#185: Jan Cox gained both freedom and control over publishing her books (plus saved thousands of dollars)

We're going to have you just share just a little bit of your journey and, you know, any tips that you have as well.

Hi, I'm Janice Cox. I am a wife of 50 years, and I have three married children and seven grandchildren. I think I'm trying to think back. I did publish a book in 2012, and it was from following the Holy Spirit in going to writers conferences and realizing that God had given me a gift of writing. I was a teacher and then a businesswoman and retired at 52. I beat you, Lola.

At that time, God said, okay, that's. This is the new path you want you to be an artist and a writer. And I also came to know Jesus at that time, so I'm a late bloomer for my faith, but he has really taken me on quite a journey. My first book was Taddy O Turtle. It came from journaling, and I went to a conference, met a publisher. I paid. Are you ready? $5,000 to have my books published. And they were very nice. They, you know, but the marketing was terrible. They didn't do anything. So I just. I ended up marketing again myself, going to fairs, and I probably have sold over a thousand books of those. Of those books, but it's still. They were over $10, almost at $10 a piece, and I was selling them to 13. So it's taken a long time to put that money out, and I don't even know if I've got it back. I thought, okay, number two, I'll do this again. But I really would like to do it myself, but I don't know how to do it myself. Now, I had met Shelley at the time, but somehow that wasn't the way. I should have said, go with you right at the beginning, but I didn't. And so I went with another publisher. And this time it was the same thing. It cost $3,000. And I had another pile of books. So I don't have many tattoos left, but the kingdom throne. These are children's books. I have a number of those left. And I thought, okay, I can't do this anymore. I can't just keep throwing money away. I want control.

And Shelley walked back into my life again. And as soon as she did that with her art, believe it or not, she and I bonded through art. And then I went, okay, she's got something here. But it still took me, what, two years, three years before I said, all right, I'm ready to do this. And I think it was 2019. I went, I'm going to join.

Yes.

And that was the most amazing time. I've never met such wonderful people and so much help and so much encouragement and prayer. I have never had a group that prayed as relaxed as your group prays. So the first thing I did was take those two books and learn to do them again myself. So I printed both books.

Through KDP. I learned how to do Adobe InDesign. These are quite a lot of learning curves.

Yeah. And for those of you that don't know, Jan is also the illustrator of her books. So, you know, all those illustrations are hers. So she wasn't paying for the publisher, she wasn't paying the illustrator. You know what I mean? Like, that would have been an additional fee. But show them the difference between the ones that the publishing company did and then the ones that you independently.

First publisher did this one.

And then I printed this one. Yeah. So it's my own artwork. And when I did it, you know, when I put it inside and I did the printing.

To me, they look quite good.

Yeah, they look very similar to what you had.

Now, I did pay for somebody to do the, you know, putting it together, but then she couldn't figure out how to do kdp, so I ended up.

Not doing that well. And so this is the new one. And what's really nice I have to tell you about KDP is if I don't like something that's happened in the book, I can fix it. I don't have to have 30,000 copies or 300 copies or 50 copies. Oh, I have to sell them first. Yeah.

And you know, you don't have to buy thousands of copies up front or hundreds of copies because they do print on demand. So Amazon will print one book as someone buys it, and you can buy as many author copies as you want. But right now you still have boxes from your previous publisher that, that you bought. And it was part of your. Was it part of your contract and that sort of thing to buy those books.

The more you bought, the cheaper it was with the shipping. So I thought, okay, I'll buy lots. I can do this with the ship. But, you know, every book of the first book was $9 something. And this one turned out to be, oops, wrong one. This one turned out to be $8. I mean, these cost me 250 or something, or three.

There's a much bigger profit margin now. You have control. If you want to change anything, you can. And you can publish as many books as you want now. Right. Because you know the process.

And then it got even better because last year I joined in 2019 did those two. But I also did a coloring book with a Bible study. I did Tadio Turtle activities. And then last year I also did my very first devotional journal writing. And this year I just published the second in the series of the same, Growing Through God's Word. And I'm ready to do the next one. But I also love, and I've got to say, this is my thing, I love not just publishing the books and knowing how to do it. CBA teaches you to market, teaches you to do social media where it's fun, where you interact. I've never had so much interaction as today when I asked about the one that you did where you put what you ate with what color you were wearing.

Oh, yeah.

Things together. Oh, my goodness. People were going crazy with that one. Yeah.

And for people who don't know, we have every month a mini marketing messages kit which gives you templates that you can use on social media in your email. And so Jan's been using those on a regular basis and really been seeing more engagement and even sales coming from some of those posts. Right?

That's true. That's true for sure.

That's awesome. So what is one tip you have for any writers that are watching right now?

Take it simple. I would say simple because my problem is I'm as I'm a painter. I'm painting on tea bags right now. I'm painting on tea bags. And I have to say, okay, Jen, right now you're going to do this. Put the blinders on and go.

Yeah, it's good, you know, to have that focus and, you know, really moving forward. Well, you're so inspiring, Jan. Thank you so much for sharing with us and all that you have been doing.