Blurbs have started to come in for my forthcoming book, Seven Glorious Days, coming out with Paraclete Press this fall.  Here is a comment from my friend Stephen Pope at BC.

Karl Giberson's Seven Glorious Days presents an attractive and readable account of creation showing that there is no need to oppose scientific and biblical ways of understanding the origin of the world. His ability to translate the complex insights of physics, cosmology, and biology into terms that ordinary Christians can grasp is matched only by his ability to express deep religious convictions in simple and direct language.

Giberson's book is invaluable for any Christian wanting to think seriously about our place in the natural world. It's culminating point--that we are made to love one another--is one that the human race needs to hear now more than ever."

Stephen J. Pope 

Professor of Theological Ethics, Boston College

(I am doing a terrible job with posting daily. Somebody needs to start paying me.)

Saving Adam is a huge sprawling book that is pushing me far outside my comfort zone. I have been reminded of that this month as I have been working on a chapter dealing with material that I literally knew nothing about six months ago—nothing that is, beyond the fact that it was relevant to my topic.

The disciplines into which we compartmentalize our knowledge make it hard to think clearly about certain types of problems. The question of Adam and Eve is one such problem. On the one hand the topic is profoundly Biblical. But is Biblical in Christian, Jewish, and other ways. And it is historical. By the 17^th century some people were becoming convinced that Adam was not a real person.  It is cultural and we can’t really talk about Adam without Dante and Milton.  It’s political. Nineteenth century southern racists used a twisted version of the Adam story to justify mistreating African slaves. It’s scientific.  Our knowledge of genes and fossils is forcing us to invent all kinds of very different Adams to make sense of the data.  Adam is even psychological—I know a lot of really smart people who are psychologically attached to the idea of a first man and woman, often for reasons even they cannot explain.

Thinking clearly about a topic like Adam requires bringing all these disparate disciplines and perspectives into dialog with each other.

The section of the book I just completed looks at some of the interesting ideas about Adam in extrabiblical literature from the period after the Old Testament was basically completed. This literature, which I was only dimly aware of six months ago, is fascinating. There are amazing stories of Adam gathering his children around him at age 930 to tell them about what happened in Eden centuries earlier. There are stories about Eve telling her side of the story. Some stories make Eve look worse than she does in Genesis; others make her look better. All of the stories raise troubling questions about whether we can know that the Bible contains the right books—fortunately that is not my topic. 

It was quite satisfying to delve into a brand new topic and, from a position of total ignorance and confusion, slowly learn enough to make the points needed for my story.

I have 25,000 words on my book now—1/3 of the way to the finish line.

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 21^st 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.

Saving Adam, that I am working on now, will be a trade book with Beacon Press, in Boston.  And while, I have worked with agents on two previous books, this was the first one with a more or less standard approach to the process of getting a contract.

Once there are two or more publishers interested in a book, the agent’s job is to get the biggest advance for the author and—since the agent takes 15% commission—that also means the agent gets the best deal for himself.  Our interests were mutual—no conflict of interest here.

For a really “hot” book project—like the one being circulated now by that whistle-blower from Goldman-Sachs—the proposal will go to auction and publishers will bid against each other. I heard today that the bidding for that book is in the millions now.  The publishers interested in Saving Adam were much smaller and the two bids for the book were $10,000 apiece.  There was not a lot of headroom for an auction here and my agent was concerned that one—or both—of the publishers might back out if threatened with a bidding war. So he looked for other ways to sweeten the deal. 

There are various ways to sweeten a deal without increasing the advance—everything from additional free copies at printing, to retaining ownership of foreign rights, to increasing the percent of the royalties on a future paperback, to artistic control over any movies based on the book.  My agent got Beacon to give up the foreign rights to sweeten the deal.  This could mean absolutely nothing, but it could also be significant. Suppose, for example, that Saving Adam sells very well, or perhaps gets adopted as a standard text in some college class. This would almost guarantee interest on the part of publishers in other countries, especially England and Australia where no translation would be necessary, to sell the book in their market.  If that happens, my agent will negotiate a separate contract with these publishers and get me another advance.  The same would be true with versions that had to be translated into other languages.

The advances that authors get are ambiguous in many ways. Technically, they are an advance on royalties from the book when it starts selling. An author would make between $1 and $3 per book, depending on the price, and the publisher would not have to pay anything until the advance payments was fully covered. If my royalties on Saving Adam are $2 per book, then I won’t see any funds beyond the advance until after 5000 copies have been sold. 

