Yup, it’s happened again.

The last time around, it was Life after Life by both Kate Atkinson and Jill McCorkle. This time the shared title is Killing Jesus, which you’ll find on book covers by both Stephen Mansfield tomorrow and Bill O’Reilly in the fall.

In the first one to hit bookshelves, Mansfield, a prolific religious historian, details the machinations and political intrigue surrounding the death of Jesus. His version of Killing Jesus is subtitled The Unknown Conspiracy Behind the World’s Most Famous Execution.

It mirrors the title of Bill O’Reilly’s Killing Jesus: A History, the third in a series of homicidal blockbusters that began with Killing Lincoln in 2011 and continued with Killing Kennedy in 2012. Sticking with his winning formula — those first two have sold more than 6 million copies combined — O’Reilly once again shares writing duties with Martin Dugard, whom he calls “the most honest historian I know.”

Mansfield’s publisher learned of the title overlap very late in the process, and chose not to change the title. “Stephen’s book was conceived long before there was any news about an O’Reilly book,” reports Worthy Publishing President Byron Willliamson. “We were uploading digital files to the printer for Killing Jesus when we first heard [about the title duplication].”

Why change it? The title sharing may have augmented sales of both Life after Life novels mentioned above, and Mansfield’s numbers are likewise apt to benefit from a little authorship confusion.

Now let me tell you about a little book I’m planning to write called The Bible…

You can’t really eat everything you want after 6—can you?

Well, you can’t eat [nonstop] from 6 to midnight, that’s for sure. But you can eat pretty much everything you want for dinner. What I’ve found, and I’ve been doing this for 6 years, is that you sort of naturally moderate the size of your dinner because you’re learning moderation, in a way, and you’re learning restraint.

What do you think is the key to why this plan works?

The key really is delayed gratification, giving yourself the opportunity to eat really, really well during the day, but in a disciplined, mindful manner, and then letting it go at night. It’s not magic, but it’s kind of the best of both worlds.

And you tend to encourage a lot of flexibility in how to approach VB6—as you do with your recipes. Why not be more firm about how people should approach the diet? 

You know, I’m not here to be God or anybody’s mother, I’m just here to say if you eat a largely plant-based diet and are pretty strict about it before 6 you’re probably going to see improved health and weight loss.

If you have to have milk in your coffee in the morning or say you’ve gotta have a sandwich for lunch — these are minor things.

When did you decide you wanted to write a book and share your part-time veganism with the world?

After five years I started to think, “This really works.” Because enough of my friends had tried it and they’d call and say, “Hey I can do this. This is working.” And I’d hear from strangers, too. I’d been doing it long enough that I actually believed in it — it’s not just a quirky little thing.

Do you have any specific advice for people who are older about trying it?

I’m 63. It’s doable. You’re only changing your diet for two-thirds of the time. I mean, do you want to live a longer, higher quality life or not? Some people say, “I don’t care, I’m going to eat my cheeseburgers.” Those are not the people this book is addressed to. Obviously.

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Maybe we would actually read the books if we knew we could ask those questions of the authors themselves — which today we could easily do. In the flesh, via Skype or speaker phone, lots of authors, from first-timers to established writers, are happily joining living-room discussions of their own works to explain a character’s motivation, or what the title really means, or why so-and-so had to die.

Some writers get around more than others. Wiley Cash (left), author of a gripping debut novel about a tragedy in a small Southern town, has virtually visited more than 30 book clubs since A Land More Kind Than Home was published last year.

“It’s fun,” Cash says. “Where else can you get in front of an audience that’s guaranteed to have read your book?” On his website, Cash invites readers to send him questions. Or, he adds, “I’d be honored to meet with your reading group and discuss these questions in person.”

Cash, who lives in West Virginia, claims not to mind answering a few of the same predictable queries each time he speaks to a club. (Before you ask, though: Yes, Wiley Cash is his real name.) But he admits that some writer friends think his doting on book clubbers is a waste of time. “They say, ‘Why are you doing this?’ I tell them, ‘This is my first book, and people are actually reading it — I’d be a fool not to take advantage of that.’” Once a book has been a success with some clubs, says Cash, word spreads and “other book clubs tend to embrace it as well.”

