Tomorrow begins the work

A Spiritual Journey of Homo Sapiens Story

The two most exciting days in the life of an author are: 1) When you get a contract from a publisher to write a book; and 2) When a box of those books shows up on your doorstep. In between those two days it is a lot of work. That period of work begins in earnest for me tomorrow, because today I got the contract from HarperOne.

This is very exciting to me, because I wasn’t sure it was going to happen. My previous book, The Sacred Chain, was published by HarperOne last April. Just before it came out they wanted to start talking about the next book, which was fine by me. The Sacred Chain wasn’t actually the book I wanted to write first, but it was the one they wanted to publish first. So I had this other idea brewing, hoping I’d get the opportunity.

The publisher was so optimistic, at least in how they presented things to me. I had difficulty not just going out and buying a yacht with the expected stacks of money I figured I’d have lying around from all my book sales. I thought we were just about ready to sign the contract back in March of 2024… and then The Sacred Chain came out. And for some reason, it didn’t end up on the top of the NYT best sellers list. So the contract for book #2 got “bogged down” in paperwork.

---

Aside on the economics of publishing:

---

The world of publishing is a fickle business. Big time publishers like HarperCollins (of which HarperOne is a subsidiary) make all their money on just a few titles. This exposé of the publishing world claims that 96% of books sell less than 1000 copies. The Sacred Chain is over that if you count the Kindle and audiobook sales, but I think it’s fair to say that it hasn’t done what they had hoped. (I will note that if you’d like to help that situation but the $30 price tag has been a barrier, it is currently 50% off on Amazon. Paying $30 at your local bookshop, though, is definitely the more socially responsible thing to do… and makes no difference to how much I’ll get.)

For some apples-to-oranges comparison, all the other books I’ve written or edited are on academic presses. The money game is very different there, where they give virtually no advance on royalties so all the risk is on the part of the author. Most academic authors, though, are gainfully employed elsewhere and don’t have to live on the royalty money, so the risk is just in terms of time committed (I’m afraid if you calculated the dollar per hour rate for the vast majority of academic books, you wouldn’t be close to earning minimum wage). A textbook I co-authored with a friend, Christian Thought: A Historical Introduction (Routledge, 2010), has sold about 6,000 copies and is going to a 3rd edition soon. That is a reasonable success in that world. The Science and Christianity: An Introduction to Issues (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016) textbook I wrote has fared more modestly at about 1700 copies. My best-seller by a long stretch (it has sold more than my seven other books combined) is Four Views on Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design (Zondervan Academic, 2017), which has sold more than 30,000 (at least when you count the Portuguese and Korean translations of it). But I’m the editor of that one and not getting close to $1 per book.

Suffice it to say, I need to not quit my day job.

---

Back to your regularly scheduled celebratory post:

---

And so I kept getting the unofficial word that they were interested in publishing book #2, but never got anything official. This went on for months, and I pretty well gave up on it. Then after the first of the year, things started moving again. I work with a literary agent who does all the tough guy stuff with the publisher, but in this case we weren’t in a strong negotiating position. So we agreed to take whatever they would give. As of this afternoon, the president of HarperOne signed off on their commitment to publish, The Spiritual Journey of Homo Sapiens.

I have a year to write the manuscript. My day job definitely has some overlap with what I’m writing about, but doesn’t really give me time to do the writing (they pay me to do other things). So like all the other books I’ve written, this one will take up lots of evenings and weekends.

But that starts tomorrow. Tonight is for celebrating. It’s Pad Thai Tuesday at our local watering hole. I’ll be there in about an hour if you’re in the area and would like to join in the fun.

In future posts I’ll actually tell you about this book I’m writing. I think it’s pretty good.