In a sense then, advances on royalties might seem irrelevant—the author is simply getting paid early but ultimately you would get the money anyway when the books sold.  But this is not how it works.  Publishers typically give you more money in the advance than they expect the author to make from royalties. Harvard University Press gave Randall and I significantly more money in our advance for The Anointed than we would earn if the entire initial print run sold out at full price. The successful author, Paul Davies, told me once that a good agent would make sure his or her authors got advances so large they would never see a penny of royalty after the book appeared.

Technically, a publisher can ask for the advance back if the book doesn’t sell enough copies to cover it, but my understanding is that this simply never happens. My book Saving Darwin did not sell enough copies to cover the advance of $25,000 that I got for that book, but HarperOne has never approached me to return any of the money.  My guess is they consider it their mistake to have given an advance that turned out to be “too big.”  And they also make more money than the author on every copy so they don’t need to sell so many to start turning a profit.

And, for what it is worth, even with my largest advance, writing books still nets less than minimum wage per hour for the time spent writing.  You gotta love the work….

Unlike today, which I spent outdoors writing in my gazebo, yesterday afternoon was spent indoors on my phone.

It started at 1 pm with a call from Beau Underwood of the DC project Faith in Public Life.  I had never heard of this organization—or maybe its name was so generic sounding that I didn’t remember it—but the director, Rev. Underwood, had emailed me asking for a time when we could talk on the phone.  Someone had given him a copy of The Anointed for Christmas and he loved it.

Faith in Public Life is a pro bono shop that promotes scholars from faith traditions that are not out of touch with reality or constantly at war with all forms of progress. Needless to say, their clients don’t often appear on Fox News.  They are looking for people with valuable insights to share with reporters and talk show hosts about how religion functions in America’s public life. Although The Anointed was an analysis of religious dysfunction in American life, Underwood thought that Randall and I are the sorts of voices they would like to promote. Faith in Public Life seems like a classy shop so I said I would be interested in working with them. We will see what comes of that.

At 2 pm I was on an hour-long talk show with Bill Feltner of the Pilgrim Radio Network, to promote my new book The Wonder of the Universe. He has 20,000 “actual” listeners, as he calls them (as opposed to “people whose radio could get the signal with his program on it if they tuned it,” which I understand is how Rush Limbaugh calculates his rapidly diminishing audience.)  I also welcomed the opportunity to promote real science to an audience that might rarely hear it in a faith friendly context.  The conversation was great and I really enjoyed chatting with Feltner.

At 4 pm I was on a live radio show with a husband and wife tag team—whose names I forget—but who do a really good “Regius and Kathy Lee” show, with comfortable back and forth.  They have a very conservative audience and asked me some aggressive questions about the age of the earth and the Big Bang but I enjoyed the conversation. I am so impressed with people who can be so natural on the air. One caller assaulted me so aggressively near the end of the show they had to shut her down so I could answer. This caller assured me that Ken Ham and Al Mohler were right and that the only reason scientists disagreed with them was because they had different “presuppositions.”

This “presupposition” argument—which Ken Ham has on display everywhere in his museum—is so bogus.  It’s “philosophy for pre-schoolers.”  This argument claims that one’s conclusions derive entirely from one’s starting point, rather than from careful inspection of the world. If one assumes the Bible is scientifically accurate, then all the data line up with the earth being 10,000 years old, and any data that do not can be ignored. Scientists, unfortunately, have this other “godless” assumption that the world needs to be such that all kinds of complicated things can happen on their own. Since this takes time, scientists naturally find that the universe is billions of years old to provide the time demanded by their presupposition. In this strange binary world there is apparently no room for people who think they should look closely at the world, gather facts and make observations, think about this data and then try to explain it. And then try to test those explanations against more data, and so on. No need to do all this hard work, says Ken Ham and my irate caller—just leap boldly from your presupposition to whatever conclusion you need. 

I spent much of today dealing with the “echo effects” of being a writer.  These are the things that go with publishing books and articles but are not connected to the writing process itself.

