Bondfire Books

We’re excited to announce a partnership we’ve been working on for the last few months. Bondfire and Patheos are joining forces under the imprint moniker Patheos Press. See the press release below and stay tuned for new Patheos Press titles coming this spring.

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DENVER and COLORADO SPRINGS, CO., April 1, 2013 – Bondfire Books, the thriving e-press launched last spring, and Patheos, the world’s top independent website for religion content, today announced the launch of a publishing partnership under the moniker Patheos Press.

Under the joint imprint with Bondfire Books, based in Colorado Springs, Patheos Press will publish a wide range of titles. The imprint will feature several current Patheos writers in addition to other leading voices in religion media and academia.

Since the fall of 2011, Denver-based Patheos has published prominent religion writers such as Scot McKnight, Hemant Mehta, Peter Enns, and Jana Riess. The new arrangement with Bondfire will mean expanded operations for Patheos, allowing for about two dozen new titles annually, plus expanded marketing and promotion.

Bondfire Executive Editor Patton Dodd says the partnership will help both companies achieve their mission of promoting writers whose voices can help shape a positive, productive conversation about religion and spirituality. “Bondfire has a broad editorial perspective, but we’re especially invested in books about faith and spirituality and authors who are driven by questions about life’s ultimate meaning,” says Dodd. “Patheos has become the web’s premiere site of that conversation.”

Leo and Cathie Brunnick launched Patheos (www.patheos.com) five years ago and have watched it grow from a world religions library into the web’s most engaging—and heavily trafficked—independent source of religion and spirituality content. “We are home to more than 300 bloggers across the faith traditions,” says Leo Brunnick, “and that number grows every month. Our new strategic partnership with Bondfire Books enables us to expand our publishing reach and ensure that works from our leading authors are available wherever ebooks are sold.”

Bondfire (www.bondfirebooks.com) was founded in May 2012 by Rick Christian, who also founded Alive Communications in 1989. Alive is the nation’s leading literary agency for religion and spirituality authors, including #1 New York Times bestsellers Karen Kingsbury and Todd Burpo, as well as Eugene Peterson, translator of The Message Bible. Christian launched Bondfire to be a “game-changer in publishing,” says Christian. “We are working with other literary agencies and paying authors 50% of net royalties, double the industry standard of 25% for digital books.”

Bondfire and Patheos—and all of their authors—will benefit from the combined strength of their marketing platforms, including multiple millions of visitors each month to the Patheos website and many thousands of friends and followers at both companies’ social web platforms. The co-branded venture will offer direct sales of ebooks on the Patheos and Bondfire platforms in addition to selling all titles via every major online retailer, including Amazon, Apple, Barnes and Noble, and Kobo.

“We are excited to let readers know about the titles they can expect from Bondfire and Patheos,” says Dodd. “We have a promising list set for 2013 and are aggressively acquiring new properties. This partnership will produce a ton of great reading experiences.”

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About Bondfire Books:

Bondfire Books is an independent epublisher based in Colorado Springs. Bondfire publishes original fiction and nonfiction in addition to backlist titles, all while maximizing digital prospects for authors. Founded in 2012, it offers full epublishing services to authors on a straight partnership model and for short five-year renewable terms.

About Patheos:

Patheos is a multi-faith religion website founded in 2008 and based in Denver. Patheos features over 300 blogs by top religion and humanist writers, from journalists and academics to stay-at-home parents, and is the highest-trafficked independent religion website in the world.

In the coming days, Bondfire Books will publish Hell and Beyond: A Novel by Michael Phillips. In the tradition of C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce and other stories about the afterworld, Phillips imagines a modern-day journey into hell. When the story opens, we meet one of the world’s most prominent atheists–an unnamed narrator whose books sell by the millions and who is at the very peak of his career…and, as he will soon discover, at the very end of his life. When he dies, surprises abound–not only for our narrator, who discovers that the faith he so despised is true, but also for us as we encounter a vision of life after death that challenges our assumptions about what is waiting for us–and may be required of some of us–in the great and foreboding beyond.

