Book launches this spring have a NASA-like quality: There is a plan in place, and there are a thousand reasons the plan might or might not unroll on the intended date.
Still, the webinar whiz at Our Sunday Visitor? She isn’t dependent on symptoms and exposures and whether the printing press is able to open safely this week. She makes a living just zoom-zooming away. Therefore, barring an asteroid hitting my garage-library or some other very high-bar-even-for-2020 level of disruption, my Live On the Internet part of the book launch will be this coming Tuesday, June 30th, at 1pm Eastern.
I asked a few fans (translation: Facebook friends, some of whom like what I write and the rest are probably just being nice to me) what I should put into my presentation, and here’s what they said:
- What are the top 3-5 things we should know from the book?
- What was your first experience evangelizing?
- How do you know when to speak and when to shut up?
- How do you keep from centering on yourself instead of Jesus?
- How would you bring the Good News to someone who is disgusted with the criminal actions of Catholics, especially clergy?
We’ve got about thirty minutes set aside for the event, so I’ll hit those topics in my prepared remarks, and then if there’s time left over we’ll do open Q&A. I have no idea whether the event will be captioned (probably not, and we all know how auto-caption does anyway), but I’ll post a transcript* immediately after, look for it here.
Warning about the top 3-5 things: I have nothing new to say. I’m going to be hitting the same top 3-5 talking points that have been the contents of Divine Revelation over the past 5,000 years. On the one hand, that’s making you go, “blah blah blah love God, pray, fast, behave yourself, blah blah blah,” and on the other hand? I kinda need that talk, and there’s evidence other people do too.
So maybe you don’t need a shot in the arm in that direction, but maybe you know someone who does. Maybe you just need to be reminded that doing the basic things Christians do matters and makes a difference in people’s lives.
If so, you or they can come to my talk. It’s free.
–> Also it will be a highly entertaining event, because unlike the entire rest of the planet I have not been doing internet video communication non-stop all spring. So that’s gonna be big. Bonus: You can see my scrapwood bookshelf, and if the camera gets pointed wrong, you can see the garage that is still very garage-like despite my calling it “the library” now. We are hoping the camera doesn’t get pointed at the pile of junk I pulled off the shelves to make them look less disturbing. You might or might not see cats. No promises on that.
So that’s gonna be awesome. Don’t judge me for my incomplete Hardy Boys collection, just send me the ones I haven’t read yet, thanks.
How to get the book: It appears that the Kindle Edition is already available for sale! Amazon is telling me I can buy it with 1-click, so that’s pretty nice? FYI if you get the e-book and read it this weekend, come Tuesday a couple stories I tell will be ones that are not in the book. I’m not actually going to read from the book or anything, because you can read a preview on Amazon if you want to find out what my book-writing is like.
As soon as I get word paperbacks are shipping, I’ll let you know.
![The How-to Book of Evangelization: Everything You Need to Know But No One Ever Taught You by [Jennifer Fitz]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41StUMvwvxL.jpg)
Cover art of The How-to Book of Evangelization: Everything You Need to Know But No One Ever Taught You, courtesy of Amazon.com and Our Sunday Visitor.
*Transcript of my prepared comments will be ready to post immediately. Yes, I’ll be sticking to them religiously, ahem, because it is so, so, so very easy to say something dumb if you ad-lib on these topics. If there is time for Q&A, what I’ll do for a text version is take the questions that came in and make a blog post or so fleshing out my quick answers and clearing up any confusion I created. You’ll be dependent on whatever the tech team can bring you as far as a transcript of my bumbling attempts to answer questions on the fly.