I was greeted this morning by a nice stroke on facebook that generated a bit of humor. Rachel Held Evans, author of the delightful coming of age memoir Evolving in Monkey Town, recently blogged about “15 reasons I left the Church.”  Unknown to me, for the past three years Rachel—who I consider a friend— has apparently not been attending church which, in Dayton, TN, probably means she is the only person at home watching Meet the Press on Sunday morning.  Like the 8 million other 20-somethings that have left evangelicalism in the past few years, Rachel feels like the church has stopped trying to nurture her faith in a meaningful way. I understand her concerns and am aware of many of my more thoughtful college students over the past few years who have left the church for the same reasons.  Although it has been decades since I was a 20-something, I share the concerns.  The institutionalized church seems to have become obsessed with protecting a small number of social structures and conserving its power and money, rather than addressing issues of social justice, a central concern of young people. 

Reason #5 on Rachel’s list of frustrations is “I left the church because I believe the earth is 4.5 billion years old and that humans share a common ancestor with apes, which I was told was incompatible with my faith.”

(I should add here that this identical issue is one of the reasons why some young people, including my daughter, left the church they grew up in.  I complained to the church leadership that bashing science in Sunday School should not be occurring but my concerns were ignored.  I am pretty sure this is happening everywhere.) 

Today, however, Rachel listed her reasons why she has “returned to the church.” (I believe this is the church as a collection of believers, not any denomination.) Anyway, I was pleased and surprised to see this reason for why she is still in the fold: “Karl Giberson, who was the first to reach out to me and tell me that I didn’t have to choose between my intellectual integrity and my faith.”  This affirmation from a thoughtful person like Rachel makes up for many of the assaults from annoying and sometimes drooling anti-science loonies that have been perpetually trying to get me fired from Eastern Nazarene College.  So, thanks, Rachel.

My afternoon was spent on two radio shows and a most interesting conversation with Beau Underwood of the DC project Faith in Public Life. I will report on these tomorrow.

(I am doing a terrible job with posting daily. I must do better.)

Sometimes I think the culture war between the “trust only science” demographic and the “trust only the Bible” demographic, is simply not resolvable and will eventually lead to “two Americas,” one educated and populated by demoralized liberal Christians and secularists, and the other fundamentalist and populated by anti-intellectuals working hard to avoid thinking. To a degree Randall Stephens and I outlined this trajectory in The Anointed.

I was reminded of this today when I open my email to discover that Ken Ham has attacked Randall Stephens in a piece titled “What does this Nazarene University Professor Believe?”  (http://blogs.answersingenesis.org/blogs/ken-ham/2012/03/16/what-does-this-nazarene-u-professor-believe/)  This piece, a response to our recent article in Religion Dispatches (http://www.readability.com/articles/uzdwibvp), is interesting for several reasons:

1)    Ham’s ire is now directed primarily at Randall, even though he has not been the primary critic of Ham’s young earth creationism.  The “professor” in the title is Randall this time, not me.  He says he hopes that “every Nazarene understands what this Nazarene professor believes—and therefore we assume his beliefs are being transmitted to the students he teaches and influences.”  I am convinced that Ham is refocusing on Randall rather than me for one reason: He wants his troops to start pressuring the administration at Eastern Nazarene College to get rid of Randall, just as his troops applied pressure for the college to get rid of me.  Alas, this is the way that “gatekeepers of truth” operate. Lacking confidence that their ideas can stand on their own, they look for ways to push their critics out of the conversation.

2)    In the second place, after claiming we are taking cheap shots at him, Ham explains that “one of the main reasons for the appearance of this article is to push their new book.” This is a strange claim.  In the first place, the boost in sales that comes from publishing one article doesn’t provide much financial incentive.  But, more importantly, public intellectuals—including Randall and I—engage culturally significant ideas by writing books and articles. Does Ham think that every article in every magazine is really an advertisement for the authors’ books in disguise? And then—amazingly—Ham gives links to his books!  “I also urge you to obtain our book Already Compromised,” he writes, “it is a real eye-opener into what is being taught in Christian colleges in the USA.” Randall and I have published many pieces related to our book but never have we included such a shameless encouragement to purchase our book.

