It’s a new year, and it seems like the right time to start writing this occasional newsletter again. I’m not going to write every day like when I was on sabbatical a year ago last fall, nor like my two weeks in Dubai at COP28 in December. There’s not enough news to keep you interested every day. But tomorrow is three months until the release of my new book, and once or twice a week I’ll tell you something interesting about the process of writing and publishing this book.
Today is the cover reveal. I’ll devote another post to the title, as there is a whole story behind that. For now, I’m just talking about the appearance. As the author, you don’t have a lot of say on what the cover looks like. My art school graduate daughter, Sloan, whose artwork is throughout the book (and will be significantly featured here in the future) had a course in college where they had to design book covers. So I got her to sketch out a few and submit for consideration. But the publisher told me that they really prefer to go with their own people and a text-centric approach. So they sent me several different colors of this current design, asking which ones I like. I tended to gravitate toward the darker colors, and this color (which my good wife tells me is “ox blood”) was the one they liked.
They also told me there was a subtle nod to a DNA chain in the background, and initially I didn’t understand it. But it turns out that those horizontal lines give the silhouette of the double-helix. Hold it back a little and screw up your eyes, and perhaps you’ll see it.
Next is my name on the cover: Jim Stump. I’ve been the author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of seven books before this one. But this is the first one where my name on the cover is “Jim”. Why is that? My first one (Christian Thought: A Historical Introduction) I was James. For all the other ones, I’ve been J.B. I went through this phase where I thought that if initials were good enough for C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and LL Cool J, then they were good enough for me. And I had adopted “JB” as the moniker my students could call me instead of “Dr. Stump” if they wanted to be more familiar. And I also wondered whether the initials might give me some plausible deniability if some people in my community didn’t really like what I wrote (turns out not… more on that later).
Now it has been a few years since my last book (Original Sin and the Fall: Five Views, 2020), and since then I’ve become much better known through my podcast (Language of God) as “Jim”. So we agreed that it would be better to have that on the cover. One of the downsides of that, though, is that Amazon is pretty confused at the moment… they are currently reviewing my request to acknowledge that James, JB, and Jim are actually the same person (and they’ve been reviewing it for several months now… evidently it is complicated).
Finally, at they bottom they call me out as the “Coeditor of How I Changed My Mind About Evolution”. I’m actually pretty proud of that book, but I wonder whether it is the most prestigious to call out on the cover of this book? My scholarly credentials would be better established by my Science and Christianity: An Introduction to the Issues. And if they are looking for total sales, my best-selling book so far is the one I edited called, Four Views on Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design.
Hopefully, the good people at HarperOne know what they’re doing. They really have been a pleasure to work with, and it is a dream come true to publish a book with them.
You can see the book listed on the Harper site here, or Amazon here.
Reading your thoughts Jim is like talking to a good friend. Your words resonate with me which is rare for most writers. I think if could make a wish come true it would be to walk and talk with you. Good luck with your new book Dr Jim.