We’re pleased to announce the signing of author, counselor and speaker, Jan Meyers Proett. Her new eBook, entitled Beauty & the Bitch, is set to release in the very near future. The title of the book is controversial; nonetheless it speaks eloquently of a reality that Jan says every woman understands: lurking within a woman’s heart is what she calls “a beast of a bitch” that wars against the beauty of Christ in our souls. 

Beauty & the Bitch is a woman’s art of war for the age-old battle between flesh and spirit that the Bible describes. It is foretold as a battle every Christian will wage. But there is hope. The answer is not in mantras or in simply trying harder to be a reflection of God and goodness. In Beauty & the Bitch, Jan Meyers Proett reveals how Beauty triumphs organically over the dark places in our souls–because it is God’s beauty and not our own.

Follow @BondfireBooks on Twitter to get updates about Beauty & the Bitch and other upcoming titles.

Announcement: coming to Bondfire in 2013 is Dear Abba, a new ebook by Brennan Manning, with co-author John Blase, who also penned Manning’s biography All is Grace. Dear Abba is a collection of short devotionals made to be used over the course of a month. Each day combines a verse, an excerpt from Brennan’s beloved writings, and a short, personal response to the verse, addressed to Abba. This lovely, heartfelt little book is full of grace and ragamuffin wisdom, and will be a favorite of anyone who enjoys Manning’s other works. Check back for news about the book’s release.

We’re delighted to announce the signing of Julia Duin. Julia is an associate professor of journalism at Union University and an award-winning reporter for the Washington Times.

A rising number of faithful people are leaving the organized church environment–many of them choosing instead to sit home on Sunday morning rather than take part in the available communities. In her book, Quitting Church, Julia draws on extensive experience as a reporter to faithfully research and ask important questions about the factors contributing to this phenomenon. Duin’s careful analysis will provide valuable insight for church leaders and churchgoers alike as she asks provocative questions about the changing nature of spiritual community in our culture.

Quitting Church–originally published in 2008, and updated with new material for this forthcoming edition–has been praised as a timely, important piece of sound journalism that will encourage any believer who has ever despaired about the church, been tempted to quit, or felt guilty over leaving.

One of my favorite short ebooks of this year–and given my love of Byliner, Kindle Singles, and The Atavist, and my work at Bondfire and Patheos Press, I read more than my fair share–is one you may not heard of unless you’re a theology nerd: Tony Jones’ A Better Atonement: Beyond the Depraved Doctrine of Original Sin. Fortunately for Tony Jones, theology nerds aren’t hard to find, especially online, but they aren’t exactly an audience that major publishers are lining up to serve.

That makes Jones’ ebook a perfect example of one of the best things about epublishing today–authors can serve even the niche-iest of audiences with a low-cost, quick-to-market title.

Low-cost and quick-to-market do not mean “cheap.” A Better Atonement is less than 15,000 words long–you can read it in a single evening–and costs less than a latte, but it offers a helpful, thoughtful, and balanced overview of the dominant views of the atonement, that hard-to-pin down doctrine about how humans can be reconciled to God. I’m not a theology nerd so much as I am theologically curious, but I found the book an ideal primer on the major schools of thought about Christian atonement, and I appreciated seeing Jones consider how the received wisdom of an idea like “original sin” inspires particular ways of thinking about salvation. If I were teaching the atonement to a group of students or leading a church discussion, I’d have a hard time coming up with a better introductory resource.

Enough from me–I asked Jones to tell us about his experience of doing this kind of ebook, and whether it’s a stand-alone title or the beginning of a larger project.

Why did you decide to do an ebook on the atonement?

Because I had a sense that the atonement was an issue for a lot of people trying to break away from evangelicalism. I could just tell it was in the water. I also want to establish myself as a public theologian who engages the issues that people care about.

