When I began writing the book I had no idea of what the title would be or even what the content would be. I knew God wanted me to write and so I made a commitment to write as often as I could. I have a fulltime job as an insurance broker so all my writing took place in the evenings and on the weekends. I began by studying the life of Moses and his relationship with God, and making an outline of all my thoughts and studies, Being Jewish, I felt a connection with Moses since I had been hearing about him since my days in hebrew school as a young boy.
When I look back on the three and a half years it took me to write what was ultimately two books, even though I thought it was one, what stands out for me is that I had no goal for completion. I kept writng a little bit each day I could and I wasn’t conccerned how long it would take to finish. In fact, I didn’t have a planned end at all. Many of my friends would ask me when I would finally be done writing and my reply was always the same, I don’t know. I felt a peace about just writing and leaving the rest to God to sort out.
I wrote for three years before I even went back over my work to develop a theme for the book. In fact, after three years of writing I remember praying and asking God to help me put the book together in a way that flowed. Up until that time, it wasn’t a book at all, not in the least. Within a few months though, it all came together into one very long book! I did feel a sense of accomplishment once I submitted the book to a publisher, and I was happy it was done, but throughout the writing process I was very content to be patient and wait to see what God would do with my writings.
Since this was the first book I ever wrote, I decided to only approach self publishing companies, I felt my chances to get a royalty publisher to publish the book were very remote and would take much more time than if I self published. With a self publisher, the author pays all the expenses of getting the book published but retains full control and ownership of the work. A royalty publisher absorbs the cost of publishing, owns the rights of the book and pays a per book fee called a royalty to the author for each book sold. Within the first week of the publisher reviewing my submitted manuscript they told me that I needed to split my writing in two. I had submitted 193,000 words and they wanted the book to be about 80,000 words! Through considerable help from my editor, who did a great job, my original manuscript was carved into two books, the first one published in July, 2008.
With a commitment to writing almost everyday for an average of an hour or so each day and a passion to serve God in this way, two books were birthed and I was off to the races of getting the first book published.