Jennifer Hart, group marketing director for William Morrow, Cash’s publisher, says, “It helps sales for authors to connect directly to book clubs.” Hart points to Adriana Trigiani (The Shoemaker’s Wife) as “one of the first authors to do this in a big way. It helped make her the New York Times bestselling author she is today.” According to Trigiani’s website, she addresses three to five book clubs a week. You can e-mail her assistant to set up a talk; if you’re in the New York City area, Trigiani might even come chat in person.

Even top sellers like Gillian Flynn, whose mystery-thriller Gone Girl has been riding the charts since last summer, works the book club call-ins (maybe to defend that disappointing ending?) when she’s not busy writing or traveling.

One super-snaggable author is Brian Freeman, an affable guy in the Twin Cities area whose most recent thriller is Spilled Blood. “Honestly,” says Freeman, “It’s fascinating to discover how readers react to different components of a book.

I learn a lot about my own writing when I’m chatting with a book club.” Freeman usually talks to groups by speaker phone. A few times he has climbed out of bed in the middle of the night to address club meetings in Australia. “It’s such an important way of reaching out to the reader community these days.”

So book clubs, take note: If your readers go for psychological thrillers, Freeman would love to talk about his. Really, he insists: “It would be fun to have more readers contact me.”

Photo credit: Tiffany B. Davis

Also of Interest

Browsing for your next great read you may soon discover two books with the same alluring title: Life After Life. One is by Kate Atkinson (from Reagan Arthur/Little, Brown, in April), the other by Jill McCorkle (Algonquin, this month). What’s unusual is not only that books with the same name would be released within two months of each other, but also that both happen to be wonderful. They’re set to share top billing as the American Booksellers Association’s Indie Next Pick in April.

This title-sharing is not ideal for the two publishers’ publicity departments — the last thing they want is consumer confusion. (Unless you happen to be promoting Ruta Sepetys, whose young adult novel called Between Shades of Gray, about a Lithuanian girl during the Stalin-led genocide, was on shelves when E.L. James’s kinky Fifty Shades of Grey mania hit. Memorable mistakes must have been made.)

It was, alas, too late to change the name of either Life After Life — not that the publishers were eager to do so. Little, Brown’s publisher, Reagan Arthur, explained that they found out about McCorkle’s book title in October, and “in addition to liking the title as much as I’m sure Algonquin and Jill McCorkle do, we couldn’t move our publication date because of many plans already in place, including the near-simultaneous publication in the U.K. and Canada, where it will have that title.”

Algonquin Publicity Director Kelly Bowen says her shop found out about the rival book after they’d already launched their enthusiastic marketing campaign — which included a series of quirky postcards to booksellers and reviewers that appeared to be from the fictional residents of Pine Haven Estates, the retirement home that’s the setting for the novel. Bowen adds, “I’ve never heard of this situation happening before, so it will be really interesting to see how consumers react.”

Books have often shared titles — Forever is a popular one — but rarely both with such similar release times and of the same caliber. Two came close: Susan Choi came out with a thriller called A Person of Interest in January 2008, three months after mystery writer Theresa Schwegel’s A Person of Interest was released.

The Life After Life books, it should be said, are wildly different, though the title truly does fit both stories. McCorkle’s is centered on the residents in the aforementioned retirement home — where their lives have only tenuous connections to all that came before — and interactions between them, the staff and a seriously dysfunctional family living next door. It’s thoughtful and moving, and left me in tears at the end. Atkinson’s is more ambitious, in a way: It’s set during the World Wars in England, and involves the main character’s brushes with death. The story repeatedly rewinds, in a sense, to give her another chance at life. It’s gripping and is a sure Man Booker Prize finalist.

Confused or can’t decide? Buy them both.