That One Time When I Accidentally Wrote Someone Else’s Book

The bizarre adventures of a fledgling author who had a book published that he was never meant to write

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash

Once upon a time, I wrote a book I should never have written.

I don’t simply mean that I wish in retrospect that I hadn’t written the book—though that’s true as well.

What I mean is that someone else was actually supposed to write the book, but I ended up writing it instead.

In my own name.

Which also happened to be the name of the person who was supposed to write the book.

Mostly.

It’s complicated, so please allow me to explain.

The Day I Thought I Was a Big Deal

This unlikely series of events began in the year 2000, when I was a youth minister in Tulsa and the church secretary transferred a call to my office.

“Hello,” the voice on the other end of the line seemed uncertain. “Is this Timothy Jones?”

“Yes, it is,” was my reply. I was finalizing the details of a spring break mission trip to St. Louis, and I assumed this must be a father calling to verify what his child would need. Or maybe it was another screen-printing company wanting our youth ministry to sign a contract for custom shirts.

“You’re the Timothy Jones who’s an author, correct?”

The caller was clearly not an anxious parent.

I was beginning to suspect he might not be a t-shirt vendor either.

“Yes,” I hesitated. “Yes, I am.”

My first book Christian History Made Easy had been released the previous year. The book hadn’t exactly been a best seller. At that particular time, my brief introduction to the history of the church hadn’t even sold the entirety of the first printing, which had been limited to a run of five hundred print-on-demand copies. I steeled myself for a critique of some aspect of the book’s content that this one-of-fewer-than-five-hundred purchasers had not appreciated.

“Oh, good!” the voice on the other end of the line responded in a friendly tone, and I breathed an inner sigh of relief. “I’ve been trying to find you.”

This was strange, but not unexpected. Less than a year had passed since I made the transition from the pastor of a small church in rural Missouri to an associate minister at this mid-sized congregation in Oklahoma. Maybe the caller was someone who had met me in Missouri.

But the truth was stranger than fiction.

In some ways, the truth was even stranger than nonfiction.

The voice continued: “I have a publication agreement to send to you, to see if you might be interested in writing a book for us.”

It had taken me almost three years of pitching my previous book to land a contract with Rose Publishing, a small producer of charts and pamphlets with an interest in pressing their way into the educational book market. Now, I was suddenly being offered a contract I had never even requested.

It seemed too good to be true.

And it was.

I just didn’t know that yet.

“If I could get your address, I’ll send you the contract so that you can look it over,” he finished without waiting for me to respond.

Stunned, I recited my mailing address to this unknown editorial benefactor and hung up the telephone, not expecting the contract ever to arrive.

But arrive it did, with a packet of marketing information and the promise of an advance that was almost twenty-five times larger than what I’d received for my previous book. The title of the projected book was Prayers Jesus Prayed, and the publisher was positioning the book to tap into the same market as Philip Yancey’s recent book The Bible Jesus Read. I returned the signed contract and, two weeks later, we deposited a check for the first half of the advance, which paid off our aging Ford Aspire and most of my wife’s student loans.

Then, I was assigned an editor who had most recently served as Max Lucado’s assistant for the books He Still Moves Stones and When God Whispers Your Name.

A multi-thousand dollar advance.

My book going head-to-head with Philip Yancey.

Me and Max Lucado sharing the same editor, probably on the verge of becoming besties.

I was now officially a big deal.

Or so I thought.

My first hint that something had gone wrong happened in my first call with Max Lucado’s editor Liz Heaney. It was like she was picking up in the middle of a conversation in which I had been on another planet during the first half.

She mentioned my work with Christianity Today. She told me how much she enjoyed my discussions of prayer and finding spiritual friends. I stumbled through the conversation, stunned by what I was hearing. When we turned to the book that I was writing, she began to describe processes that I had never considered or experienced, and I was too confused to say much of anything.

