#345: Publish with a Purpose: Publishing a Journal in Print and eBook Versions

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.

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Hey friends. Welcome back to the Kingdom Writers Podcast. In this episode, we're going to talk about publishing a journal in print and ebook versions. And what are the differences? So before we dive into that topic, if you haven't yet, I encouraged you to download our publishing map. This is a map I actually hand drew and you have some of my lettering on there. But what happens is with the publishing map, it takes you through the steps of self publishing and what that actually looks like. And I also include a video, an overview video. And so if you're considering self publishing or independently publishing your book and just kind of want to know what might be involved, go ahead and download that for free. It's@trainingauthors.com publishing map. So, so this episode comes as a result of a question that I've gotten a few times in Christian Book Academy. And it's very common for those of you in my audience to be publishing some kind of journal. Some of you may actually even have a journal that accompanies your main book. So I totally could publish a journal that could accompany my book. Broken crayons still color. That probably would be a great idea. I just, I, I mean it's one of those things that's in my idea bank, you know, that I've, I've put down for later, but I just, I haven't done it yet. But if you are publishing a journal, you know, how do you do that for both print and ebook? So there are different options and it really depends on the type of journal you have. Now if you have a journal that is mostly blank pages end, there's just a few little prompts or headings here or there. That kind of journal, honestly would probably do better as a print only journal. If there's hardly any content in there, you know, people might complain about that or give you bad reviews. For example, I do have a gratitude journal and every day there is new content there. There's a little kind of inspirational thought that I've written out for each day. There's a new scripture and a new quote and so there's like there's new content for every single day. But I have actually purchased and used other gratitude journals that are pretty much just the same thing every day. You know, you just write out three things you're grateful for, you, you know, what is your intention for the day or whatever it is, and that it's just that same thing over and over and over and over. There's not really any new content. And so again, for something like that, it's probably better just to publish it as print. But if your journal is something like mine and it has different prompts for each day or different content, I actually recommend that you also publish it as an ebook. Now, it seems kind of weird to think about having a journal as an ebook, right? Because you think of a journal as something you write in. So what I would recommend is for that kind of book, you can actually change the wording a little bit if you want. I haven't always done this, but, you know, it just helps. And I've definitely seen books that will do this and they'll say, you know, this is the Kindle version of the book, or this is the ebook version. You may not want to call it Kindle because you may actually publish it on other ebook platforms, but you can say, this is the ebook version of the journal. And because of that, you'll need to write your answers in a separate notebook. And you may also want to change how many lines you put in there. You know, that shows them like, you know, where they're to be journaling. You may also want to add a prompt, like when there is a place to journal. You know, you could say, write this in your separate notebook and journal about this now. So there are different things that you could actually change with the wording. And that way the person is not caught off guard or, or whatever. You can also, in your Amazon author account, you can go in and change the description of your. And so that's just author.Amazon.com if you haven't set that up, I highly recommend to go and set it up. You can edit your, you know, your picture, your bio, you know, so many different things that you can do in that account. You can see different statistics and, and different things. You can, you know, connect your blog and there's just a lot. So, but one of the things you can do is you can go in there and you can change your description of your book and you might actually want to add, for the, the ebook version, say something about, this is the ebook version of the journal. You will need to have a separate notebook or journal that you write your responses in, blah, blah, blah, something like that. So those are a couple ideas that you can do. Now if it's really Important for you that you want to have them writing in the book, then by all means you can have a journal that is just in print. So our Illuminate Prayer journal is just available in print. And I decided for that one, it's kind of the same content over and over and over. And I just decided that for that one I wanted to keep it just in print. But I think if I just made a few of these tweaks and I explained the situation and then I would probably change the pricing to where it was just, it was a, you know, a good price so that they're not, you know, the, the person is not feeling gypped in any way or you know what I mean, like they feel like they're getting their money's worth. I could potentially put that in the ebook version as well. So it really just depends. And you know what, when you are an independent publisher or when you're a self published author, you get to make these decisions. You know what, if you publish it as a ebook and all of a sudden you're getting some bad reviews or some other things are happening and you're realizing this really isn't what I, for this book, unpublish that version. You know, you can do that. I mean, you can change things, you can try things. Don't be afraid to try things. I think that's one thing that's made C.J. and I successful over the years is I have not been afraid to try things with our books. And to be honest, we have written and published over 70 books. But not all 70 books are still in print. Some of them have become outdated or needed updated. And so I retired this, you know, an entire series. And there's been so many things that I've just experimented with over the years. Be willing to try something different. So I hope that this encourages you that first of all, there's no one way to do it. And second of all, be willing to experiment. If it doesn't work well, you can always unpublish it, right? You can always change it, you can always update it, do something different. But those are just a few tips on what to do when you have a journal. And you know, if you do want to publish it as an ebook as well, and if you want to get started with publishing an ebook, the easiest, most quickest and most affordable way to get started is by publishing on Kindle. We have a workshop called procrastinationtopublication.com that you can get our five step process. You can get all the people we recommend to hire, you can get your Kindle ebook done. Even if you're a traditionally published author, you might want to publish a short Kindle ebook to promote your other books. It's a great, great skill to learn. Because once you learn how to publish a Kindle ebook and you want to do it well, you still want to have it edited, hire a designer, but you can do it on a budget, then I mean, you can also be a prolific publisher like CJ and I have become. And really, it's a great way to experiment. It's a great way to see what your audience responds to, what they like, and it doesn't break the bank. So go check out our workshop@procrastinationtopublication.com and I hope that this episode just kind of got you thinking about what's possible when you publish a journal and the options of publishing it as a print book and or an ebook. I will talk to you in the next episode. Bye Bye.

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 writers.

Sam.