A new book has hit the online shelves – Beyond Belief: What if Jesus Wrote His Own Creed? by Russ Hinckley.
This project was an editing referral from Susan Hinckley, from the At Last She Said It podcast – Russ is her husband. She told me about it when I met her in Utah last May, and he followed up with an email about a month later.
From the first sentence, I was intrigued. “It isn’t clear to me that Jesus was trying to start a church. A movement, yes; a church, no.”
Excuse me? Jesus and NO church?
Well, no, not “no church,” but Jesus was working within the church that was already there, not necessarily trying to start a new one. Teaching an advanced version of faith, most definitely.
And that’s how we got going. We did the editing rounds between June and October 2023. It’s easy to work on a book and do multiple rounds of editing when you support the premise and believe it’s presented in an interesting way. This checked all the boxes for me.
And I’m grateful Russ took a chance on me with the publishing, because that took A LOT longer than we thought it would. He wanted to self-publish. I wanted to learn the tech of how to self-publish but had never done it before. I was upfront that I didn’t know what I was doing but wanted to try, and we ran with it. I used Adobe InDesign, a lot of YouTube tutorials, a lot of texts and emails to various people asking for advice, and a lot of swear words when things didn’t work over and over and over. It took over two months for the production after the manuscript was fully edited, when we thought it would be about two weeks.
But it’s available now! At the link above!
Thank you to:
- Andrew Heiss and Jaida Hancock for scooting me along with InDesign.
- Mindy Sebastian for the cover – both the photography of that cool trail, and the design.
- Ashli Carnicelli and Jeff Andersen for the previews and promotional blurbs on the back.
- Russ Hinckley for the really nice acknowledgement in the book, and his patience while I learned how to MAKE a book, not just edit one.
