It’s been a wild two-weeks for our Cartel publishing line as we get into 2017.

We’re continuing to gain traction for our two lines of downloadable curriculum, Viva and Next. That’s fun to see.

Earlier this month we announced that after several years of seeing diminishing returns from Amazon.com we’ve now broken up. You can still get our books via Amazon Kindle but we’re no longer distributing our books directly through them because we lost a bunch of money.

One of the awesome things this means is that we’re going to offer better shipping rates, including months like January where we’re offering free shipping on every single order.

And this month we’re launching three new physical books.

Mission Tripping by Danny Kwon

This is a book and companion interactive journal

Here’s what I like about Mission Tripping. Tons of youth ministries do mission trips. Tens of thousands of them each year. Over the years I’ve been on and lead a whole bunch of them.

I’m here to tell you: There are really great mission trips. And there are really crappy ones who do more harm than good.

What’s the difference? The youth worker. Mission Tripping is truly comprehensive in that it helps you ground your mission trip in solid theology, theory, and practice. You need to know how to find the right trip for your group, you need to know how to manage all aspects of that trip, you need to know how to have a great trip, and you need to know how to help cement learning with follow-up.

You can save $3 on Mission Tripping if you order today with the pre-release coupon code of MTBLOGGING

Leading Without Power by Mark Oestreicher

It’s about time, right? Marko created the Cartel publishing line five or so years ago but hadn’t, until now, published a full-blown book on his own line! (We did publish a curriculum, Every Picture Tells a Story: 2013 Edition) He and I both took some time in 2016 to go on a writing retreat and hammer our new titles. (More on my new book another day) And I’m really excited about what he’s come up with. It’s super useful for people who aren’t the #1 leader on a church staff but as definitely still leaders.

Here’s a snippet of the description:

Hierarchical, coercive leadership should have no place in the church.

But if we move away from those unbiblical (and ineffective) forms of power-based leadership, we still need to lead. In Leading Without Power, Mark Oestreicher explores—in very pragmatic ways—what it might look like for us to replace power-based leadership modalities with other approaches.

Leading Without Power unpacks nine metaphorical job titles, with stories and examples of what it looks like to embody these mindsets and practices.

You can read the rest of the description, see the crazy good endorsements, or place your pre-order at this link. You can save $2 per copy if you pre-order Leading Without Power by January 31st with coupon code: getlwp