Publishing a Devotional Guide

Since several of you have asked about publishing devotional guides, I decided to write a post that will give you a few guidelines:

Publishing Devotional guides

 

Here are a few things I have learned from my experience with writing and publishing that I hope will help you in your quest to publish a devotional book.

 

1. Publishers are not really interested in publishing devotional guides unless the person is already a well-known writer. There are SO many devotional guides out there, and the publishers want to sell books. They realize that the ones written by well-known preachers and speakers have a better chance of selling.

2. There are many 'publishers' or 'printing houses' or what some called 'vanity publishers' out there who will publish your book if you pay for it. They also say they will help you promote it, but in essence they are a printing company and you do the paying and the promoting and the selling. If you MUST publish, here are some suggestions:

    a. anyone can put their book on Amazon and Barnes and Noble (BN.com), free. (You can also publish on IBooks, but this involves obtaining copyright, etc....a real pain and costly). The royalties are a small percentage, but it does not cost you anything to put something on their sites. And you can promote your book to friends, family, etc., through emails and Facebook, and word of mouth, and hope people will buy it. You decide how much to charge, and the major work for you is learning how to put the book in the required format for each site. Both sites are working to make that as user-friendly as possible and the instructions are available for you to use. If you are not computer savvy, however, you may want to pay someone else to do this for you, but the more you shell out, the less your profit will be. You can also xerox copies yourself, the most economical way usually.

    b. you can pay to have a local printer print the book , and you do all of the selling and promoting yourself. You can try to recoup your investment and you determine the selling price.

 3. If you want a hard copy of the book, whether or not you use the online sites, I think it best to try to print or copy the books yourself, or hire a local printer. I would not recommend that you use vanity house publishers. They are very costly.

4. You can send a few pages of your book to various recognized publishers and hope someone will want to publish it. If they decide to do so, they will pay all of the cost for printing and promoting and will give you a small percentage in royalties. If you decide to try this, you will need to purchase a copy of "The Christian Writer's Market Guide" (available on amazon.com) which will give you the names of the publishers, the editors' names and addresses, and what they require with your submissions.

 

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.