Into the world of publishing!

 It began purely as mental exercise to work through my own thoughts and loss.  My mother had recently died quite suddenly in January 2022, and about the same time I was starting to teach a Bible Study on Revelation.  I began writing out in prose form the outline that I had used to teach this Biblical book.  I was in essence fleshing out the bare bones that an outline represents.  I had no thought of publishing, no idea how long it would be, I just wrote.  It was more an effort in self-therapy than any sort of intentional book project. Some nights I wrote for a couple of hours, others just a half hour or so, and some nights nothing.  I had no thought that this might be something that I would someday publish so I did not footnote as I went.  

As I went along, the project took on a bit of a life of its own.  It had been some years since I had written anything "serious" or "heavy" and I found myself very gradually shifting my writing style.  What began in a relatively informal style became more and more formal.  I went back, and re-worked sentences to make them more formal.  Each week's session became, in essence, a "chapter."  When it was all said and done I had 115 pages on a standard Word document.  It was too long and represented too much effort just to ignore or toss aside.  

After I had sort of "finished" it I e-mailed it to my mother-in-law, a retired Presbyterian minister thinking she might like to read it.  She enthusiastically told me I had to publish it.  I knew nothing of publishing.  I also knew that what I had was not a technical commentary of the book.  Furthermore, I am an "unknown," and as such the well-known publishers of Christian books- Eerdmans, Zondervan, etc. wouldn't even give me a glance.  Nonetheless, I began tweaking, revising, and tweaking a bit more.  I added in a proper "Bibliography" page even though I had not footnoted it.  I created a map for the seven churches of Revelation.  I added few more charts or graphics.  Then came a proper foreword.  A couple of English teachers in one of my churches agreed to proofread for me.  

The publishing aspect still loomed.  Small publishing houses were/are an option, but I had no desire to keep boxes of books in the basement and then have to be responsible for taking orders and shipping them out.  That led to the "self-publishing" route.  There are any number of different companies that do this, and after some researching the options, I ended up settling on KDP/Amazon.  If I'm going to actually publish, that means ISBN number(s) and obtaining a legal copyright from the Library of Congress, so I filled out the necessary forms on-line and plunked down the $$ to take care of the legal necessities.  Next came the rather daunting task of formatting, to convert original 8.5" X 11" document into a much smaller size in this case 5" X 8" to make a good size paperback.  After I spent some time myself, I paid someone else to do this tedious work.  My awesome wife painted something on canvas to serve as a cover background.  All of this I converted to PDF and then uploaded to DKP/Amazon.  

Now the finished product Impending Doom or Incredible Promise:  A Study of the Book of Revelation is up on Amazon!  At the encouragement of my wife (did I mention that she's awesome?) I wrote Bible study resources so small groups could use the book as the basis for a study and will soon have short video segments to accompany a small group session.  I have very little experience or knowledge in website design, but my awesome daughter is pretty skilled at it and put together a website to "house" the resources.  

I never went into this with any thought of making money as an author.  Trust me I won't be!  But, I do hope that what I've done will do two things.  First, I hope that it will help people get beyond fear of Revelation.  It's a powerful book, and one that is a worthy close to the canon of scripture.  Second, I would love to think that other churches might find it useful.  The website for the Bible study resources is https://preacher-dan.square.site.  This has a link to order the book from Amazon, or to go straight to Amazon the link is:  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CQJ41TX3.  Pick up a copy of it from Amazon, go to the website and download the resources.  I hope that this will help open up this amazing and powerful book for you.