We’ve been overwhelmed by the positive reaction to Ignatius Press Novels. Thank you! Now that we’re starting to get on top of our feet, it’s time to give our Novel Thoughts blog here a regular schedule and respond to the wonderful queries we’ve had about joining the conversation.

What You’ll See Here

Besides thoughts from Ignatius Press authors on a free-form and ongoing basis, Novel Thoughts will have regular weekly features. So far, here’s the list:

• Monday: Thought for the Week – Kickstart your week with a meaty, perplexing, illuminating, or otherwise novel idea about fiction and faith, written by an Ignatius Press author or submitted by a reader. Good for reading over Monday morning coffee.
• Tuesday: News & Links – Someone thinks Shakespeare was a time-traveling vampire! A major Catholic author just signed a new book deal. Look at this cat-bacon-book-moustache meme. The internet is full of news Catholic fiction lovers should be up on, and we’ll link you to it.
• Wednesday, alternating:
  • 3 Newly Featured Titles – Every other week we’ll roll out a few new featured titles. Classic, contemporary, book club picks, and more.
  • tl;dr Digest – If there’s a comment thread you really have to read or a Michael O’Brien post last week you may have missed, you can find it here. We’ll recap in brief what’s been going on around the site so you don’t have to scroll through the entire archive.
• Friday: Open Discussion – End the week with some light banter, name your favorite book, ask us how David C. Downing‘s beard stays so healthy looking, propose a new take on the nature of beauty. As long as it fits our super-simple commenting guidelines, it’s your two cents to spend.

Ignatius Press authors’ contributions will be anything from a short insight like T.M. Doran’s “Formation via Fiction?” from site launch to in-depth essays or a Thought for the Week.

Book Reviews?

While we’ll certainly talk about our beloved books, we won’t be publishing straight-ahead book reviews here. Instead, we have a better idea! Put your review on Goodreads, Amazon, or your own blog, and send us the link at staff [at] ipnovels [dot] com. This way you tell people all around the web what you think of the book, and it can still end up in the conversation here. We’ll link longer reviews of Ignatius Press books that we think would interest Novel Thoughts readers.

Have an idea for an article based on a book instead? Read on for how to contribute to the blog.

Contributing

Ignatius Press–published authors have an open invitation to contribute to the Novel Thoughts blog. (If you are one and haven’t received an invite yet, reach out to us! We’d love to have you.)

We’re also open to some very limited outside pitches from fiction enthusiasts and readers here on the blog. Full contributors’ guidelines will be posted later this week. Until then, query staff [at] ipnovels [dot] com with your idea and a short author bio, and we’ll discuss it together from there. Keep in mind that this is an experiment for Novel Thoughts spurred on by reader request, and while we can only accept a limited number of articles to post, we love to have discussion of books and ideas in the comment section.

Commenting

Speaking of commenting, our guidelines are simple. First, we love hearing from you. Comments are a great way to contribute to the conversation–we’ll be commenting, too. Second, be sure to keep it clean and charitable. (We’ve fortunately had no issues there yet!) Third, please keep it on topic, more or less, most of the time.

Comments will now automatically close 60 days after they are posted.

That’s it. We’ll see you in the comments!