For almost three years I bought Bibles, nonfiction and academic books for a Christian bookstore in Grand Rapids. Part of the job was meeting authors who hoped we’d carry their books. Many of them were self-published, and a good number had something worth saying. Most of the time I still had to turn them down.
The reasons were rarely about the message. The manuscript hadn’t been edited past a spell-check, or the cover looked homemade from across the room, or the interior was set in a way no trade publisher would have let out the door. Some of those authors had paid a vanity publisher several thousand dollars and still ended up with a book I couldn’t put on a shelf. I hated those conversations. In 2023 I wrote an open letter on my blog, “Dear Self-Published Christian Author,” trying to describe what I was seeing from the other side of the counter, and I kept thinking there ought to be a better way.
True Bearing Press is my attempt at one. I want to be plain about where it stands.
Right now it’s a one-man operation in Saranac, Michigan. We’ve published two of my own books, Reassigned and Human, Still, and a third, Strong to Save, a devotional for men drawn from my Navy years, is coming in 2027. Most of what we’ve released so far has come through Puzzle Arbor, our imprint for Bible puzzle and coloring books. I’m not embarrassed by that. Those books are made with care (each word search is built from a named passage, and you can check every criss-cross clue against an open Bible), and they’re part of how a small press pays its own way while it grows. There’s no marketing budget yet and no staff. If you publish with us, you’ll be promoting your own book, and I won’t pretend otherwise.
I also want to be clear about what we aren’t trying to do. Eerdmans, Crossway, Baker, Zondervan, B&H, Thomas Nelson, Tyndale, InterVarsity Press and the rest have earned their places, and they publish a great many good books. We’re not trying to compete with them. They have acquisitions editors, sales forces and decades of reputation behind them, and an author who can land a contract with one of them should probably take it.
Academic theology is another shelf I don’t feel called to fill. Reformed publishers keep it well stocked, and the arguments for and against Calvinism have been made many times over by people with more patience for them than I have. We won’t be adding to that pile from either side.
What interests me is the ground the big houses mostly can’t afford to cover. I think of the pastor who has spent twenty years in a small church that will never make anybody’s list of the fastest-growing anything, and who has learned things about faithfulness that no conference speaker had time to learn. Or the woman who has led the same Bible study for a decade and finally wrote down what her group kept asking her. Books like those rarely get past an agent, because their authors don’t have a platform. Some of them deserve readers anyway.
So here’s where we’re headed. I want True Bearing Press to publish thoughtful Christian nonfiction, including Christian living, women’s issues, ministry, Bible studies and devotionals, from people who have something worth saying and are willing to do the work of saying it well. We provide editing, cover and interior design, production, and a True Bearing Press ISBN, and we don’t charge authors a dime. You keep the royalties. Over time I’d like the catalog to be something a bookstore buyer would recognize: books that look like they belong on the shelf because someone took them seriously before they went to print.
I don’t know how long that will take. Small presses grow slowly, when they grow at all, and I’d be lying if I said I had the next five years mapped out. What I can promise is how we’ll treat each book that comes through: we’ll read it closely, push back where it needs it, and make it as good as we know how.
If you’ve been working on a manuscript that fits, I’d like to hear about it. Tell us about your book. If you’d rather see what we’ve been up to first, our books are here.