#315: Publish with a Purpose: Self-Publishing vs. Traditional Publishing

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So there was a ton of questions about self publishing, which is normal. I'm a self publishing expert and I've been in this field for a long time. My book, self publishing books 101, kind of put me, you know, in that. That rank of, you know, expertise. But, you know, I've just been doing this for a long time. It's been since I published my first book in 2008, started mentoring writers. Couple years later, actually in 2010, people were just asking me, how did you do this? And here we are all these years later.

So Suzanne says self publishing seems very intense and time consuming. What is one really gaining by self publishing?

Yeah, it is intense. It can be time consuming. But the thing is.

I want to encourage you that you can hire people.

So it doesn't have to be so intense, it doesn't have to be so time consuming, and it doesn't have to be so expensive. Like, some people use vanity publishers, which are small publishers, which charge you like thousands of dollars to get your book self published, basically. But to give your book published, you don't have to spend thousands of dollars. You know, you can spend hundreds of dollars. And so, you know, we help you with that in Christian Book Academy. Traditional or self publishing, some of you will choose traditional publishing, some of you will choose self publishing, some of you will be hybrid. So typically in Christian Book Academy, we attract a lot of people who want to self publish. That is my expertise. I can help you with that. But we do have hybrid authors too, and we have some people that join for the marketing content because there's a ton of really good marketing training for you. But I do want to say that I'm probably.

I'm probably someone that's a little bit different in that I have never desired to be traditionally published. That has never been a dream of mine. That has never been something like, oh, I will finally made it if I get traditionally published. Like, I have never thought that, but my husband, C.J. has. He was one of those that always wanted to be a writer. I never dreamed about that. And so for me, it hasn't been like an important thing for me. What's important is being obedient to what God has called me to do and getting the message Out. Typically with self publishing, you can get the message out a lot quicker than you can with traditional publishing. Traditional publishing will typically take two to three years, sometimes longer. And self publishing, depending on your team, depending on what you're doing, depending on how you know how long your book is, what, what all you're doing, I mean, you can get it done pretty much as, as quickly as you want. Now you do want it to be quality, so you want to go through the process of making sure it's well edited and, you know, the formatting is good and all the things, but the time is a huge, huge thing. And to be honest, I don't know. I mean, it seems like we're in the end times. And, you know, it's like, you know, I just wonder, like some of my friends that are starting the traditional publishing process, it's like I would sometimes wonder, was Jesus going to come back before the book's done right. But I love self publishing. And you can call it independent publishing, indie publishing, whatever term you want to use. A lot of people look down on self publishing. I do not. I think it is amazing. You have so much control, you get more royalties, you. I mean, there's just so many advantages. But yeah, so there's a lot of questions on. Elsa says, how, how are you able to self publish by do write the book? How on earth do I get it published? Christy asked was the best way to go about self publishing? Charlotte says, Shani says, I love to write, but how do I move forward and actually self publish, Publish all of these questions. I would start with the publishing map. That's at trainingauthors.com forward slash, publishing dash map. And that will kind of give you an overview. But the main company, like I said, that we use is king kdp.Amazon.com and that's through Amazon. You can also use a company called IngramSpark. So what happens when you use KDP or Ingram Spark? You upload these files, your book cover, your interior, your interior file, two different files. They do all the magic behind the scenes. And then it's for print books, it's print on demand technology. So they print your book only as it's ordered. So you don't have to order thousands of copies of books. You don't have to, you know, have all of this money spent in buying books up front. If the book, you know, it's just, it's awesome. If it sells really well, they're, they're printing more books. If not, they're just not printing as many. And so the technology is amazing for ebooks, you get a higher profit margin because there's less cost. Right. And so, so those are you just upload your files and people get them instantly. So that's kind of just in a nutshell. And like I said, we go into it in much greater depth, obviously. Step by step in Christian Book Academy.

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 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 Rank writers.