I decided on an ebook because I imagined this conversation with a publisher:

Tony: “I want to publish a 14,000-word manuscript on the doctrine of the atonement; most of the material is already available for free on my blog; I want it to cost $2.99; and I want it to come out next week.”
Publisher: “Bahahahahahahahahahaha!!!!”

What came first–the idea to do an ebook or the idea to do a blog series? Or were they always part of the same plan?

As I said, I just had a sense that people wanted to talk about this. Why? Because whenever I blogged about the atonement — including about my theological opponents like John Piper — people loved it. I was hearing a lot about Girard’s unconventional reading of the atonement. And I’d already edited a book by another author about the atonement, and that book had done better than expected.

So I had a bunch of posts on the atonement that I’d already written, and I’d just read about a guy who repurposed his blog posts into a very successful ebook.

Finally, it was timely. Lent is a time when a lot of Christians think about the crucifixion and the meaning of Jesus’ death. Part of the reason my book took off was the timing.

You’ve been known to argue strongly and stridently for your various commitments. But in this book, even as you announce that you’re making a case for a “better” approach to atonement theology, your tone is quite folksy, teacherly, and approachable. Was that a conscious decision for this particular topic? Or for this particular attempt in publishing?

Since about 75% of the book is repurposed blog posts, it simply reflects my tone there. Plus, I’m quite sure that I feel more freedom to write in a folksy way in an ebook. To be honest, I think that when someone pays $2.99 for a book, they’ve got low expectations. I’m fine with that. They don’t expect highly polished prose. Secondly, I want to establish a rapport with the readers.

But remember, the subtitle (“Beyond the Depraved Doctrine of Original Sin”) is anything but conciliatory. That’s a shot across the bow of 90% of the Christian theologians who’ve ever lived.

How has your audience responded to the ebook?

They’ve loved it. I sold 2,000 copies in the first two weeks. It was an amazing experience. And it’s got a long tail: in the next two weeks, I’ve got two speaking gigs on the topic of the atonement. That wouldn’t have happened without the book.

What is the future of A Better Atonement? Will you work in audience feedback, expand and republish, or develop into a traditional book someday?

Readers have found errors — both factual and grammatical — and I am fixing those in an upcoming version. I’m also going to add about 10,000 words on different views of the atonement that I didn’t cover.

Plus, readers have said that I should have a stronger conclusion. I plan to release that revised and updated edition on Ash Wednesday, 2013.

Here at Bondfire, while our authors are hard at work on ebook masterpieces, we like to interrupt them with questions about what they’re up to and why. This post is the first in our 3 Questions series, wherein we momentarily bug an author about what they’re working on for us.

First up, Jonathan D. Fitzgerald, author of the forthcoming Not Your Mother’s Morals, which is…well, we’ll let him explain:

What are you writing for Bondfire?
My book is called Not Your Mother’s Morals. It is a kind of pop culture manifesto in which I declare that, contrary to common perceptions, contemporary movies, music, and television shows are not just a frivolous waste of time. On the contrary, as our culture becomes increasingly more fragmented, they are among the best modes for transmitting valuable moral lessons to a wide audience.

Why are you writing it?
When I was growing up in a particularly conservative and fundamentalist Christian community, the general assumption was that popular culture was a tool the devil used for corrupting young minds. And yet, that’s just not my experience. What I’ve seen instead, rising steadily through the eighties, nineties, and aughts, is a movement toward authenticity and sincerity in the stories we tell, making them excellent mediums for communicating moral messages. This “New Sincerity” that runs through popular culture has wide reaching, positive effects on our perceptions about God and matters of spirituality, family values, and attitudes toward our country. Pay no attention to the naysayers; the sky is not falling, my friends.

Why should we read it?
Because you love pop culture. You’re addicted to great television shows and are obsessive about the music you listen to. You love comic book-based movies and romantic comedies and you’ve always had a sense that there’s more to these things than just the enjoyment they provide. You’ve felt this, but haven’t been able to articulate it. I’m here to tell you that the shows you watch, the music you listen to, and the movies you stream are actually making you a better person. This is good news, so you should read my book!