How not to write a book

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a simple photo of my soon-to-be-launched book, Prophecy Shock, sitting on a coffee table on social media with the headline: It’s Finished.

That post got a far bigger response than I expected – a lot of it from people who know I’ve been working on this project for years and who were genuinely wondering if I was ever going to actually produce a final draft.

That suggestion – that I’ve been dragging the chain – is valid. While there has never been a time when I’ve considered throwing in the towel – there has certainly been lots of self-bargaining over how long the project should take.

Some of that has come from an unhealthy perfectionism that obsesses over whether a comma is in the wrong place or whether the word ‘strides’ is a better replacement for ‘walks fast’. But most of that procrastination has come from a crisis of confidence about what happens after I push publish. Not because I doubt what I’ve written – indeed, this is the most sure I’ve been about anything I’ve done in my entire life – but because I’m acutely aware of the size of the mountain I’m trying to climb and the enormity of what my book asks of the reader.

A while back someone asked me if the delay had anything to do with reputation. I write and speak a lot on political and economic issues, and I’m aware that stepping publicly into the world of Bible prophecy is, to put it mildly, an unusual combination. But no: reputational risk is the least of my concerns. If the cost of publishing Prophecy Shock is that I lose some access or credibility in certain secular spaces, that’s a price I’m entirely willing to pay. Politics is loud, urgent, and endlessly consuming – but it’s also transient. Today’s crisis is tomorrow’s footnote and the subject of this book has occupied my thinking far more deeply and far more consistently than any policy debate or political cycle.

So if this work matters in the way that I believe it does, it will still be speaking to its readers long after todays news cycles have been reduced to dust.

Certainly, some of my hesitation has come from personal questions around whether I’ll be taken seriously in the prophecy space. I don’t come from a prophecy ‘tradition’. I’m not known in prophecy circles. I’m not one of the ‘names’ that people quote when they’re talking about this topic – people with bigger platforms, longer résumés, and far louder voices in this space.

So I can understand that people might think “Sure, he knows a lot about Israel and Jewish history – but what does he know about prophecy”?

Actually, a lot. That Jewish and Israeli knowledge that I draw from – and which people appear to respect and respond to – that comes directly from my work on prophecy over the past 40 years. The same care, depth of research, and insistence on internal coherence that has shaped my writing on those topics has shaped my book. If you’ve read my work in those areas and recognised the effort to be fair, grounded, and rigorous – that same approach runs through every page of Prophecy Shock. This isn’t a departure into speculation or whimsy. It’s the same method, applied to a subject most people only ever encounter through inherited frameworks and second-hand assumptions.

But what I’ve ended up with is not just another prophecy book.
It’s not a fresh coat of paint on the same old frameworks.
It’s not a remix of popular end-times teaching with a few tweaks.

It’s a completely different way of reading the prophetic material – and the conclusions it leads to are, frankly, extraordinary and … confronting. Even for me, and I wrote the thing.

So that potential for massive disruption is where most of my hesitation has come from. Not doubt about whether the claims of the book stack up (they absolutely do), but an awareness of how unsettling they are to long-held assumptions. This book doesn’t just challenge one group of people. It quietly unsettles three.

First: Jewish readers.
This book is, in a very real sense, about the Jewish people. It radically recentres them in the story of prophecy – not as a theological footnote, but as the core reference point. And yet I’m very aware that many Jewish readers will see ‘Christian Author’ and give it a hard pass. I completely understand that instinct.

All I can say, humbly, is that any Jewish reader who has read, and valued, my past work – and is willing to look past the cover – will find, in Prophecy Shock, satisfying explanations for historic and contemporary events that may have appeared entirely random in the past.

Second: committed prophecy believers.
I’m very aware that there are people who have spent years – sometimes decades – immersed in particular prophetic frameworks. These views aren’t casual opinions; they’re deeply held convictions, often woven into personal faith journeys. I haven’t approached that lightly. I once held many of those views myself and this book certainly doesn’t mock those traditions. But it does ask whether some of the most popular frameworks actually fit the clues we’ve been given in Scripture as well as we think they do. My hope is that some might be willing to consider that there may be a closer, more coherent fit than the models most of us inherited.

Third: people of no faith at all.
This is, in some ways, the hardest group to reach. Why would someone who doesn’t believe in prophecy read a book about prophecy?

And yet, this is precisely the group that often says: “Show me evidence. Show me something testable.”

This book is built around dates and timelines that can be checked with nothing more exotic than a calculator. You don’t have to start by believing the Bible is inspired to recognise when patterns line up with real-world events in ways that are, at the very least, intellectually provocative.

So yes – this has been a long road. Longer than I planned. And the delay hasn’t been about uncertainty over the work itself. It’s been about recognising the size of the conversation this book steps into, and the fact that it will unsettle people I respect, disagree with people I admire, and challenge assumptions many of us have carried for decades.

But the long wait is over and the pre-promotion proper starts this weekend.

I’m not going to give away the hook or the angle of that promotion just yet, except to say this: in the same way that the book itself starts from a place most people wouldn’t expect, the pre-launch campaign is a fitting homage to that. It takes a counter-intuitive approach to promotion – which, in hindsight, is probably the only honest way to launch a book that takes a counter-intuitive approach to prophecy.

Let’s just say it won’t look like a standard “countdown to launch” campaign.

So – what now? If you’re even mildly curious, you can register your interest in the book from today by going to www.prophecyshock.com and inputting your email address at the bottom of the page. This will subscribe you to my personal newsletter and allow me to send you a short email a couple of days before the launch toward the end of March, letting you know that the book is about to drop and where and when it will be available.

That’s it. No commitment to buy anything. No pressure, no hype train – just a heads-up.

After five years of work, this feels like the right way to do it: quietly, honestly, and without pretending that this book is for everyone.