#306: Publish with a Purpose: One Mistake to Avoid When Self-Publishing Your Book

Welcome to Kingdom Writers, where we help equip and empower Christian writers of all genres to share your unique gifts with the world. We're your hosts, C.J. and Shelley Hitz.

This podcast is filled with spiritual encouragement as well as prayers to help you overcome the resistance you face as a writer. Your story matters.

When you're self publishing or independently publishing your book, there's one big mistake I want to help you avoid. Hi, my name is Shelly Hitz. I am an author, coach and mentor inside my online membership Christian Book Academy, and we have been mentoring writers for over a decade. Today, I wanted to share with you a tip that can help you really avoid some major issues. So one of our Christian Book Academy members, Nancy, recently asked this question and I thought it would be helpful for all of you. So when you're working on your book, most of the time you're going to be hiring a team. So you're going to be working with a editor, a book cover designer, a book formatter. Now, sometimes you can learn to format your own books. You might be a graphic designer and create your own covers, but let's say you are working with a book cover designer and a book formatter. So someone who's going to format the interior, the inside of your book, one thing that you need to get from them, and you need to ask them in the beginning, you may have to pay extra for it, that is okay, is make sure you get the original files. So when you're working with a book cover designer, that typically is going to be the Photoshop file. When you're working with a book formatter, that could be an indesign file, it could be a Microsoft Word file, it could be something else, depending how they're formatting your book. The reason you want these original files is in case you need to make changes in the future. So I have had to make little changes to my book cover. I've wanted to add a lead magnet or a certain link to my book, or maybe something has changed and I need to update it in my book and I don't want to necessarily have to pay someone a lot of money to update it. Or maybe that person is no longer available. Maybe you can no longer get in touch with them and all of a sudden you have to start over again from scratch with a new formatter. You know, sometimes people just stop offering these services and there's no way to get ahold of them. Sometimes, you know, I mean, it happens. Some people pass away, and you don't want your book files to pass away with them because otherwise you're gonna have to start from scratch and then have someone completely reformat the whole thing over again. And so Nancy was asking this because she had her book formatted in InDesign and wants to add a Leader's Guide to the back. Now, this is a really cool that I recommend. I've done it with my book Broken Crayons Still Color, and it really helps you to sell books in bulk. And we have an entire lesson that I talk about this in Christian Book Academy. However, she wanted to be able to maybe update the file herself. Now, because it's in InDesign, she can reach out to the person who formatted it and ask them, you know, just ask could, you know, could they send her or would they send her the original InDesign file, you know, and just have that be included in what she previously paid them. If they're not willing, then negotiate a fee and our price to get that original file. And ideally, you would negotiate that up front and have that be in your contract from the beginning so that you're getting that original file from the very beginning. And then I told Nancy, with InDesign, you can just sign up for month to month. So it is a recurring monthly fee to sign up for Adobe InDesign, but you can sign up for a month, update your book, format your book cancel, and then you can always sign up again when you need it in the future if you don't need it all the time. Now, I have an ongoing subscription to Adobe products because we do enough books and have enough products that we need it on a regular basis. But I hope that this really gives you a great tip for moving forward with publishing your books. Always, always, always negotiate and make sure that you're getting the original files when you hire someone to do work for you. So that way you can make changes, or you can hire someone to make changes in the future. So you might still hire them to make those changes, but at least you know you have the files. If something ever would happen to them and you couldn't get ahold of them, or if you want to save money and you want to learn to do it yourself, you know, you can always edit those files later yourself. So thank you for being here. I hope that this helped you and definitely, you know, let us know where are you in the process of writing, publishing, and marketing your books? We'd love to hear from you again. This is Shelly Hitz, the owner of Christian Book Academy and the podcast host of Kingdom Writers.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Kingdom writers. We believe that you, as a Christian writer, have a specific role to play in the Kingdom of Heaven to impact lives for eternity.

And because of this, we choose to pour out our lives and into encouraging writers like you to not only tell your stories, but to take the courageous step of self publishing your stories in books that will outlive you and leave behind a powerful legacy. This podcast is sponsored by Christian Book Academy where we help you give birth to your books. We invite you to join our community of Kingdom writers.