What’s in this Episode?

In this episode of the Church Tips podcast, Jonathan Hardy, author of Arrow Striker, is sharing info on how to publish your book on a budget, as well as the pros and cons of traditional and self-publishing.

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Read the Transcript

Dick Hardy 0:00
Sure, you’ve got all the money in the world, don’t you? You ever wonder, with this book idea that’s inside you, how in the world you’d ever publish this with a limited budget. Well stay tuned for today’s episode and you’re gonna find out exactly that. Here we go.

Dick Hardy 0:19
Hey friend, it’s great to be with you here on this episode of The Church Tips podcast. We are so excited to have you with us. We are in the process of talking about the new book, Arrow Striker, and first time author, Jonathan Hardy. And we are so excited to jump into today, talking about money.

Dick Hardy 0:36
So, you’ve got this book inside you. And we’ve talked over the last few episodes of how do you get that book out of you and onto paper and into print. But today, we’re gonna talk about the reality of budget. Most of us don’t have unlimited resources. And we’re excited to talk to Jonathan today about the kinds of things that you could think about as you jump into the journey of writing your first book. So Jonathan, get us started on it.

Jonathan Hardy 1:00
Well, I want to thank those of you who have purchased the book, Arrow Striker, by the way. I’m very grateful for that. I know many have, and it means a lot that you would pick up a copy. And if you haven’t yet done so I want to encourage you to still do that. You can get the audiobook, the ebook, or the paperback, as Dick is holding up here.

Jonathan Hardy 1:17
And also don’t forget that we have an Ozark Mountain Getaway that we’re giving away to people, that you can be entered in, to give as a giveaway for having purchased any version of the book. And all you have to do to get entered in is to go to arrowstriker.com/giveaway. And that’s the place where you can go to fill out the form, put your receipt number in, and you’ll be all set and entered into that giveaway. So I’m pretty excited about tha.

Dick Hardy 1:42
We’ll do the drawing and you could be the big winner.

Jonathan Hardy 1:44
The lucky winner. Yeah. So, but we’ve got this whole idea here where so many pastors, ministry leaders, people who have influence, they’ve got these book ideas in them. And yet, we talked about in the last episode, we’re busy. And so many people are so busy, that it’s like how do you, how can you finally get that from your mind to paper.

Jonathan Hardy 2:05
And now we’re talking about how to actually publish it, especially when resources are limited. And there’s a lot of different situations people could be in. But nonetheless, it’s like you want to publish this book, but I mean, how are you going to actually do it. And so that’s what we’re hoping to be able to talk to you about today.

Dick Hardy 2:21
Well, and we walked through the whole journey of the kinds of things we’re going to talk about. The different avenues for you to be able to publish your book. So, we’d like to have Jonathan just kind of go step-by-step down through the options that are available to you and then we’ll talk about the pluses and minuses of each one. So, what do we got?

Jonathan Hardy 2:39
Yeah and hopefully through this, we save you time. We spent a lot of time, we spent a lot of phone calls, a lot of research, a lot of reading, and our hope is that we can collapse the time for you. So that way you can be able to make an effective decision quickly.

Jonathan Hardy 2:40
As it relates to publishing though, the most common thing that people think of when it comes to publishing is just more of the what we call the traditional publishing route, which is where you have a publisher that picks up your book, your manuscript, they they do all the work, they put it into writing, they put it into print, excuse me, and and then they, you know, literally print the copies.

Jonathan Hardy 3:15
And that’s certainly the most economical for the writer, because the publisher is the one who’s covering the cost on the front there, they’re funding all the money for it. But, as we’ll talk about more in this next episode, that doesn’t mean that they also do all the marketing for you, there’s still a lot of work on your end that you have to do.

Jonathan Hardy 3:39
And frankly, it’s harder and harder to get a traditional publishing contract these days. Because they’re looking at the size of your audience they’re looking at whether it’s a ministry you lead, or a church you lead, or you know what kind of social media following you have. They’re looking at all these different things to determine if they will traditionally publish your book.

Jonathan Hardy 4:00
Then the other option is self publishing. And there’s really two different ways, maybe subsets, to the self-publishing route. The one is to self-publish, and then print a bunch of inventory of books. The other route is to self publish, but have a print on-demand option. Both of those are viable options. And of course, printing inventory is not very budget friendly. That’s not something that you know, if you’re looking to do this on a budget, that’s probably not going to be your route because you’re you’re fronting all the money up front, to print the books. Not to mention the fact that you’re also printing, or you’re paying to have a designed, laid out, edited, and so on and so forth.

Dick Hardy 4:44
But keep in mind, even on the self-publishing reference that amount of money is relative to you, so it’s worth taking a look at.

Jonathan Hardy 4:55
Absolutely

Dick Hardy 4:56
Because then you’re in absolute control of the printing process, the inventory, and the whole works. But then that’s going to tie into, as Jonathan said, tomorrow’s episode. You got to eventually get those things out of your, your basement, your garage, wherever you’ve got them.

Jonathan Hardy 5:11
Yeah. So you want to break down a little bit more pros and cons here. I’ve kind of just dabbled with it here in describing these.

Dick Hardy 5:17
Let’s jump into the plus of the traditional publishing. Well, no, no, no, let’s go the reverse way. Should we do that plus, first, we can do whatever you want to do. Okay, let’s do that. What’s one of the minuses of the traditional publishing?

