Self Publishing Christian Fantasy

by William Woodall
(Arkansas/Texas)

Self Publishing Christian Fantasy

Somewhere in the back of my mind I've always had the notion that I'd like to be a published author someday. Maybe that's nothing unusual, but the way in which I went about it certainly turned out to be far off the beaten track.

I started out conventionally enough; I wrote a book first and then started thinking about having it published. And at first I followed the usual path of approaching the mainstream publishers, as I thought I was "supposed" to do. One of them even accepted my work and offered to publish it, but after I read all the fine print in the contract I was very dissatisfied with the offer they made. I turned them down.

After thinking about it a while, I made the choice to pursue self-publishing instead and see where it would lead me.

To be very frank, I had a low opinion of books that were put out by the big POD houses such as PublishAmerica or Lulu, and I knew I wasn't alone in thinking so. Fairly or not, the first impression they normally create is a highly negative one. So I shunned that route, although it would no doubt have made things easier for me in the beginning.

Instead, I decided to open my own Christian fiction publishing company. I was told about what you'd expect- that I didn't know anything about publishing, that I could never do the typesetting or the proofreading in a professional way, etc. etc. Baloney. I worked hard and I learned what I needed to do; I read every blog I could find about publishing, I talked to everybody I knew, I read every article on the Internet. I had enough faith in myself to believe that it wasn't beyond my abilities.

It was still hard in the beginning, I admit. I had to contact the Library of Congress to set up a publisher account so I could register books with them, I had to get in touch with Bowker and purchase a block of ISBN numbers and set up an account so I could enter books into Books In Print, I had to call Lightning Source and negotiate a contract for them to do my printing and worldwide distribution for me. I had to buy software to design book covers (BookCoverPro is excellent, even for those who aren't very good at graphic design), to create print-ready PDF versions of Word files (I soon discovered that not just any PDF creator will do; it has to be the real Adobe Acrobat). I found that typesetting can be done in Microsoft Word, IF you are careful and IF you take the time to know what you're doing- you don't need special software for interior book design and template, unless you're going to have lots of graphics and tables. Since I write novels, I didn't have that problem.

It took me a few months to learn all this, but the end result was that I published my first novel, "The Prophet of Rain", in the spring of 2008. All the really hard work was done at that point. It automatically showed up on Amazon and almost everywhere else in the worldwide distribution chain, thanks to my contract with Lightning Source. I had the complete power to set the retail price and the wholesale discount, so I was able to price my book competitively with other paperbacks. . . something most self-publishers are not able to do. All I had to do was sit back and collect my direct-deposited royalties.

Since then, I've published another novel, "Cry for the Moon" in the same way. I knew what I was doing this time, and it went off without a hitch. I've even published books for other authors now, so at this point I'm no longer strictly a self-publisher anymore. . . I'm just a publisher, who happens to publish his own books too.

Marketing and promotion have been the hardest part. Sometimes authors have the idea that books simply sell themselves and there's nothing they have to do to help the process along. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

It helps to blog, it helps to set up a nice website and then give away keychains and pencils with the link printed on there. It helps to include a link in the signature line of every email you send out. It helps quite a lot to get as many book reviews posted in as many different places as you can. It helps to send out press releases and to give away free library copies and to offer yourself as someone who will come and do presentations if asked. It helps to keep several copies on hand at all times so you have some to sell. But most of all, since most of us don't have unlimited budgets, this part of the journey simply takes time.

To make a long story short, you CAN successfully self-publish, if you're willing to work very hard and take the time to learn a lot of specialized information. If you're not willing to do that, then you'll fall flat on your face.

Visit William Woodall.