Update: Since posting this Monday afternoon, Amazon has sold out of its copies of this book but some used copies are still available. The book appears to be available from other online booksellers, however, and if anyone is interested in a signed copy, please contact me and I’ll get one to you.
Twenty-five years ago next week, my first book, E-vangelism: Sharing the Gospel in Cyberspace, rolled off the presses of a Christian publishing house in Lafayette, Louisiana, and was shipped to Christian bookstores and, on April 1 of that year, an online bookseller known as Amazon.com.
It was 1999, the year synonymous with a 1982 hit record by Prince. That spring also saw the release of The Matrix in movie houses, the expansion of NATO in Eastern Europe, and the debut of SpongebobSquarepants on Nickelodeon. It was the spring of the Columbine massacre. It was the year Amazon broke the $1 billion mark in revenues for the first time and expanded their product line by introducing an ebook reader called the Kindle and a smart speaker called the Echo, which was used with the company’s Alexa personal assistant system.
It was also the year the internet was beginning to expand its influence beyond the worlds of government and academia into the homes of anyone with a personal computer, dial-up modems, and an interest in exploring this new communications technology. Many of these ordinary people were using the net to connect with each other – families, friends, complete strangers – and talk about their interests, like hobbies, sports, music, movies, and their religious faith. As I started surfing the web, such as it was in the mid-1990s, I became interested in how adherents to Christianity, ministers and laypeople alike, were using the internet to discuss their faith. I wrote a few freelance articles on the topic and decided to expand what I’d learned by writing a book.
Released in paperback by a now-defunct publisher, E-vangelism was my attempt to describe the opportunities the internet offered churches and laypeople to spread the message of Christianity broadly. In a hybrid storytelling fashion grounded in journalism but informed by my evangelical beliefs, I sought to describe the internet’s potential to, in the words of the back-page promo copy, “communicate our 2,000-year-old faith to a cyberculture that measures ‘history’ in nanoseconds.” (Hyperbolic, I know, but that’s marketing copy for you.) I intended the book to serve also as a guide for those interested in sharing their faith online.
A mixed blessing
The book was not a commercial success – not by any stretch. But it was a personal achievement, albeit a mixed blessing. I met my goal of becoming a published author before age 40, but it wasn’t the great American novel my younger self had imagined I’d write. And while I would not write a book like E-vangelism today – I’m a different person with a different worldview than I was in the late 1990s – I’m pleased that the book has made a small but meaningful contribution to the study of what was then a new arena for transmitting ideas.
Fully aware that pride is one of the seven deadly sins as defined by Christendom, I’m nevertheless going to crow about this achievement.
I took great pride (and still do) in the clever title I came up with for the book. (E-vangelism, as in electronic evangelism. Get it?) I’m also happy that the book, which is not an academic work by any stretch, has been cited 41 times, according to Google Scholar. Many of the citations are from academic works – research papers, theses, dissertations, and books. E-vangelism was well-received by its niche audience of mainly youthful, mostly white, mostly male, net-savvy evangelicals.
It also led to more writing and speaking opportunities, including publishing contracts for two other books, eMinistry: Connecting with the Net Generation (2001) and Hooked on the Net (2003). By that time, I was labeled a “Christian author,” but that was OK. These days, I’m not thrilled with that tag. Not so much because my theology has changed, but because my writing these days is not so restrictive as that title might imply. (As I said earlier, I’m not the same person today that I was in 1999.)
I also was asked to write a chapter for a bona fide academic book, Virtual Morality: Morals, Ethics, and New Media (2003), and no less prominent a theologian than Leonard Sweet, a prolific author and scholar, took notice and invited me to deliver two lectures at Drew University, where he served on the faculty at that time. After the talks, he took me to dinner at Windows on the World, a popular restaurant at the top of the World Trade Center in Manhattan, two years before the Twin Towers were hit and demolished the WTC and that restaurant.
E-vangelism was a nice ride for a couple of years. Then the publisher went out of business, a casualty of the rapid changes the internet was wreaking on the book industry, and I lost some of the royalties due me. I wish my book had earned enough to keep the company afloat while affording me a decent royalty income, but that was not to be.
Going into this venture, I suspected E-vangelism would have a short shelf life. Such is the plight of most books about rapidly advancing technology. (My publisher rushed a couple of Y2K titles to publication around the same time as my book was coming out. Those titles did not age well, either.)
So much has changed in the quarter century since its release that I doubt it offers much practical advice to ministers or laypeople today. After all, who still uses a dial-up modem? At best, E-vangelism is a historical curiosity, at worst an irrelevant anachronism. Either way, it’s one writer’s perspective of an internet that no longer exists. The internet of AOL and Hotmail, when AltaVista and Yahoo! ruled the search universe and Google was barely viable, much less a verb. The internet before social media. The cyber world of GeoCities and AngelFire. Heck, even Blogger and MySpace did not exist when E-vangelism was released.
Lessons learned
If there are lessons for other writers to learn from my experience with E-vangelism, they might include the following:
- Realize that books have limited shelf lives, especially those dealing with contemporary events or rapidly evolving technologies. So choose your topics wisely.
- Enjoy the ride while it lasts. Take advantage of as many opportunities to speak and write as your new role as a published author provides.
- Realize that your books won’t sell themselves. Authors must work hard to promote and market their works. Your publishers and publicists can only do so much. The smaller the publisher, the less support for writers. While my publisher’s staff set me up with many interview opportunities during the first few months of the book’s life cycle, much of the promotional legwork fell to me. In that sense, I suppose promoting a book is a lot like evangelizing. We authors not only create our product; we also must do our part to spread the good news of its existence. That holds true for any writing, of any genre.
Andy writes! 