The Deal on Traditional Christian Publishers

There are many Christian Publishers out there that can offer you great service for your book project. The two main categories of Christian publishers is traditional and POD publishers. Traditional publishers follow the path that most beginning authors dream of taking. 

Traditional Publishing:

You sign a contract, they pay you an advance of some size, and market and distribute your book to bookstores. The negative aspects of this lie between the lines.

• The contract you sign usually means you’re giving up the rights to your work to the Christian publisher. It means that you’re giving up creative control of your book and its look and feel.
• The advance for first time published authors who are not major celebrities is usually somewhere between $1,000-$5,000. This isn’t much money at all considering the fact that most authors spend about two-three whole years searching for and getting to the point of receiving that advance.
• By the time you get that first little advance of $5,000 it’s only worth $4,000 because of inflation! You can flip burgers at Burger King for a year and earn more money than that!

Once the books make it to the bookstores, they still have to sell. The bookstores aren’t going to do that for you, you have to do it. Those books will sit there and collect dust until they do their “Spring Cleaning” and see that your books haven’t sold. They will then box them up and ship them back to the Christian publisher you’re working with. That’s probably going to be it for your traditional Christian publishing career.

POD Christian Publishers:

The process with a POD company is different. They are a company that simplifies the process of creating, binding, printing, and distributing a book. You are considered a self-published author but they take care of all the hard stuff; all you have to worry about is writing a great book and marketing it, just like you would with a traditional publisher. You can see all of our publishing services on that page of this site.

“POD” means print on demand, which means we print up small quantities of your book at a time to sell. If you order book from us for an event, you can order the exact amount of books that you need (for instance, 100 books instead of only being able to order 5,000 or more). Your book is filed digitally with their printer and can be stored indefinitely.

• You sign a contract with the company that guarantees that you keep all rights to your work. You control the creative process of your work, but as a caring Christian publisher, they should make suggestions to you based on their expertise.

• They don’t pay you an advance; instead you pay them as a contractor for your self-publishing services. Some Christian publishers will charge you in an itemized fashion ($X for the ISBN, $X for the bar code, $X for a custom cover) while others may offer a few packages at different levels.

Usually services like manuscript editing, transcription, promotional tools, book marketing, and other extra things are additional costs with all Christian publishers; traditional or POD.

So you have to add up all of the costs you will need and ask a ton of questions of your publisher before you sign a contract, even with a POD Christian publisher. 

• POD publishers don’t send your books to bookstores, even though they can. This is mainly because they understand the book marketing and sales process, and know that just because books are on the shelf doesn’t mean they are sold.

When we were publishing books we’ve had books written by some of our authors come back to us from the bookstores. This was a very painful experience but we learned what many others were teaching about this was true. 

Now we teach you, the author, how to market your book in a multitude of methods through these free articles, our free mini-course and the educational products we recommend on this site. 

You want to make real sales to customers, not be consigners by letting your books collect dust on bookstore bookshelves. In the kit we recommend on this site you learn how to do a local and regional bookstore tour where you can influence the sale of the books in the bookstores within those parameters.

POD publishing is the better, quicker, cheaper, and savvier way authors are choosing to launch their book publishing career. There are many great POD Christian Publishers out there.

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