The Awkward Realization that I Was Not and Never Will Be a Big Deal

The Internet still required a telephone line back then, and Google wasn't nearly as streamlined as it is now. And so, the World Wide Web wasn’t where I turned to discover what was happening. Instead, I headed to Mardel Christian Store on 31st Street in Tulsa.

There, I found the answers that I didn’t want to know.

There was another “Timothy Jones.”

He was a big deal.

I was not.

The other Timothy Jones had been an editor at Christianity Today. Before that, he had acquired religious books for Ballantine. This Timothy Jones had authored a stack of books for major publishers about prayer and friendship and angels. Most recently, he had penned Awake My Soul: Practical Spirituality for Busy People for Doubleday.

I thought I was a big deal.

As it turned out, I wasn’t a big deal.

I was just the wrong Timothy Jones.

To this day, I still do not know how a representative from Servant Publications located me, and I have no idea what precipitated the confusion. I was so new to writing and publishing that I didn’t recognize how implausible this entire scenario was.

What I did know even then was that I was in over my head, and I needed to turn my confusion into a confession.

During my next conversation with Liz, I told her what she had already figured out by this point: I was not the Timothy Jones she was looking for. To her credit, she recognized I had been innocent and oblivious to the error. And she said, “Well, contracts have already been signed and countersigned, and you already have the advance. So there’s nothing we can do about it. Let’s just do the best we can with what we’ve got.”

And we did.

And the best I could do was not great.

At that point, I hadn’t yet started my doctorate. I lacked the writing skills and the resources to know how to write well about the prayers Jesus prayed. To make matters worse, my theology was still in flux. I had been trained by the last of the liberal faculty at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary during my Master of Divinity degree. As a result, I had spent the past six years flirting with process theology, open theism, and transreligious spirituality. I had only recently arrived at a firm confidence in the inerrancy of Scripture and in the orthodox view of God, and there were myriads of areas in which my theology was still developing.

When planning the book, I should have stuck with the prayers that Jesus actually spoke in the canonical Scriptures, but I didn’t. Instead, I tried to theorize prayers he might have prayed in the Jewish tradition; then, I attempted to retell key scenes in the life of Jesus. The result was a messy mishmash that was poorly researched and late to the publisher.

Servant Publications released the book as Prayers Jesus Prayed: Experiencing the Father through the Prayers of His Son in 2002. Twenty months after the book was published, Servant went out of business.

Which didn’t surprise me.

Business growth doesn't go well when you go around handing out contracts to the wrong people.

How a Bad Book Got Worse

Even after the demise of Servant Publications, the book’s fate did not improve.

After Servant went out of business, a messianic Jewish publisher acquired the book. The editor of the new edition of the book informed me that she would be making a few tweaks for their audience. I agreed to the acquisition, unwisely assuming that the tweaks would indeed be minor.

When I received the edited manuscript, her “few tweaks” turned out to include converting every proper name from the Bible into a transliterated Hebrew term, alongside a laundry list of other idiosyncrasies that she introduced into the book.

I repeatedly asked for these changes to be reversed or at least reduced, but my protests ended up being completely ignored. And so, in 2005, a book that was already substandard was released under the title Praying Like the Jew, Jesus in a form that is not only substandard but also embarrassing and confusing and weird and worse than anything I might actually have written. My name remains on the cover of this edition, but this book is not my work.

And all of this happened because I once signed a book contract not knowing it was never meant for me.

Before this time, I had gone by my first and last name, occasionally with my middle initial. From the moment that the first edition of this errant book went to press, I have always identified myself by all three of my names.

And so, if you’ve ever wondered why I go by “Timothy Paul Jones” and not just “Timothy Jones,” now you know.

And, please, don’t buy either of these books.

_____

After this was published, I was able to locate the Timothy Jones who was supposed to have written the book, and we had a delightful email conversation. You can learn more about the real Timothy Jones here: http://www.revtimothyjones.com