Writing and editing books is one thing; publishing and marketing them is quite another.
First you need to figure out what size and configuration your book will be in: booklet or full book, hardback or paperback, size, margins, typeface, layout, with or without color, illustrations, and so on. Then you run into questions of registry: getting ISBN numbers, copyrights, trademarks, and the like. and then who will publish and/or print the book, which opens a whole other topic about how will it be marketed: pricing and discounts, website links, broader distribution through Amazon and others, domestic and international sales, shipping and taxes…
We decided fairly early on that we would be our own publisher, going by the name His Kingdom Press and working under the Celebrate Salvation imprint. Then we chose to have our printing handled by a quality international self-publishing firm with years of experience called Lulu that does Print On Demand (POD) distribution. Our books would be small and approachable in format in a standard “US Trade” 6 by 9 inch size, fewer than 100 pages at most and easily handled as paperbacks. We settled on 68 pages for our course workbooks, simple black and white with color and a few graphics and illustrations in the layout, bright white paper to make them easy to write in, friendly matte covers, and laid out in Garamond as a primary typeface with most 8-1/2 by 11 handouts in Times New Roman. Drafts were then written in this format in Microsoft Word, saved for review and editing in PDF form, printed as a series of test copies, and circulated for hands-on editorial review. By the end of July most of our editorial work was wrapping up.
As we approached the end of the editorial phase we ran head-on into the marketing phase: how to set up a website bookstore with purchasing links, pricing and discounts, arranging broader distribution through Amazon and others, domestic and international sales, shipping and taxes… August has been a month of arranging these details using Lulu for domestic and international retail sales and setting up a hybrid Shopify Lite interface with WooCommerce templates on our website to handle discounted sales for users and churches setting up discipleship groups. Pray for us as we work through the details of pricing, discounts, ordering, cart management, shipping, taxes, and all the rest!
Thankfully, our God is on the throne!
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