I've decided I'm not a very good author. I love writing, and I feel good about the end product. But I suck at actually selling books. I'm not saying the book isn't selling...Pop Goes the Church is actually doing pretty well after being out for a year.

But I, personally, don't do well at pimping my own books. I see the way others create energy and buzz around their own work through their blog, Twitter or Facebook. It just feels weird to me. Or perhaps it sometimes seems a little bit narcissistic to me--so I swing the pendulum way to the other side and rarely say anything. Not a good thing.

Not sure if I'll ever change, but at least for today, let me point you to what Nate Beaird (how many people do you know with 3 vowels in a row in their name?) wrote recently about Pop Goes the Church:

One of my favorite parts of this book is when Tim uses the story of a big-time movie shooting film in the small-time town of Glenmoor. There happen to be five churches in this town, and they all handled this new Hollywood attention differently. The chapter tells each story – one church condemned it, one church separated from it, one church embraced it, another church ignored it, and the last church leveraged it.

This is the best illustration I've ever heard encouraging, and yet explaining perfectly the need to use pop culture to direct people to Jesus. Stevens is careful to make it clear that using pop culture for the sake of being different, or using pop culture without maintaining the integrity of the message is missing the point completely.

You can read Nate's entire review here.