Maybe it’s because I commanded one of the smallest ships in the U.S. Navy. At the time, a coastal patrol ship was about as small as a commissioned Navy vessel got. Those ships have all been decommissioned since, and nothing in commission today is that small. Maybe it’s because I grew up in small churches and have spent my years as a pastor in them. Or maybe it’s all the unknown writers I met as a bookstore buyer who wanted so badly to break into the Christian book market.
I’ve seen the other end, too. I served on larger ships. I was on the staff of a large church that “did church” with excellence, and later I spent almost three years buying books from the biggest names in Christian publishing. I’ve seen excellence up close, and I’m convinced it scales. A small ship can be run every bit as well as a destroyer, and a first-time author’s book can be as well made as anything on the front table at a bookstore.
My heroes are the underdogs. I think of the pastor who serves one church faithfully for forty years and never becomes famous. I think of moms, and of families, and of ordinary people with a story of God’s faithfulness to tell. Those are the people whose books I want to publish.
I also want to be honest with them, and that means saying a few things aspiring Christian authors don’t always want to hear.
Start with the reader
Unless you happen to be famous, most people don’t want to read your autobiography. I know how that sounds, and I don’t say it to be unkind. A reader standing in a bookstore aisle or scrolling Amazon is asking a fair question: what’s in it for me? What will I get from this book? What will I learn, and what can I put to use?
People in the industry have been saying this for a long time. Dan Balow of the Steve Laube Agency, a literary agency that works mostly in Christian publishing, wrote a piece called “Why Christian Memoirs Rarely Sell Well.” His explanation was that they usually sell for about six months and mostly to people who already know the author. Jane Friedman, a former publisher of Writer’s Digest, put it more bluntly in an article titled “Your Self-Help Book Should Not Be a Thinly Disguised Memoir.” Surviving something hard, she wrote, doesn’t by itself make a person someone a publisher will trust to guide others through it.
Well, darn, Bart. What else do I have?
A lot, actually. You have what God taught you, the mistakes you’d warn someone away from, and the habits that held you together when nothing else did. You have the questions people keep bringing to you. The work is to begin with the reader in mind. Your stories still belong in the book. They’re probably relatable, and an example from your life or ministry can make a point land in a way an abstract argument can’t. But they’re there to serve the point. What will the reader carry away when they close the book?
It has to look like a real book
People do judge a book by its cover. In a 2023 survey of 2,000 Americans that OnePoll ran for ThriftBooks, 57 percent said they’d bought or read a book because of its cover, and 80 percent said they’d passed on one because of how it looked (StudyFinds has a summary). When I was buying for a store, a homemade cover often ended the conversation before it started.
The inside counts as well. Online, the “Look Inside” preview means a reader can see your first pages before deciding to buy. Book designer Joel Friedlander has written in Publishers Weekly about the layout mistakes that mark a book as an amateur job: page numbers on blank pages, ragged right margins in a trade book, odd-numbered pages on the left. Most readers couldn’t name those mistakes, but they feel them. A well-made interior gets out of the way and lets the reader read.
Proofreading is the last step
A lot of the self-published books I saw at the bookstore had been “edited” in the sense that someone checked the spelling and fixed the commas. That’s worth doing, but it’s proofreading, and proofreading comes at the end. A proofreader catches “teh” and a missing quotation mark. A developmental editor asks whether chapter four belongs in the book at all, whether the argument holds together, and whether the reader has any reason to keep turning pages. A line editor goes sentence by sentence and asks whether each one says what you meant as clearly as it could. Angela Ackerman has a good breakdown of the different kinds of editing, with examples, if you want to see the difference.
There’s evidence the work pays off. A 2016 Written Word Media survey of self-published authors found that 79 percent of those earning more than $5,000 a month from their books hired a professional editor, compared with 56 percent of those earning under $500. The higher earners were also more likely to use a professional cover designer (63 percent against 44). An earlier survey by Taleist, summarized by Victoria Strauss at Writer Beware, found the same pattern: self-published authors who got outside help with editing and cover design earned more than those who didn’t. Neither survey proves the editor caused the sales. Authors who were already doing well may have been the ones who could afford help. But every survey I’ve found points the same direction, and so did everything I saw from behind the buyer’s desk.
What that means if you publish with us
True Bearing Press provides developmental and line editing, cover and interior design, and production, and we don’t charge authors for any of it. What we ask in return is that you let the editing happen. Expect notes that push back. Some chapters may get cut, and some of your favorite stories may move or go. It isn’t personal. Every one of those changes is aimed at the person who will someday pick up your book and wonder whether it’s worth their evening.
If you’re the pastor, the mom or the faithful nobody I described above, and you’ve written something with the reader in mind, I’d like to hear about it. Here’s how we work with authors, and here’s where you can tell us about your book.