Launch day is always a bit exciting – and nerve-wracking! There’s so much that goes into it, and always the question of “should I have waited longer?” “Should I have done more to prepare?” “Is it good enough?”
Prep work before launch day
Kathleen and I spend months leading into the publishing of every study combing over every question, every reference, every page. We restructure things, rearrange, restudy, and rewrite. It’s a seemingly endless task that is a labor of love and devotion to the Lord.
Everything has to be just right. Every question has to be backed with scripture, appropriate, clear, and not misleading in any way. We check the accuracy of historical details. We pore over every detail of the formatting to make sure it looks just right.
Liz Hodes prepares a beautiful watercolor painting to use for our cover. Designing the cover puts my design skills to the test as I arrange, resize, balance, and beautify the face of the study. Finally, I request copyright permissions from Crossway, and set up publishing information on Amazon. An initial copy goes to Margot Bass, my sweet proofreader with an eagle eye for otherwise invisible formatting issues who gives me a lesson in English grammar and punctuation with every returned manuscript.
Editing, Editing, Editing
And then the fun part. With a “perfect” manuscript ready, I order proofs. One of my favorite days is the day the proofs arrive and I see the book in its nearly-final state for the first time!
These proofs go out to my team of final proofreaders, and somehow like socks in the dryer and lids in the container drawer, they find even more things that need to be corrected. It’s a seemingly endless process! One has a knack for picking up inconsistencies, another is a pro at spotting missed capitalizations, and another (my engineer patent-examiner husband) finds things that need to be somewhat reworded.
Pads of post-it notes later (and a stained table at Panera – word to the wise – hot pink post-its bleed permanent pink ink when you sit a cold cup of soda 6 inches away from them …) and I’m ready for a final print-out and read through. And still, I find dozens of spots to adjust. The editing is never-ending.
And then – time for the launch!
After all this, it’s time. With nervous anticipation, I upload a final manuscript to Amazon. I then reformat and upload a version for Kindle (what do you mean there’s a misspelled word? How did that get in there? More editing, fixing, reuploading …). Update the final description, and with a held breath and a prayer, I hit “publish.”
And then, about 24 hours later – it’s ready!
While it is exciting to watch everything come together, launch day is actually relatively quiet. I spent the morning fixing the Amazon description, which somehow got oddly formatted and needed some adjusting. Facebook, on Instagram, and Twitter each got posts. Newsletter subscribers received their heads-up about the new study. I texted my co-laborers, updated the website, signed up for pool passes for our neighborhood pool for the summer, fed the cat, watered the deck garden, and just kept praying for the Lord to be glorified in all of this.
A powerful message of JOY!
I am excited for you to study Philippians with me. When we did this study at CCFred in 2021, it was the very first, and only, time I’ve ever ended a study with more people than we started with. Some of that may be due to people being ready to come out of quarantine after 2020. But it was a little awe-inspiring to walk into the final day of the study and actually see new faces – and lots of them! The ladies seemed to love the study, and many are excited to see it go public.
Philippians is an amazing book. We’ll spend 6 lessons in it, but really you could spend months and even years exploring the depth that it has to offer. In our study of Philippians, we focus on joy. We seek to understand how Paul can say so often that he is rejoicing. As we study learn his secret to joy.
And what is that secret? What is the source of this joy? Spoiler alert – Jesus is the root of our joy! Just as Habakkuk could say “Yet I will rejoice in the Lord,” while looking head-on into a time of extreme distress and difficulty, Paul tells us “Again I say, Rejoice!” Even in times of hardship, Jesus is still worthy of our rejoicing.
My launch-day prayer
My prayer is that your heart and mind are changed as you encounter the Lord in this study. I pray that you would listen for His voice, that mine would just be a guidepost to keep you moving forward in your own study, but that His voice would be the one you focus on. You cannot encounter Jesus and stay unchanged – and the change that He has in mind for you through this time in Philippians is a mindset that is filled with peace and with joy!
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