Not publishing Song of Songs for Singles was simply not an option. As I continued studying the Song of Songs, I became more and more convinced that a book like this needed to be published. While a plethora of books have been written to married couples on the Song of Solomon, none existed for singles. When rejecting my manuscript, one publisher even took the time to give me some pointers and encourage me to publish it because they saw its value. After telling him about Song of Songs for Singles, another colleague was exasperated, saying, “That is who it is written to.” This colleague has a PhD in Old Testament and wrote his dissertation on the Song of Songs. Repeatedly, I found scholarly literature claiming something to the effect: “The daughters of Jerusalem might have been placeholders for young woman of the society to be taught about love.”[1] Yes, the daughters of Jerusalem are unmarried young women. As a conservative evangelical father of five children, the Song of Songs needs to be taught to our children. As I continued speaking and teaching the Song of Songs, more people started asking me questions. A book needed to be published which would instruct the next generation of Christian young people what God’s Word teaches concerning love, marriage, and intimacy.

Not Publishing Song of Songs for Singles was simply not an option.

Having managed Faith Bookstore for over ten years and already published one book, I was aware of some of the difficulties in book publishing. I read Berrett–Koehler Publishers’ The Ten Awful Truths about Book Publishing several years ago. Self-publishing has flooded the book market. The industry is in decline. If people read at all, they read blogs and news articles. Many would rather watch a movie than read a book. Furthermore, the overhead of publishing a good book has increased due to various challenges (e.g., a diverse marketplace with electronic, audio, and print books; pressure from accessible online sources like blogs; etc.). Publishers can’t afford to invest resources into projects that will flop, so they work with agents who help them find quality authors and resources.  What this amounts to, however, is that an agent won’t talk to you unless you have 25k social media followers. It is true, we buy books written by people we know and trust. If you don’t have much of a platform, you are toast. Furthermore, most of the major Christian publishers are capitulating to a worldly view of fairness because those are the books that sell. Who wants to read a book by another white guy? At the 2023 Evangelical Theological Society meeting, InterVarsity Press (IVP) had a huge banner promoting books written by women. IVP knows that their constituency wants books written by women, so they publish female Bible scholars.