My Literary Children
Karl Giberson
Someone once compared writing books to having children—you spend a lot of time with them at first and invest much of yourself, but then they go off on their own and you hear about them from time to time. This has been a week when several of my children have been on my radar screen in various ways.
The Big Project now is Saving Adam, and I am now spending a few hours on that almost every day. I have sent off the first two chapters to my editor at Beacon for a review, and am working on the chapter now where I have to explain the incredible significance of St. Paul’s “Second Adam Christology” to a secular audience. This is a fascinating theological concept but it is not immediately apparent why protecting it is so important to evangelicals.
On Tuesday of this week I did the first booksigning for The Wonder of the Universe, at Gordon College. My writing students set up the event and three of them interviewed me about the process. The crowd was small but it was a very nice evening.
Earlier today I got an email from a friend at the University of Navarre where Mariano Artigas taught until his death shortly after the publication of The Oracles of Science. The Spanish translation of the book is about to appear—which is exciting—and they are hoping I can come to Spain for the launch. They were very gracious hosts the last time I was there. The Oracles of Science is now available in English, Italian, Polish, and Spanish.
Also in today’s mail I got my royalty statement from Lion Hudson for the second half of 2011, which is basically the first 6-month period that Quantum Leap was available. They sold 1362 copies for total royalties of 562.89. Half of that goes to my co-author, Dean Nelson. But I am getting nothing this time around, since authors don’t see any new royalty money until their advance royalties have been covered. Dean and I got $1000 each and we are still around $350.00 ahead of the game. Royalty checks tend to all come around the same time but I suspect that they will never amount to very much. My earlier books are selling at a rate of about 2 or 3 per month now.
Today’s mail also brought a report from InterVarsity about reviews and other publicity for The Language of Science & Faith.
The biggest book news of the day however, is the arrival of the copy edits for Seven Glorious Days: A Creation Story for the 21st Century, coming out from Paraclete Press in September. This is the single most tedious part of writing a book—to go through hundreds of tiny bits of busy work. I worked on this for a while this afternoon. My editor wants references for some quotes that I thought were sufficiently well-known not to need that. Some pictures need better attribution. A thousand small edits have to be approved. Etc etc. This is part of being an author, though, so I have to do it.
Overall, it’s been a good week, spending time with my literary children.