#416 Publish with a Purpose: Best companies to self-publish a 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.

Shelley Hitz I'm the owner and founder of ChristianBookAcademy.com and really am a self publishing expert. We have been doing this since 2008 and have been mentoring and teaching other writers to do it as well since 2010 and so have a lot of experience helping thousands of writers to do the same. Now, it really depends on what you're defining as self publishing. There's a lot of people that think about self publishing and as what I would call vanity publishing. So you have, let's go back to traditional publishing. You have traditional publishing where a publisher chooses you, they pay you in advance, and they publish your book for you. Then the, the middle part is what I tend to call vanity publishing. Some people call it hybrid publishing, but I typically call hybrid publishing when you've had a book traditionally published and you've chosen to self publish. So what vanity publishing tends to be is a smaller publishing company will publish your book, but you need to pay thousands of dollars, sometimes $10,000 or more, to get your book published. And then there's self publishing. That's where you are really doing it. It's independent publishing, self publishing. That's what we call it and that's what we have done. This is where you are like the project manager and you hire people to do the different parts of the publishing for you. You have a team. It doesn't mean you do everything yourself. You hire an editor, you hire someone to do your book cover design. You may choose to learn how to do the formatting. That's something you can learn pretty easily, but you can hire someone for that as well. And then you upload your book to companies that will distribute them around different book retailers on the web. So the company that we use most often is associated with Amazon and it's called Kindle Direct Publishing, KDP. And you can find that@kdp.Amazon.com and they publish directly to Amazon. And then they will also, if you choose to do so, they have an expanded distribution that can get your products print book into places like Barnes and Noble and other places as well. Another option for print books is IngramSpark. And when you publish or when you upload a book and you choose to have it printed and distributed through IngramSpark. Your book gets in the Ingram catalog. This is what bookstores use to purchase their books. Now, for most of us, it's not going to be a huge deal to get into the Ingram catalog, but when I published my book Broken Crayons Still Color, I decided to publish or to upload the print book to IngramSpark so that it could be available in bookstores. And I'll tell you, we have gotten a few really big orders from ingramspark usually every month. There's just a little bit of royalties that come in. Most of them are from Amazon, but it has been worth it to have it on there as well. And we teach how to do this inside Christian Book Academy to. We teach you how you can do both. If you want, you can go on to KDP only or ingramspark only, but both of those companies are the ones that I recommend the most. And they're, they're printers. They're not publishers. You will be the publisher. So we recommend that you independently publish, which means you have an imprint name. And I know all of this can get sound very overwhelming at times when we walk you through this step by step, we have a lesson on the business of publishing and we can help you get started. And really just the easiest way to get started is a short Kindle ebook. You don't even need a publishing name or an imprint or any of those things. You just get started with the minimum. And it's the cheapest, quickest, easiest way to get published. Now, I know that you have been publishing blog posts and so you might be able to put your blog posts into a book. That's what I did with my very first book, Mirror Mirror and My Beautiful. It was a book for teen girls that's still out there today, impacting lives. But I took different website articles is what it was called at the time, and I compiled it into a book. So you may already have enough content for a short Kindle ebook. And get started with the process. We teach you how to do this in Christian Book Academy. Love to help you to become a published author. How fun would that be? But those are the, the main companies that we recommend. Now. You can do like with kdp, you can do a print and a Kindle ebook. With IngramSpark, you can do a print book and then you can do an ebook that's distributed to many different channels. I don't recommend using IngramSpark for their eBook. I had really bad experience with that. But that was years ago. It might be better now. But what we recommend is A site called Draft to Digital. And it will distribute your ebook to many different sites like Nook Kobo, Ibooks, you know, all the different sites. So it, you know, you can get it on other sites besides Amazon. I know this is a lot. I know it's a lot. Take a deep breath and just say, God, I'm willing, I am willing to be your vessel. C.J. often says my husband, C.J. often says we are priestly pens in the hands of the author of life. He is holding you right now. You are the pen in his hand. He is not going to let you fall. And if he has this for you to publish a book, he will lead you and guide you every step of the way. And maybe one of the ways he's providing is by connecting you with us and you can learn all of the steps of self publishing. In ChristianBookAcademy.com we teach you not only print books, ebooks, full color books, you know, devotional books, memoirs, I mean, journals, so many, you know, spiral bound books, children's books. Like all, we have a training on just about everything in the academy now, so we would love to have you there and then you can ask any question in our community and myself and my mentor team will help you. But it's, it's really an amazing thing that we have the opportunity at this time in history to publish in this way and you can be a vessel that God uses to impact many lives. So I'm cheering you on and I'm excited to hear what God does in and through your writing.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Kingdom Writer. 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 Exchange Academy, where we help you give birth to your books. We invite you to join our community of Kingdom writers.