Michael Hyatt - Bibles

About Me

Favorite Quotes

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”

–Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
“Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you help them to become what they are capable of being.”

–Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“Every search begins with beginner’s luck. And every search ends with the victor’s being severely tested.”

–Paulo Coelho
“Multi-tasking is dead. It never worked and it never will. Intelligent people love to sing its praises because it gives them permission to avoid the much more challenging alternative: focusing on one thing.”

–Timothy Ferriss
“Fight as if you are right; listen as if you are wrong.”

–Karl Weick
“Anyone can count the seeds in a melon. It takes vision to count the melons in a seed.”

–Unknown
“Before you become a leader, success is all about growing yourself. After you become a leader, success is about growing others.”

–Jack Welch
“This coffee falls into your stomach . . . sparks shoot all the way up to the brain. From that moment on, everything becomes agitated. Ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges; on imagination’s orders, sharpshooters sight and fire; forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink—for the nightly labor begins and ends with torrents of this black water, as a battle opens and concludes with black powder.”

–Honore de Balzac
“You see, when there is danger, a good leader takes the front line. But when there is celebration, a good leader stays in the back room. If you want the cooperation of human beings around you, make them feel that they are important. And you do that by being humble.”

–Nelson Mandela
“Our job is not to figure out the how. The how will show up out of a commitment and belief in the what.”

–Jack Canfield
“Imagination is everything. It is the preview of life’s forthcoming attractions.”

–Albert Einstein
“We trained hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up in teams we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing. And a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress whilst producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralization.”

–Gaius Petronius, AD 66
“Now if you are going to win any battle, you have to do one thing. You have to make the mind run the body. Never let the body tell the mind what to do. The body will always give up. It is always tired in the morning, noon, and night. But the body is never tired if the mind is not tired.”

–George S. Patton, U.S. Army General, 1912 Olympian
“I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.”

–Wayne Gretzky, as quoted by Steve Jobs in his keynote speech at MacWorld 2007, San Francisco
“A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

–Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, as quoted in Chip Heath and Dan Heath, Made to Stick, p. 28

Bibles

Sunday, July 13, 2008

Thomas Nelson Wins Evangelical Book of the Year

The Evangelical Christian Publishers Association (ECPA) just announced that our Word of Promise audio bible won the “Book of the Year” award for 2008. Wayne Hastings, Senior Vice President and Group Publisher for our Bible & Reference Group, accepted the award at the Christian Book Awards, held in Orlando, Florida, at the International Christian Retail Show (ICRS).

Word of Promise Book of the Year

The amazing thing is that it is the first time in the 30-year history of the award that it went to a non-book. Think about it. First, it’s an audio Bible, rather than a traditional print book. Second, it’s a Bible rather than a book. This is fascinating. What does it mean for the future of publishing?

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Posted at 10:12 PM in Announcements, Bibles, Books, Future, Good News, Media Coverage, Publishing, Thomas Nelson | Permalink | | Comments (9) | TrackBack (0)

Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Why Don’t Publishers Do More Research?

Book publishers are notorious for not doing consumer research. I am not sure exactly why, but it seems they want to decide what is best for the market. Early in my publishing career, I got my first taste of this.

In my second job out of college, I became a Marketing Director for a medium-size publishing house. I had been in the job less than 90 days when I suddenly realized that no one seemed to know which marketing vehicles really affected consumer buying behavior. For example, at the time, I couldn’t tell you what was more effective—a magazine advertisement, a “shelf-talker,” or an author appearance on television.

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Posted at 02:03 PM in Bibles, Market, Publishing, Thomas Nelson | Permalink | | Comments (11) | TrackBack (0)

Saturday, December 16, 2006

Why Publishers Love the Bible

The December 18 issue of New Yorker magazine has a great article entitled, The Good Book Business: Why Publishers Love the Bible. It focuses on the Bible publishing industry in general and Thomas Nelson in particular. It mentions several of our own employees—and former employees. Here’s an excerpt:

The familiar observation that the Bible is the best-selling book of all time obscures a more startling fact: the Bible is the best-selling book of the year, every year. Calculating how many Bibles are sold in the United States is a virtually impossible task, but a conservative estimate is that in 2005 Americans purchased some twenty-five million Bibles—twice as many as the most recent Harry Potter book. The amount spent annually on Bibles has been put at more than half a billion dollars.

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