excellence in your craft. We genuinely desire to serve you. If you want to reach out, we would be honored to see how we can serve you. Our emails are john@thebeehive.live and benjamin@fanandflame.com.

“True humility doesn’t kill our dreams; it provides a guardrail for them,”

“What if, instead of competing with other women writers or seeking a larger platform for my writing, I became the ‘village poet’ for my friends and neighbors and began to see other writers as my peers and friends?”

Challies has pointed out that just because it feels like every major website in your blogging bubble has already written on a topic and thus saturated it, the reality is that many people in our local churches and who belong to our blog readership don’t read the major ministry blog sites.

I’m trying to meander toward is seeing the goodness of what Laura Lundgren calls being a “village poet.”68 A village poet views success as faithfully serving a small number of readers with our words, not as a resignation to the state of affairs but as a goal.

Adding shorter paragraphs, more subheadings, lists, and hot takes would get more readers to skim my posts, yet I’ll often find myself intentionally writing posts with long paragraphs and without headings, lists, and hot takes just to reward readers who read, like a parent putting a candy bar in the bottom of their kids’ laundry baskets to reward

What I mean is that after blogging weekly for over six years, I have just over five hundred email subscribers. My open rate on emails is around 40%.

if ‘bigger’ is your goal, nothing will ever be big enough . . . because ‘bigger’ isn’t really a measure of having more readers than you do now, but having more readers than the other guy.”

Would you pray right now for other bloggers God would allow to cross your path? If an author’s writing has blessed you, how could you encourage him or her? What is one tangible way you could help another writer?