Jonathan Hardy 5:24
Well, the big negative there is that you don’t own the rights to the material anymore. So, if you wrote a book, someone else publishes it, then they own the rights to the brand, the material, and supplemental resources that might get created out of that. They have all the rights to, that they have control, they have the decision, they have the decision making power.

Jonathan Hardy 5:47
And the positive is, of course, they front the money. And you might get a little bit of a kickback on the front end, an advance, that they would give you. But then beyond that, after you reach a certain number of book sales, you would just get a small percentage of all future book sales. And so that’s something you just have to weigh out.

Jonathan Hardy 6:08
And really probably throughout all of this discussion, is a lot of it is just a math, it’s a math equation, and what seems to make the most sense for you with what your goals are, and with what you want to accomplish.

Dick Hardy 6:17
And with the traditional publishing, if you could make what you call the big time, you know where you look at authors that have multiple books. You know, those guys and gals they’re living off of royalties.

Jonathan Hardy 6:18
Yeah

Dick Hardy 6:19
But you got to get from, you haven’t written your book yet, to that point, and that is a big leap. And frequently, those traditional publishers are gonna tell you to go self-publish first, because they really want to watch and see, can you deliver? Okay, so let’s talk about the downside of self- publishing.

Jonathan Hardy 6:47
Well, the self publishing printing inventories subset, that’s the downside of that is you are the one fronting the money. And so you’re paying for everything. So like with this book here, with Arrow Striker, you know, we’re fronting the money for the print of it. But not only that, also the design, the layout, the editing, the printing. So, all that went into the development of that book was all the costs we incurred on the front end. And so that would be the downside. But the positive, of course, is, we own the rights.

Jonathan Hardy 7:21
We have a video study coming out here in the near future on this, on this book about a six part video study that is going to be able to be kind of a supplemental resource to the book.

Dick Hardy 7:33
Perfect for small groups.

Jonathan Hardy 7:35
Yeah, small groups, Bible studies. And then a sermon series outline that’s also going to accompany the book, and for churches and pastors to do a sermon series using content from it.

Jonathan Hardy 7:44
So the point is, when you when you’re self-publish, you could do those things. It’s yours.

Jonathan Hardy 7:51
Yeah, yeah. So that’s the positive, both for the the self-publishing and printing the inventory, and self-publishing, on-demand. Now on-demand, there really isn’t a lot of downside to that these days and this is becoming more and more popular. Because with with Amazon, they have something called KDP, which stands for Kindle Direct Publishing, where you literally can print on-demand. And so they, you know, when someone purchases your book on Amazon, it prints a copy and ships it out to them. And so that’s a really nice feature.

Dick Hardy 8:26
The one potential negative, and I wouldn’t say it’s a giant one, but as we went through the process, it was when they’re printing the mass quantities, they’re running through a certain number of them to make sure the print is absolutely right. You could have a risk with the print on-demand, the print might be just a tad, not quite what you want. Small risk, but that is a risk on the negative. The positive on that, Jonathan, on the KDP is…

Jonathan Hardy 8:55
Well, obviously you’re paying for all the inventory up front, and you don’t have to store the inventory, which that’s a big one.

Dick Hardy 9:01
But now you are paying more per book than you would with the self-publishing.

Jonathan Hardy 9:08
Than the print inventory. Both of these are, I know it’s a little maybe confusing, but they’re both self-publishing options. There’s just the printing inventory. Yeah, on the printing inventory, obviously, your your cost per book is going to be a little bit lower. So, that’s where it comes back down to the math. Your goals. What are your goals, you know? And you have to establish what are you hoping to achieve through the printing of a book and trying to figure out what’s going to be the best option for you based on your resources that you have?

Dick Hardy 9:37
Yep. Now, arrowstriker.com. Go to Amazon or arrowstriker.com, pick up the book, and be sure to enter and fill out the form for the giveaway. We’re excited to be able to see if you’ll be the big winner for the Ozark Mountains Getaway. That’s gonna be a great time. Bringing you in here to southwest Missouri, enjoy Silver Dollar City and all that Branson has to offer, coffee with Jonathan and Ashley Hardy. That’s worth the whole deal right there.

Dick Hardy 10:09
So, now I will tell you our next episode we’re going to be talking about how do you actually get this book out? How do you market the book? Now, if you’re a pastor, there are pastors that don’t necessarily run in the world of marketing. The book isn’t going to jump off-the-shelf by itself. You’ve got a good amount of work to do with any of these options, self-publishing, print-on-demand, or traditional publishing. So in the next episode, we’re going to talk about exactly that. Thanks for hanging out with us on this particular episode. We’ll see on the next one. Take care.

Jonathan Hardy 10:44
Hey, Jonathan here real quick before you go. Everything in your ministry rises and falls on your leadership. So investing in your leadership is essential to staying healthy and growing the ministry. And that’s why I want to invite you to join us inside the leaders dot church membership. This online streaming service for pastors gives you access to more than 300 videos plus training material to level up your leadership and improve your ministry skills. If you’d like to do that. I want to invite you to go to leaders dot church slash booths. Again, that’s leaders dot church slash boost. Well, thanks again for joining us on the church tips podcast. We’ll look forward to seeing you next time.

Show Notes
Enter the giveaway by:
1) Purchasing Arrow Striker.
2) Filling out the form using the link below.

Ozark Mountain Giveaway:

Arrow Striker Giveaway

Learn more about Arrow Striker:

Arrow Striker

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