Archive for the ‘Authoring’ Category

Writing Christian Books

Thursday, February 2nd, 2006

If God is calling you to writing, the options today are much more interesting than a few years ago. A few years ago you had basically two options: finding a royalty publisher or vanity publishing. The royalty publisher pays for the costs of editing, publishing, marketing, and distribution and pays you a royalty. The publisher takes most of the risk. You can make good money on a popular book if the volume sold is high.

When using a vanity publisher, you pay the costs for editing, publishing, marketing, and distribution. You take all the risks and get all the gravy. The publisher prints a few thousand and delivers them. You stock the books. The problem here is that most authors don’t have sufficient marketing and distribution skills and finances to get the printed books into the market. This is often a good alternative, however, if you are a popular speaker and sell the books at your conferences and workshops. In most cases, however, you end up selling a few copies to friends and church members and that’s about it. Our book Discovering Your City that I authored with Bob Waymire was vanity-published. It is used in many classes in seminaries and workshops and we’ve recovered our costs and more.

Now there is a new and third option: Print on Demand. With this method your book is stored on a computer. When orders arrive, books are printed based on the order. You don’t have a large print investment or a large stock of books. When you need more books, you tell them how many you need and those are printed and delivered. With a quality print on demand publisher (such as Winepress , the printed books are indistinguishable from those printed by a royalty publisher.

The Pros of Print On Demand (POD) are a smaller upfront investment to publish your book, and some POD companies can get the books into good distribution and have good marketing. In addition, some POD companies can move your book to a royalty publisher if the sales become aggressive. You own the copyright on a POD book. The down side is that the cost of the book in the store can be a little higher and (with some PODs) you have to do the marketing and distribution.

Want more information? Athena Dean , Director of Publishing at WinePress, is offering a free workshop for potential authors. We highly recommend this. The next conference is online the Tuesday evening of February 21, starting at 5:30. It lasts 1 1/2 hrs, and a Part II is the next Tuesday at 5:30 - another 1 1/2 hrs. To register for the free conferences, see http://www.winepresspub.com and click on the menu option for the free conference. Register and then return on February 21.

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You want to see your book published?

Wednesday, June 22nd, 2005

Want to publish a book? You have a story to tell? Is God calling you to tell this story?

Here is the general path for getting a book out there:

Authoring - -> Proofing - -> Publishing - -> Marketing - -> Distributing

For authoring, you determine the purpose of the book, draft your outline, put bite in the first few sentences, and then tell your story holding the readers attention. Your proofing should be done by someone that is good at it and not by the author. You have a friend with these skills?

Until recently there were only two publishing methods:

  1. Traditional - A corporate publisher publishes your book, doing the proofing as well. Lots of luck finding one unless you have a famous name or a good agent. And a good agent is hard to find unless you have a famous name. It takes about 2 years from the time you sign that contract. The publisher then owns the book. They may or may not treat you well. You are putting a lot of trust in the publisher.
  2. Vanity - In this case you pay a publisher to publish your book. You edit, market, and distribute your book. The cost per book is low, as you take the risk and the print run is fairly large. Marketing and distributing is a tough job, however.

Now there are two more:

  1. Online Publishing - You author and edit your book, then send it in to a publisher by email. They design the cover (unless you create a cover or send them artwork for their design) and in about 1-2 months you have the book for about $500 (including cover design). One of the best here is
    iuniverse.com.
    The book can be soft back, hardback (for a little more) or both. You buy the books in small quantities. You can sell it locally, online, or through bookstores.
  2. e-Book - You author the book with Microsoft Word and edit. You then use a program like Adobe Acrobat to “print” it to disk, saving it using a password. You sell it through a web site and take orders through PayPal. You get the whole selling price. No publisher gets a cut.

This author has used all four of these methods. Here’s my take on each:

  1. Traditional - I’ve made big money on this route (some years $9K a month), but it doesn’t work for a lot of my material that has to be updated often, and the publishing cycle is much too slow for almost anything I do now. In addition, it takes too much energy to find a publisher willing to work with you and I’ve gotten ripped off at times. I would still go this route if I had a publisher I trusted and had a lot of interest in moving a good book. A good publisher can do excellent editing, marketing, and distribution. Before signing a contract, check local bookstores that you want carrying your book and see if they carry books from the publisher with whom you plan to work
  2. Vanity - I was fortunate here with a good publisher here, but this leaves the editing, marketing, and distributing up to you. You may be able to contract the distribution if you know someone that can do this. Sometimes a traditional publisher will do vanity if you are willing to pay the tab and take the risk. That does give you a distribution channel. Some of the vanities are big rip-offs. They take your money and do nothing, then go bankrupt with them owning your book. I have a friend that experienced this. The cost per book is low, however, because of the large print run. This gives you a good profit. I recommend this route for speakers who travel a lot selling their books as they go. That gives then a good marketing and distribution channel and a great profit margin.
  3. Online publishing - This is a great route for getting the book out there fast without any hassle for finding a publisher. They get it to a distributor, where any bookstore can order it. Most bookstores won’t - their profit margin is too small. It does, however, get to Amazon and other online bookstores. You still have the problem of marketing. A good book here is John Kremer’s 1001 Ways to Market Your Books. If you use iuniverse.com, they will do the cover design in their package price, but on the last book I paid a local graphic artist for a specific design I wanted. You order stock as you need it - I order about 20 books at a time. If you are ordering books for a show, you get a bigger discount. Set up at your church for a show and take the discount.
  4. e-Books - I like this route for books that I author in which the contents change frequently. I have two books like this - one on search engine optimization and one on blogging. There is no publisher or middle-man. The price of each book is all yours, but in my case I have to spend a lot of time updating them.

Update on 6/29:
More on iUniverse? See this from the NY Time:
http://query.nytimes.com/search/article-printpage.html?res=9B02E4DD103EF937A15757C0A9639C8B63

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