Some Urgent Publishing Work

I had initially planned to continue the topic of areas of NT study which need investigation, but some urgent publishing work has come up which has taken precedence. I thought it would be informative to let you know what that was.

As you can tell from my bio, I have a book coming out soon with Kregel. Co-authored with my good friend Jeff Miller, it is titled A New Reader's Lexicon of the Greek New Testament. It is a specialized lexicon for the NT which lists in canonical order all words that occur 49 times or less. It is designed to help people as they read through the text. Instead of stopping to look up unfamiliar words in a lexicon, the reader can simply have our book open to the passage they are reading and check unfamiliar words as they proceed. We weren't the first to come up with this idea. Sakae Kubo published his Reader's Greek-English Lexicon back in 1975. We simply felt the time had come for a new iteration of the concept.

The urgent work I referred to is the arrival on my desk of the copy-edited manuscript of our book. Back in September of last year Jeff and I delivered to Kregel a Word document with all our data. Once an author does this, the publisher will then take the Word document and work it over, checking it for errors, consistency, clarity, etc. Once they have done that, they send it back to the authors for a final review of the content. So our job is in the next two weeks to go through approximately 600 pages of text to answer some questions from our editor about content and doublecheck it ourselves. This is the last chance to look for any errors and fix them before the book is laid out into the exact pages for publishing into hard copy. We are pretty confident that our manuscript is in good shape, but nevertheless we have to work it over ourselves to make sure. There is almost no way to avoid a 100% error-free book; there's just too much data. But we need to make sure that we catch the vast majority of them.

So for the next two weeks Jeff and I will spend every possible free minute reading the manuscript, checking data, and fixing any problems we see. It's actually pretty exciting, since this means that we are one step closer to holding the final product in our hands this summer.