Michael D. Butler is an evangelist and he owns a publishing company that helps authors write and publish books. On today’s podcast he shares with us on “How to Publish a Book.”

Publishing

What is the difference between traditional publishing, self-publishing, and hybrid publishing?

Why is it important to have someone edit your book?

How much does it cost to publish a book?

How long does it take to get a book published?

Subscribe to The Evangelism Podcast with Evangelism Coach Daniel King

Transcript: 

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:01):
Michael D. Butler is an evangelist and he owns a publishing company that helps authors write and publish books on today’s podcast. He’s going to talk about how to publish a book.

Evangelism Podcast Host (00:14):
Jesus said, go into all the world and preach the gospel. Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be welcome to the evangelism podcast with Dr. Daniel King interviews, full-time evangelists, pastors, missionary, and normal everyday Christians to discover how they share their faith, their powerful testimonies, and amazing stories that will inspire you to reach people with the good news. And now here’s your host missionary and evangelist Daniel King. Welcome to

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (00:51):
The evangelism podcast. I’m Daniel King, and I am excited about telling people about Jesus and I also am excited about writing and books because books are a great way to tell more people about Jesus. Today. I have an expert in writing and publishing a books. Michael Butler. Thank you for being on the evangelism podcast. Hey, it’s great to be here, Daniel. Thanks for having me back. So tell me a little bit about your background in the publishing industry. How many books have you published and help authors publish over the last few years, we’ve published 350 titles in the last three years. And you know, it’s just amazing because a lot of people thought the internet killed publishing, but book readership is up globally and publishing is up globally. And if you’ve got a story in you, now’s the time to get it out to the world, specifically how to, you want to do a, how to book is the, if you’re going to write fiction or nonfiction, there’s really a place in the Christian market for Christian romance.

Michael D. Butler (01:50):
We’ve got we got some screenplays and books being option for movies right now. So I will talk about that. There’s a real demand for, for Christian content, for faith content. And when it comes to writing books, the books that sell the highest in the in the how to, or the nonfiction is, is how to books, how to books and self-help books, you can do your memoir, but that’s the slowest moving category of book. And then on the on the fiction side, if you’re going to do romance, keep it clean. I, Hey, listen, Christians need to read romance books too. Right? And wouldn’t that be great to have some godly Christian romance books that are appropriate, that we could still option for movies and sell to Hollywood. So no naked people on the front of the Christian romance, just, yeah, they have to have a shirt button, some clothes on him. Well, I know my wife really loves that category. She, she reads a lot of, of great stuff in, in Christian romance and there’s definitely a need for it. So let’s talk about publishing a book. How does someone publish book nowadays?

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (03:00):
There there’s a traditional model of, of publishing and then there’s their self publishing. And then there’s some ways of publishing that kind of combined the two. So could you explain those different categories and what the publishing process is like with modern techniques?

Michael D. Butler (03:15):
Sure. In the past, if somebody had a good book idea, they would go pitch it to a New York publisher like assignment and Schuster or a McMillan and hope to hear back. The downside of that is when you publish traditionally, they kept the rights that traditional publisher keeps the rights and only pays the author about 15 to 20%. The upside is your book would get global distribution, but on the downside, it can take two to three years to bring it to market. If they give you a call back. And the way it works now is if you don’t have 2 million followers on social media, have your own TV show, you won’t get that call back. The self publishing route is, is like it’s named you do everything yourself. And the average self-published author, statistically never sells more than 200 books because they never get distribution beyond Amazon.

Michael D. Butler (04:04):
Amazon’s only 55% of the world’s book sales. Now you do keep a hundred percent of the royalty and sin. You do keep the rights, but you’ve got to do everything yourself. So by the time you find a cover designer, find an editor, do all those things, figure out how to do an EPUB conversion. You’re a few thousand dollars in, and you don’t have everything just right on the copyright registration in the library of Congress. That’s where you might want to call a hybrid publisher. That’s the other option. And the hybrid model is, is a really popular model now because it lets the author keep the rights, keep the lion’s share of the royalties, get global distribution and bring it to market fast. So in fact, as a hybrid publisher, that’s what we do. And we get our authors into bookstores and libraries and set them up properly. There’s a one-time author investment on the front side, which is nominal. And it’s about the same as what an author would invest if they were doing it themselves. And we ensure everything’s done properly and done properly the first time.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (04:59):
And so if someone was interesting in utilizing your services for publishing a book, how could they find out more information about you?

Michael D. Butler (05:07):
Yeah, they can reach out to us on the net at beyondpublishing.net and michaeldbutler.com. We’ve been able to help so many authors, Michael D butler.com and beyond publishing.net. And they can just set up a free 30 minute consult with myself or one of my team members. And we will give them feedback on their book, title, subtitle, marketability of their books, sellability of their book and give them feedback and also look at their, their timeline goals and their book launch goals and see if we might be a fit.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (05:41):
So what are some of the elements that go into actually publishing a book? Like let’s say someone has written a manuscript, they’ve opened up Microsoft word and they’ve pounded on the keyboard and they have 50,000 words or a hundred thousand words that they’ve, they’ve written. Then what’s the next step. How do they go from having this file to actually having a printed book in their hand?

