragement, and condolences on my blog last week. As I suspected, many others have been in this place of struggling to wrench creativity from the jaws of emotional/spiritual/physical fog. Your suggestions echoed my own, from giving yourself time to setting a timer, to just writing anything to get words on paper (I even decided writing …

Read moreCreativity Sparks
Category: Creativity, The Writing Life, Writing CraftTag: Creativity, The Writing Life, Writing Craft

Real Life is Edgy

By Dan Balowon October 18, 2016
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A major topic of discussion among writers of all types of Christian books is the issue of how far is too far when showing someone’s life before they surrendered to Christ, and how real you show their journey of sanctification once they exit the broad road. It’s called the “edge.” A lot of writers want to write with an edge, with real language and situations to make it more like real life. After …

Read moreReal Life is Edgy
Category: Art, Book Business, Book Proposals, Get Published, The Publishing Life, The Writing LifeTag: Edgy, The Publishing Life

Lyrics as Literature

By Steve Laubeon October 17, 2016
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I normally steer away from controversial topics in this blog but the announcement that Bob Dylan, the popular musician, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature gave me pause. My first thought was “What?” To place Dylan alongside previous Nobel laureates like Solzhenitsyn, Steinbeck, Kipling, Hemingway, Camus, Faulkner, T.S. Eliot, and Churchill? I wondered that if, upon hearing the …

Read moreLyrics as Literature
Category: ArtTag: Art, Nobel Prize, Song Lyrics

An Alternative Candidate

By Steve Laubeon October 15, 2016
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Friday October 14th was Winnie the Pooh’s 90th birthday. (I wrote about his birthday a few years ago here.) Below is what greeted me at the dinner table on Friday night. It brought hilarity and sudden clarity. I think I know how I should vote… Winnie-the-Pooh for President Piglet for Vice President Tigger for Secretary of State. Winnie-the-Pooh promises “Honey in every …

Read moreAn Alternative Candidate
Category: Humor

Fun Fridays – October 14, 2016

By Steve Laubeon October 14, 2016
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I saw this photo and created the following poster for your “edification.”

Read moreFun Fridays – October 14, 2016
Category: Fun Fridays

How to be a Woman?

By Tamela Hancock Murrayon October 13, 2016
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This will be our last trip down Memory Lane for a while. I hope you have fun with today’s post and think about how your female characters live. We’re bombarded with ads today and we were yesterday, too. How to be a woman? I was trying to figure all of this out as I was growing up. I knew I wanted to be a Proverbs 31 woman, but she was really embodied in my grandmother Bagley, Precious. (She …

Read moreHow to be a Woman?
Category: Craft, MarketingTag: Branding, Marketing
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