I have published a book! Across Sacred Thresholds: A OneSpirit Anthology is now available to buy from all good bookstores, as long as they are Amazon.
A couple of years ago, I submitted a piece to a planned anthology of interfaith ministers to showcase the breadth of our ministry and the work that we do. This was organised by OneSpirit Ministers in Connection, a CIC of which I have been a director for several years. I had planned to resign from my role this year to free up time for other NED roles, but during that period, the whole board of directors took the decision that OSMIC had served its purpose, and we decided to wind up the organisation.
While considering disposal of the assets, I inquired what had happened with the Book Project, as it was known internally. It turned out that the submissions were sitting in an email folder and, for reasons, had not been edited and no-one really knew what to do with them.
Not wanting all the effort that had gone in so far to be wasted, definitely wanting my own submission to get published, and believing this would be a relatively simple task-and-finish job, I took over the Book Project as project manager. I’ve never edited a book for publication before, and it was certainly a learning curve. Although the use of AI has made the process of copyediting many times easier than it used to be, only humans can make decisions on style, formatting, and themes. It ultimately took twice as long as I had originally projected, although it was still only six months in the end.
The original intention of the Book Project was to create a book based on the elements, which is why so many of the submissions are themed on fire, water, earth, or air. However, on reviewing the material I inherited, this ultimately did not work – although some submissions covered all the elements, the balance was heavily lopsided towards earth, and some submissions were of previously completed work and were unrelated. I therefore arranged it to have a beginning, middle, and end, with the various formats of essays, poems, ceremonies, and photographs evenly distributed in a complementary order.
With all the other activities of OSMIC ended or passed onto other groups, all of the directors of OSMIC put time and effort into making this happen, so we are all jointly editors of this book. I handled the text, Sass managed the design, and Sarah managed the email correspondence with all the contributors. After I’d done the initial sweep in Scrivener, we then spent several months editing pieces that needed reorienting or tidying for publication, obtaining consents and higher-res images, and then a couple month laying it out to meet Kindle Direct Publishing guidelines (which took five goes! Imagine how we felt when we ordered our first galley copies and there was a thick white stripe at the bottom because we’d calculated the bleed wrong XD).
With pieces by 26 interfaith ministers ordained over the last twenty years, this book covers a wide spectrum of traditions, media and descriptions of the kind of work that we do. From essays on spirituality to artwork to individualised ceremonies, you really will get a sense of why interfaith ministry is a thing. Shout-out to Reverend Chloe Greenwood, a friend and colleague who, entirely unaware of this project, ran into me at Sacred Arts camp in May while I was in full editing mode, asked how I was, and was promptly press-ganged into writing a piece for me on a subject I thought was missing, which went in just under the wire while we were finishing off the design stage.
The book is set up in my KDP account, and I have committed to passing all funds raised once a year when I do my taxes, to the OneSpirit Interfaith Foundation for their student bursary fund. The price has been set at the minimum level to qualify for KDP Expanded Distribution, to allow the book to be added to various global catalogues and enable institutions and bookstores to buy copies. This means that if you buy the book from Amazon, the OSIF bursary fund will make approximately £3, and 99p for institutional orders under Expanded Distribution.
This is currently only a physical paperback — formatting a book as an EPUB from a PDF is not a simple task for a work with full page colour photographs, so it will follow at an unspecified time and date when technology and time allows.
I don’t expect to sell many copies (although at the time of writing, we are 75th for “Spiritual Rituals” on Amazon), but it was the principle more than anything. Most of the challenge was working with material we hadn’t compiled that had been submitted for a different book managed by a different editor and wrangling it into something with its own internal coherence and focus – once we got the hang of it, dare I say, book editing turned out to be quite fun? I did say to Sass, after we’d finally gotten approval from KDP, that we should do more books together. She thought so too. Watch this space!
Check out Across Sacred Thresholds here.