Drum roll……….here is the book cover!

I am very excited to share the book cover of Win at Home First. Instead of just posting the picture on social media, I wanted to provide some back story.

Most of us like to see or hear ‘behind the scenes’ of how something was made. In fact, a great podcast is How I Built This, which takes people behind the scenes of how companies were made. So here it goes!

Jon Gordon and Brian Tome

I am grateful, humbled, shocked, and any other positive adjective you could say about Jon Gordon and Brian Tome on the cover of my book. Both have been significant in my leadership development. Jon Gordon is a keynote speaker and author of almost 20 books. Jon has been a distant influence via reading his numerous books, blogs, and social media posts over the last few years. Although Brian Tome is local and executive pastor of Crossroads Church that we attend, it was still similar to celebrity status since most often a one-way relationship. Seeing him speak at Crossroads, reading his books, blogs, and social media posts have impacted me as a leader, and more importantly spiritually.

The encouragement here is I swung for the fences in asking them to endorse my book. Both men are extremely busy and endorsing a book is not a light task. It takes time to read the book, write the endorsement, and the overarching risk of associating your name with a book and author. Thankfully they both said yes.

Brian Tome also wrote the foreword and I will share with you and my reaction in a future post. I may have teared up.

Title: Win at Home First

People have asked how I came up with the title so I wanted to share. For the last three years, I have coached business executives, entrepreneurs, or owners in either one-on-one or group settings.

In these conversations, we talked about work challenges and ways to improve, but I kept finding myself say ‘you need to win at home first,’ in order to have energy and capacity to lead well at work. If you are tired and going to bed late the night before, then you are going to be exhausted at work. When you and your spouse are not getting along, you have less to give at work because you are thinking about the argument that awaits you when you get home. If you are not intentional with your kids, then when at work you feel defeated hearing how others are involved in their kids’ lives.

Before I landed on the book title, I did some random polling as I was second-guessing my title. One response I got in a social media poll, was the person said they didn’t like the word ‘win’ because it meant there had to be a ‘loser’. That was exactly my point! There is a loser if we don’t win at home first….our marriage, our kids, or all of it. We still need to win at work, which is Part 4 of the book, we just need to get it in the right order.

Subtitle: An Inspirational Guide to Work-Life Balance

Work-life balance was a hard one to finally land on because I, like others, agree it is never ‘balanced’. I thought about putting life first, since life is more important than work. Thought about using harmony instead of balance since it may be a better description. However, when talking to my book publishing consultant, a big factor in choosing the correct subtitle is maximizing SEO (search engine optimization; i.e. the words people search for on the internet), so this won since a lot of us are looking for work-life balance in our searches.

The Balanced Rock Picture

I love this picture because it doesn’t actually work when you look at the picture. Too many rocks on one side, yet balanced. This irony made me laugh as we will never have life completely balanced due to the dynamics of life.

Cory M. Carlson

A wildlife painter in the northwest beat me to the domain of www.corycarlson.com. Talking with the consultant, authors should match their author name to their domain so readers can find you. I was bummed to have to use my middle initial on the cover since it felt formal, but looking at my bookshelf to see what other authors do, I saw John C. Maxwell and Stephen R. Covey. Not bad company to be in!

Thank you for reading and hopefully you enjoyed the behind the scenes.

Thanks to Andrea Costantine for the awesome book cover.

Here is the book jacket and what this book is about.

Thanks,

Cory

Please email me if you want to get involved in the book launch!

#blog