Christian Authors: Assessing Your Skills

After I graduated from college many years ago, I took a job as a math teacher at a middle school teaching inner city students. I did this, not because that was my training during college, but because it allowed me to avoid the Vietnam War. At the time, young men were being drafted to go to Vietnam, yet school teachers were exempt from the draft. I was not trained to be a teacher, but the school district thought I was qualified – I was not.

After a year of torturing the poor students, I took a job as a landscaper where the only thing I could torture was plants and my fellow workers. I learned a great deal in those two years, and that is the basis for my part-time work as the caretaker of my church's Gethsemane Prayer Garden.

I then started my professional career working for a small consulting engineering company in Syracuse. It had been a long winter with minimal income from unemployment, so I decided to pursue what I had been trained for in college: civil engineering. My first responsibilities were to climb down sanitary sewers during rainstorms so we could measure the depth of the liquid at the bottom of the sewer – and then write about it. Our purpose was to find out where the excess water was coming from.

Today I am in semi-retirement, working fewer hours as the director of the computer department at a smaller company, and spending more hours at home where I can write what I believe God has called me to write. My job climbing down sewers lasted four years and then I was moved to the accounting department where they had just purchased their first computer. Small beginnings.

Not all writers have the where-with-all to become independent self-publishers. For me, God has given me the skill as a computer programmer so that I can more easily handle the many nuances of this information age. The publishing industry is very different from that of writing, especially for fiction writers. If you find setting styles in Microsoft Word or writing your own HTML to be a challenge, possibly independent self-publishing is not for you.

With my previous books, I hired a person to design the cover and prepare the PDF for the printer. With my current series entitled Proverbs Untangled, I have chosen to design my own cover and prepare my own PDF. That means learning Adobe's Photoshop, hardly a product for the faint-at-heart. I also will have to learn Adobe's InDesign to help move the completed MS Word documents to a properly configured and better formatted PDF. I have much to learn about layout and I am excited to do so.

I am such a nit-picker about the aesthetics of the manuscript, and this too is essential as the reader will be able to quickly determine that something is wrong. I believe God gave me the nature to pursue quality in this manner, but I realize I need the eyes of others to help me see what I don't.

Understand that you will make many mistakes along the way as an independent self-publisher. Subsidy publishers rightfully earn their money by helping those with weaker computer skills, and for many this is really the only viable choice. Writing and publishing are viable for me because God has prepared me and I am now moving towards full retirement from my regular job.

I'm excited about where God is taking me and I remain open to hearing His voice of direction. He has enabled me with both the financial means and the fortitude to become a self-publisher. I was able to purchase Adobe's Creative Suite package which is quite costly. Now my goal is to get this series of books into the market for $50 each. We'll see. There are eBook versions and the inspiration to put it into multiple languages and alternate Bible translations. God knows the plan and I believe He will provide the way because He gave me the vision to pursue this.

That is the most important part of self-publishing. Is God really in this? If you have heard His voice of direction, what is stopping you?


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For other articles about self-publishing in this series, see:
Index of Self-Publishing Articles by Thomas B. Clarke

Why I Don't Market My Books to Bookstores

Return Policy

I was so surprised. An email came into my inbox stating that one of my books was being returned and I should expect it in the mail. The email was from Lightning Source, my printer. I knew this could happen but I did not expect it to really happen. Who would ever want to return A Garden of Love?

I presume that the return came from a bookstore that had special ordered the book, but apparently this was not what the customer wanted. OK, I can accept that.

At the end of the month, my financial statement came as a second surprise, or more like a shock. For this transaction, my account was debited the cost that the bookstore paid for the book (not my wholesale price), and I was charged a fee for redistributing the book back to me. The effect was I paid $1 less than full retail price on this transaction.

In this case, the book was returned in excellent condition, but that is not always true. Yesterday I met with a small publisher that told how a bookstore was regularly returning books that had obviously been read. In a short period of time, this bookstore had returned fifteen books. In order to avoid customer dissatisfaction, this store's policy was to accept returns from their customer regardless of the book's condition. The result was the publisher had fifteen new, slightly used, and obviously used books on his hand.

When a book is returned from the bookstore, three choices are possible: return it to the publisher which is what happened to me, shred it (I believe there is a shredding fee), or sell it to a company that remarkets used books. If it is sold to a remarketer, which means that your book ends up competing against your other new books on Amazon at a dramatically reduced price, or it gets sold to a bookstore to be displayed in the bargain book section. You would earn a little bit on remarketed books, but is it worth it?

Another option is to mark the book as non-returnable which means that once sold, the retailer is stuck with it. Sounds attractive, but that is not the way that the bookstore industry normally works. Most bookstores are struggling in today's economy as witnessed by the closing of Border's bookstores last year. They have a huge overhead in their payroll, building costs, and inventory. As a consequence, many bookstores are looking for 55% of the retail cost of each book to offset their expense stream.

I think it was in 2011, or maybe it was in 2010, where a major Christian bookstore chain decided to return all the books that were not moving quickly from their shelves. That meant that after their inventory was conducted across several hundred bookstores, boxes and boxes of books were returned to the publisher, shredded, or sold as used books by a remarketer. Bookstores typically look at a two-year window for most books, after which they are removed from the shelf and replaced with new titles that might stir the consumer's heart. In this case, that process was greatly accelerated.

As an independent self-publisher, I have to really ask myself, "Do I want to play that game?" Can I really afford to have boxes of books that I once thought were great sales now returned to me?

My solution, for now anyhow, is to mark all of my books returnable to me, but set the title to have a very low discount rate. My printer allows a 20% discount rate which means bookstores won't touch my books unless they are special orders. The question each Christian publisher must as is, "If God is really in this, what is the best marketing strategy that will exalt His name?"

For other articles about self-publishing in this series, see:
Index of Self-Publishing Articles by Thomas B. Clarke