013 | 3 Publishing Paths—and Predatory 4th

Today's episode all about navigating the world of book publishing—and if you’re dreaming of getting your work out into the world, you won’t want to miss this one. Whether you’re considering traditional publishing, intrigued by hybrid options, or thinking of going full indie, this episode is packed with practical wisdom to help you make the best decisions for your creative journey.

🗝️ 5 Keys You’ll Learn in This Episode

1. Caretaking Your Work is a Business Decision
2. Discover why thinking like a small business owner is just as important as being creative, and how your publishing choices impact your business and audience at 00:34.
3. The Three Main Publishing Paths
4. Get an honest breakdown of traditional, hybrid, and indie publishing, including timelines, costs, and control over your work at 01:08.
5. Understanding Advances and Royalties
6. Learn what really happens when you get that book advance—and why the actual money in your pocket might be less than you’d expect at 04:14.
7. Spotting Vanity Presses and Author Services
8. Hear the warning signs of vanity publishers, what they offer, what they sometimes oversell, and how to know if it’s right for you at 07:11.
9. Setting Goals for Your Book
10. Uncover why defining your personal goals, vision, and timeline matters so much in choosing a path that serves you and your readers at 12:08.

📖 Fun Fact from the Episode

We learned that some so-called publishers, like “Author Solutions,” might charge you upwards of $20,000 for marketing packages alone—and most of these services can be found much cheaper on your own! 08:03 Who knew being thrifty could make you a smarter author?

🔔 Wrapping Up

No matter where you are on your writing journey, this episode will give you the lowdown to avoid common pitfalls, keep your creative integrity, and set your book up for success. Publishing is all about finding YOUR best path—so why not arm yourself with the right info?

🚀 Call to Action

Ready for more? Dive into the episode and then swing by the Gospel Wise Author Fellowship! It’s a free community packed with articles, coaching, and tools to help your writing journey flourish (13:39).

👉 Join the Fellowship & get all the episode resources!

Let’s write stories that last—see you inside!

Hey Creative Christian Jeremy Bouma here and welcome to Christian Author 2.0, the podcast for modern stewards of the written word with insights for your Gospel Wise author journey. For two decades I've watched authors struggle with their creative calling. That's why I built the gospelwise Author ecosystem to provide the practical training and high tech tools you need to thrive from deep dive insights to specialized apps and personalized coaching. I'm here to help you turn your manuscript into a movement. So stop guessing and start growing your reach with excellence. Let's dive into today's episode and master the path together. Hey Creative Christian Jeremy here with another episode of Christian Author 2.0, giving you some insights into the modern publishing world. And it's coming squarely in the middle of my camp fable Rhymo Clarity Week.

The summer experience connected to my Faith Based Book Writing Month challenge that I launched last October and then ran again in January and May. And I thought that it would be really cool to get together a number of authors in a week session to double down and drill down on their author calling as well as the vision they have behind their book. All centered around the Gospel Wise Author, Christian Creator, caretaker and connector. Well, this week is the Creator Week of this podcast rhythm and so I thought that I would pull out 14 minutes from my publishing training, write Refine, Release and put it here in this podcast to give you some honest guidance and insights into the trade offs of traditional hybrid and independent publishing, including what a $30,000 advance actually looks like after the agent and the IRS take their cut, plus the vanity press warning that every Christian author needs before Googling Christian publishing. Publishing is where most Christian authors stall out probably than anywhere else. It isn't because they made the wrong decision, it's because they never felt they could make one at all. And so here we go, offering a way to clear the fog away from the path to give you clarity around the three options you have to choose what is best for your book and your season. Straight from my course Write, Refine, Release, Here we go.

First of all, this is about caretaking your work. Again. We're slipping on our caretaker Persona hat, and the decisions we make in this phase have a great bearing about how we go about caretaking it. Because at the end of the day, the way we caretake is also a business decision. We're entering into a business relationship of some sort, whether that's with a traditional publisher or with Amazon directly as a distributor or some of the other distributors. How you go about publishing is part of the business side of Being an author, which I've become really passionate about, I think it's something that creators forget about, that we are business people, small business owners, as much as we are creative people. And so thinking through some of those choices matter for that business caretaking side as well as for the audience to side the audience side of things. And the decisions that we make about how we can best reach them and connect our work in order to serve them.

