The Deal on Traditional Christian Book Publishers

There are many Christian Book Publishers out there that can offer you great service for your book project.

The two main categories of Christian book publishers is traditional and POD publishers. Traditional publishers follow the path that most beginning authors dream of taking. 

Traditional Publishing:

You sign a contract, they pay you an advance of some size, and market and distribute your book to bookstores. The negative aspects of this lie between the lines.

The contract you sign usually means you’re giving up the rights to your work to the Christian publisher. It means that you’re giving up creative control of your book and its look and feel. 

The advance for first time published authors who are not major celebrities is usually somewhere between $1,000-$5,000. This isn’t much money at all considering the fact that most authors spend about two-three whole years searching for and getting to the point of receiving that advance. By the time you get that first little advance of $5,000 it’s only worth $4,000 because of inflation! You can flip burgers at Burger King for a year and earn more money than that!

Once the books make it to the bookstores, they still have to sell. The bookstores aren’t going to do that for you, you have to do it. Those books will sit there and collect dust until they do their “Spring Cleaning” and see that your books haven’t sold.

They will then box them up and ship them back to the Christian book publisher you’re working with. That’s probably going to be it for your traditional Christian publishing career. 

POD Christian Book Publishers

The process with a POD company is different. POD companies simplify the process of creating, binding, printing, and distributing a book. You are considered a self-published author but they take care of all the hard stuff; all you have to worry about is writing a great book and marketing it, just like you would with a traditional publisher. 

“POD” means print on demand, which means they print up small quantities of your book at a time to sell; on demand. If you order book for an event, you can order the exact amount of books that you need (for instance, 100 books instead of only being able to order 5,000 or more). Your book is filed digitally with the printer and can be stored indefinitely.

Most often, you will sign a contract that guarantees that you keep all rights to your work. You control the creative process of your work, but as a caring Christian book publisher, they will make suggestions to you based on their expertise. 

With a POD publishing company, you don't get paid in advance; instead you pay the company as a contractor for your self-publishing services. Some Christian book publishers will charge you in an itemized fashion ($X for the ISBN, $X for the bar code, $X for a custom cover) while others may have all-inclusive packages, both of which include all of the services you need to present your work to the world.

There’s no point in itemizing out everything that they know you need for your book to be functional. However, services like manuscript editing, transcription, promotional tools, book marketing, and other extra things are additional costs with all Christian book publishers; traditional or POD. 

So you have to add up all of the costs you will need and ask a ton of questions of your publisher before you sign a contract, even with a POD Christian book publisher.

POD publishing companies don’t send your books to bookstores, even though they can. This is mainly because many of them understand the book marketing and sales process, and know that just because books are on the shelf doesn’t mean they are sold.

When we used to publish books, we’ve had books written by some of our authors come back to us from the bookstores. This was a very painful experience but we learned what many others were teaching about this was true. 

If you are interested in learning more about our service, contact us and don’t forget to sign up for our free mailing list. 

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