3)    And finally, after saying we took  “cheap shots” at AiG [Answers in Genesis] and me” in referring to his approach as “anti-intellectual” Ham concludes his article with what has to be the most common and obvious example of anti-intellectualism in the fundamentalist movement—the quoting of proof texts, out of context, to argue that Biblical truth is timeless and unchanging.   “God’s Word is for all people for all time,” he writes. “It stands for eternity.”  Here are some of the examples he uses to make his point that, for example, we must continue to believe that the earth is 10,000 years no matter how thoroughly scientific evidence refutes that idea:

“Now, O LORD God, the word which You have spoken concerning Your servant and concerning his house, establish it forever and do as You have said.” (2 Samuel 7:25)

Remember His covenant forever, The word which He commanded, for a thousand generations. (1 Chronicles 16:15)

“And now, O LORD, the word which You have spoken concerning Your servant and concerning his house, let it be established forever, and do as You have said.” (1 Chronicles 17:23)

He remembers His covenant forever, The word which He commanded, for a thousand generations. (Psalms 105:8)

Ham appears to think that the Psalmist was arguing that the ancient science of the Bible must never be modified. And that a collection of books not yet written would also contain inerrant ideas. And that a committee of church leaders (Catholic leaders, gasp!) would inerrantly collect, edit, and translate these yet-to-be-written books. 

And, of course, the circularity of an argument in which Biblical statements are used support the idea that Biblical statements are inerrant poses no logical problems of any sort. But this is certainly not anti-intellectual.  Somehow, Ham has found a path around that problem that has plagued logicians ever since Aristotle noted it centuries before Christ.

(I am not doing a very good job with posting daily. Hopefully that will improve now that my life is settling down a bit.)

There are many steps between an expression of interest from a publisher and a signed book contract.  For Saving Adam, there were a few small details. For starters, you have to be OK with the advance on royalties. Such advances represent two things: the best guess from the publisher about how many copies of the book they can sell and, closely related, the commitment the publishing house is prepared to make to you. Publishers have to think hard about this.

In my case, I was an author who had written 8 books, which was good. It shows that I can finish projects and provides publishers with good samples of my work. Several of my books had been well-reviewed, which was good, but none had been bestsellers, which was bad. With Saving Adam, I was writing in the area of my “platform,” which was science and religion, which was good since it means there is a built in audience. (A book by me on car repair, or the joys of gardening, would have no built-in audience.) But I was writing from a more liberal perspective, which was bad, since the topic is most intense among conservative evangelicals, many of whom want to read only material that agrees with their point of view. Ken Ham’s bookstore, for example, will not carry Saving Adam!

Royalty advances vary greatly, from zero for projects with no real market, to over a million dollars for projects certain to become bestsellers. Many books are produced with no expectation of any real sales beyond libraries. If you see a book selling for $100 you can be sure that the publisher printed less than 500 copies and plans to sell them almost exclusively to libraries. The high price is required since the publisher has to recoup all the production expenses—editorial, design, legal—from a small number of sales. Supposedly the average print run of a scholarly book from Harvard University Press is 250 copies.

Compare this number to the 4000-copy print run for The Anointed, published in the fall of 2011 by Harvard University Press. Harvard brought out The Anointed as a “trade” book, rather than a scholarly book, which means they believe it has significant sales potential. So far they have been right, and the book has sold 3000 copies.

Authors are delighted when their book is considered a “trade book” because they understand that a trade book is more likely to show up in bookstores—but precious few understand what a publisher must do to get the book there.

What exactly is a “trade” book? It is a book sold to retailers at a “trade discount,” of about 50 percent of the retail price. For instance, a book priced at $30 like The Anointed but sold at a trade discount would earn the publisher $15 per copy. Amazon sells The Anointed for $20, probably make around $5 per copy.  Compare this to the hardcover version of The Oracles of Science, selling on Amazon for $99 with no discount. Nobody is buying that for their geeky nephew’s birthday.

Since the typical lifetime sale for academic books falls well below 1,000 copies, selling them at a trade discount is often self-destructive.

The trade market complicates the publishing process. The progress of a book from a publisher to a library is plain and simple: A library can buy it directly from a publisher, but more likely via a blanket order to a library wholesaler. Once a book is sold, it stays sold. In this system, the wholesaler is the only middleman; little can go wrong and costs are relatively low. A trade book, on the other hand, moves from publisher to wholesaler to retailer to buyer—who often is buying the book as a gift for someone else, who may not want it. If unsold at wholesale or retail, books loop back to the publisher as returns. A line becomes a circuit, opportunities for damage and error increase, books that seem to be sold may not be, and transaction costs double and triple.

In many cases publishers overestimate the demand for a book and have to “remainder” it at a large discount. (“Remaindered” books—which are very common—are often seen in huge bins at bookstores with gigantic discounts from the list price. ) My book Saving Darwin had an initial print run in hardback of 15,000 which ran ahead of demand. So HarperOne reluctantly had to introduce a huge discount to reduce their supply to acceptable levels.  Even now the hardback sells for less than the paperback on Amazon.