And when it comes to any of these questions, it's really a decision that really only you can make that's best for you and best for your work. Of course, there are really three publishing paths that are going to be best for you, beginning with what we would all consider and think about when it comes to publishing. And that's the traditional route, signing with an established publisher. Now, the timeline is longer, but the cost is low, zero to non existent, depending on where your manuscript is in the process. I've actually worked with authors who have signed with traditional publishers who've hired me to help edit their work after the fact. And so there are some costs that can be associated, but the costs really by and large come at the royalty side of things, which is the slice of the revenue from the sale of your book that comes from the publisher to you. And if you hire an agent, which is typically the process you'll start with an agent, you'll hire them, they will shop your manuscript around to these publishers. If you're signed, you will pass that along to the publisher.

Zondervan, Crossway, Broadman and Holman, Penguin Random House, however that might look. And then you'll sign a contract, your manuscript will be edited, they will enter into a revision process that could last several months, depending on the kinds of revisions they want from you, which is where that control begins to diminish as you get into these kinds of relationships. Because they won't publish something if they can't stand beside it and behind it. And this process can take anywhere from 18 to 24 months from signing to publishing. That can be very surprising to a lot of authors who want their book out now. Who, especially as an independent author, might assume that within months, six months, three months, a publisher can get your book out to market. Typically it's about two years. When I see new deals being signed, it's like 2027 is when the book is going to release.

If you're okay with that, that's great. I'm going to show you a chart in just a minute about the factors that go into making some of these decisions. And part of that is the time. It's also obviously the money. You will get an advance, typically in three payments. In advance is what the lingo is about. The initial upfront payment of the royalties they expect your book to earn. So if they expect it to earn $30,000, typically the first year is what they want your earnings to pay off.

You will get that $30,000 advance. Just to make the math easy, in three payments, typically the first is on contract signing, then the second is on submission when you submit the manuscript and it's accepted, I should say in accepted submitted manuscript and then on publication. So three payments, 30,000 sounds great, but if you get to three payments, that's $10,000 of payment. Your agent's going to take 15% of that, so that leaves you with 85 left. Government's going to take another 30, so you got about six left. And that's going to be spread over, well, about $18,000 spread over three payments. So something to keep in mind as you think about the traditional route, some education for you from my experience with that side of things, kind of the middle route is a hybrid publisher. I'm going to distinguish this from a big flash warning sign I'm going to give you at the end from what others call vanity publishers.

Hybrid publishing is really a shared cost relationship between a publishing house that is choosy and selective with who they vet and who they take on. But then you will have a portion that you contribute to the publishing process and the releasing process. And they will then also contribute with services and the publishing layout and the COVID design and the actual publication to the platforms Amazon and the electronic, the paperback printing or hardback printing. And then the royalties are typically shared more evenly than you would in a traditional publisher setting, where you will get a far smaller part of the sale and revenue of a book through a big traditional publishing house than if you go with a hybrid, which is typically 50% split. Then of course there's the indie side, which is where I've been for almost two decades, a proud indie authorpreneur with my own sort of publishing LLC and imprint. Here you assume all the control, which you also have full control and a faster timeline, and receive all the benefits from the sales of your books as well as the direct relationship with your readers. Let me touch on what I'm not talking about here. I mentioned the word vanity publisher.

Some of you might be familiar with what that is. Do you have any experience with some of the publishers, quote unquote, that are really more author service companies, that kind of Present as publishers. Author Solutions is one of the biggest of these that often gets wrapped up in some of these discussions. I see Marsh had some experience with Author House is another one of these that's part of Author Solution. Wes Bow is a Christian publisher press. The caution with these is not that you necessarily shouldn't go with some of these, but that you should go in with a clear understanding of what you are getting and what you're not getting. Okay? Because many of these present themselves as publishers or presses when they aren't because a publisher pays you, as I mentioned, the advance against the royalties they anticipate from the sale of your book. Whereas these vanity presses or vanity publishers, you pay them a substantial amount of money depending on the kinds of packages that you want.

Editing is usually the first part of those packages along with publishing and design. Cover design marketing is another big part of that that unfortunately I think is oversold and inflates the cost of many of these sort of packages. Often these are several thousand dollars. I've seen them all the way up to 20 grand depending on the kind of promises made from the marketing side especially. And again, I'm not suggesting you shouldn't go with these kinds of services because again, they offer things that authors do benefit from, especially the editing side of things. But many of them you can find for cheaper. And you can also find that you can do them yourself when it comes to the publishing side of things. And I just want you to go into it with a clear eyed understanding of what it means to sign up.

Quick Story. A friend of mine, a ministry mentor, actually had signed with a smaller kind of vanity press by paying, I think it was $6,000 for 2,000 printed copies of his book. There was some editing that went into it, but most of it was just printing. It was $3 a book. And he got hundreds of cases of these books and then spent years trying to sell these books thinking they were going to help with his retirement. But instead it took, I think it's still taking years to pay off that initial $6,000 investment, which again can be helpful if it's a good thing that actually benefits the book in releasing it into the world. But just go in clear eyed at this phase, knowing what you're getting into and what you can also bring together on your own as an independent creator. I'm glad that I see a comment that the first book was released with one of these kind of presses, publishers, service organizations, and the cheapest package did allow for a profit.

And that's where as a business owner Small business owner. Right? That's what we are. These are the things we weigh and if it's beneficial for you. Awesome. Good to hear. Go down this publishing path. Question was, do you have to pay traditional publishers? That's not typically how it works. The payment is that they.

You are selling the right to them to publish your intellectual property exclusively. Right. So there's a cost with that because they are assuming the right to publish your property, which is what a book is, it's intellectual property. They are making a profit off of your property, but then they're giving you a portion of the benefits of that property when they sell it. So in some sense you are paying them, but they are doing the hard work of editing, designing, of printing, of distributing, paying staff. And so fees for you are not upfront, out of your pocket, out of your bank account to a publisher. Your fees really come from the sale of your book. But with some of these other avenues, regardless of what you sell or how much you sell, you then do put up cash upfront, if that makes sense.

Okay, good. Pretty sure you dodged a scam. Okay, good to hear. Yeah. When you are looking at these presses, as I mentioned, what people in the industry would call a vanity press, if they are asking you to give them 10 grand, 8 grand, 20 grand, depending, again, what the service is, it's far more inflated in terms of their presentation of the cost than it would be if you were to find those services on your own. Choosing your path is all about your goals, your audience, your message and your business model. And it's really about you. It's about your book, it's about your goals, what your budget is and the vision you have for your book's ministry.

All these paths of trade offs. And that chart I think will be super helpful in helping distinguish what is good for you and for your goals and for your book. I also like to think about this through my own label of us as gospel wise authors, as a gospel wise decision grid, asking four very intentional questions about choosing this pathway. Again, the goal for your book, what do you want it to do? Who do you want it to reach? How do you want it to help your reading neighbor and the world? How fast do you want to release it? Is it ready to go? Do you want it to, Is it timely? You know, it's funny, as I mentioned, my wife works for one of these big publishers and sometimes a book will be on the horizon that I'm like, I think in a year and a half the conversation might shift a bit and I feel often kind of bad for some of these authors who it's going to take 18 to 24 months for their book to be released. And it's like what they're writing about now is crucial. For instance, I had a friend of mine at my church who is a psychologist and during the gender confusion from the past few years and the discussions around sexuality and gender identity, he had a very Christian perspective on that. That was very timely and he wanted to write a book to address that specific issue and that, that those conversations going around, they're still going around in 2025, but it shifted a bit. But three years ago, writing that book and getting it to market was really important to helping people navigate the discussions.

And so this is important. The amount of time from finishing to releasing and when that will release I think is a factor as well as how much control you want over that final voice that's coming through your book, the final way that you've structured your book. When you have enter into a business relationship with a publisher, they've got skin in the game and there is a sense in which they have a voice in what is published under their brand. Right. And so they're going to want to give input into how that book looks and how it sits with the reader. So you're going to lose control. But as an independent writer and creator, you have the opportunity to have full control over the entire process. That's a wrap for today, but the real work happens inside the Gospel Wise Author Fellowship, a totally free membership filled with actionable advice and practical insights.

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