Fortunately, Saving Adam was not categorized as a “scholarly” book. This was intentional, however, as I no longer have any interest in writing scholarly books with print runs of 250 that are sold only to libraries.

Today’s mail brought my first of three checks from Beacon Press—not to be be confused with Beacon Hill Press!—for my forthcoming book, Saving Adam. Although I knew the check would arrive eventually, it was still nice to get it.  I am amazed though, at how long it took.  It was back in the late summer—August 11— when I got the email message from my agent that Beacon Press had made me an offer.  Here is how it worked and why it took so long.

The offer from Beacon was a second offer, matching a slightly earlier one from Palgrave Macmillan. I was pretty happy to have two offers but had to make a decision of course. My agent set up conference calls with the individuals at each publishing house who would be my editors so I could get a feel for what it would like to work with them.  This step was important to me, as I learned long ago that an active, engaged editor is a writer’s best friend.  Some of my books, especially Species of Origins and Oracles of Science received no real editing beyond a final stage of copy editing to correct grammar mistakes and make sure the footnotes were in the right form.  My editors at those publishers contributed almost nothing to the quality of the final project in terms of the writing.  In contrast, my editors for Saving Darwin, The Language of Science & Faith, and The Anointed made meaningful contributions.  Joyce Seltzer—one of the most acclaimed editors in the country—edited The Anointed, and she pushed Randall Stephens and I very hard, chopping thousands of words and keeping us focused. Her voice still echoes in my head: “On every page, as you write, keep asking yourself: ‘What question am I addressing for the reader?’” 

My conversations with the editors at Palgrave and Beacon went really well and I concluded that I couldn’t go wrong in either case.  In the final analysis I went with Beacon because the editor there, Amy Caldwell, had some really creative ideas that took the book in a slightly different direction that I thought was more interesting. In particular she pushed me to use the story of Adam to show how conservative evangelicals had gradually marginalized themselves over the past two centuries either by hanging on to a literal reading of the Adam story in the face of evidence to the contrary; or by developing implausible interpretations of the Adam story that, while compatible with new evidence, twisted the Biblical story beyond recognition.  This editorial suggestion provide a sort of “spine” that would run through the book, holding things together.

So I went with Beacon.

Next post will pick up the story here.

What difference do teachers make?

I have always wondered over the years how much I mattered to my students. Certainly students learn a lot in college and leave way ahead of where they arrived. And they learn things while taking your classes. But they would learn many of those things anyway. I recall some of my classes that were taught by uninspired deadwood, or incomprehensible Olympians, where class time was spent wondering why I was there and all the learning happened at my desk. For practical purposes, those classes were taught by the authors of my textbooks.

On the other hand, there are professors who motivate students to learn by inspiring them, or putting challenges in front of them that they would not embrace otherwise. Whatever role I play in the successes of my students, I take pride in their achievements.  So I want to give a shout-out to Dave Hicks for getting an op-ed published in the Washington Post; my role was a bit of encouragement and some editorial input. 

Dave’s piece was a nice meditation on the generations and how they see the problems of the world.

“While the pragmatism of our elders has largely benefited society as we know it, it seems to operate without the youthful creativity that once inspired it. My generation blames these leaders for today’s problems. We look at poverty, violence, suffering, and see little more than failed systems propagated by conventional leadership. We are wary skeptics and impassioned critics. We are enemies of the same Enemy, working together to imagine alternatives to the way things are.

And while we may be impractical, we are good at dreaming. We see the value in opening our minds to what can look like pipe dreams to others. Sometimes we appear naïve, because we are naïve. But neither school, nor the larger institutional contexts of our lives as we grow up, should be designed to convince us that such naïveté is wholly a bad thing.”

Here is the link to the entire piece:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-leadership/what-happened-to-changing-the-world/2012/02/28/gIQAXFm8fR_story.html

I also want to give a thumbs-up to Jamee Eslicker who I would describe as “much taller in print than in person.” Appropriately enraged as she uncovers the connections that exist between so-called biblical authority and racism—both present and historical—Jamee has penned a powerful and prophetic piece, with this provocative conclusion:

“I don’t claim to even begin to understand the beautifully confusing mystery that is my faith. However, I think I can say that racism and slavery is not what God saw when He looked out and saw that it was good.”

The full piece can be found on her blog: http://jameediane.wordpress.com/