Michael D. Butler (06:06):
Well, we always like to tell authors is if you’re going to launch a book, launch a movement around it, don’t just launch a book, but launch a workshop or a course around it that really ties into your brand. So if you’re out there doing marriage seminars right now, and you’re writing a book on marriage, that’s a good fit. If you haven’t started your marriage seminars yet tell your reader, Hey, we’re, we’re launching this book because we’ve been doing marriage seminars for people in the past. We’re going to start that up again. And you want to include testimonials of people that have gone through your marriage workshop, that you’ve been able to help. And then you want to have a QR code in that book so that they can go to your landing page to see what workshops you have coming up on the calendar.

Michael D. Butler (06:47):
So let’s really build a movement around the book because let’s face it. Book sales are only about 20% of an author’s revenue. You want to have a back and product. So like Daniel’s got a podcast here, but he’s also got, he’s got a huge ministry. He’s evangelizing the world. And so what is your strategy? Let’s look at your strategy. If you’re a therapist, if you’re a pastor, if you’re a speaker, you do workshops. How can we plug that book into the overall next level? I always say to authors, why are you selling now? What’s your core product? How can we expand it? Can you explore it some more revenue out of one of these verticals, be it a, you know, licensed family therapist and you’re doing marriage workshops. That’s a perfect fit.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (07:30):
Now I’ve, I’ve met some ministers that, that they have, self-published a book and they hand it to me. It’s got a really ugly cover. It has a grainy photo on the back. It obviously hasn’t been edited because there are spelling mistakes and in different places. And it seems no matter how much the anointing is on that book is never going to do well because it just doesn’t look attractive. And they really haven’t made it look the way a professionally published book would look, even if God is in it, it’s still, they say, don’t judge a book by the cover, but everybody judges a book by the cover. So what are some of the steps that it takes to, to make a book look attractive and look like something that one would want to buy? I think first step would, would maybe be an editor. Talk to me about that. The editing process, what needs to go into that? Well, edit

Michael D. Butler (08:33):
Getting as much like a, a mechanic, you know, you’ve got to have a good mechanic to keep the car running smoothly. That’s what’s on the inside, but we, we pre-sell books and go number one for you before you ever are done writing the manuscript because we finalize the cover. And, and that is through a strategic meeting where we do with you on a zoom car in person that who is the reader of this book. So we can actually, pre-sell the cover of the book with blank pages for six months help you go bestseller because we know what sells. And you know, a lot of people will come up with a subtitle that they think is a title, like how to win friends and influence people. That was a popular book by the way, by Dale Carnegie. But it was more of a subtitle and the subtitle is what’s in it for me.

Michael D. Butler (09:22):
And that really doesn’t need to be the title. That’s the way we used to do titles. But now we want to capture the readers intrigue with one or two words, one or two syllables, and then tell them what’s in it in the subtitle. So there’s a whole science around the science around the book is if somebody sees your book on a shelf or online and the title intrigues them, then they’ll turn it over and read the back. And then the back cover content. The whole goal of the back cover content is to look at the table of contents. And if you intrigued me with one of these chapters that tells me evidence of the Bible, and I opened up to chapter five and I start reading it, I’m 83% likely to go up to the cash register and pay for this book by Daniel King. Even if I don’t know Daniel King, because I want to know that there’s evidence of God in the Bible. So that was the cover back cover table of contents, all very powerful hooks to get me to buy the book.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (10:17):
What are some elements that should be on the cover, the back cover?

Michael D. Butler (10:22):
Well, I liked, I liked the author picture to be on the front cover. It’s, it’s very important because you’re really selling yourself. Yeah. You’re yeah. You’re, you’re, you’re branding yourself. So when somebody sees you on a Christian program on television, or even just on a podcast or a YouTube channel, they’re like, I know I’ve seen this guy before you want that name brand recognition. You’re young. You’re going to be around a long time. And that’s what you want. There’s a lot of false teachers out there. There’s a lot of false prophets. So you’re, you’re, you’re selling truth. You’re selling the word of God and you’re sharing the word of God with the world and there’s nothing wrong. You know, I, you know, some churches bless their heart. They teach you to be so humble that you don’t know how to market yourself. And there’s a final, I mean, th there’s a balance there and you do, you do want, this is the right thing to do. I’ve got Daniel’s book here, master. So winner, you can become a master. So winner, you do want your picture on the cover of the book nine times out of 10. There’s some people that have a face for radio. And we’ll talk about that when we meet.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (11:25):
So if someone comes to your, your company in, in and wants your help with publishing a book, typically how much do they invest in into that process?

Michael D. Butler (11:38):
So they’re gonna, they’re gonna make a one-time author investment of about $3,000, which we’re going to help them make back quickly by selling 300 books. And that’s going to be a turnkey thing that we, we do everything them, including

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (11:54):
That’s that’s editing, cover design, net, quotation, helping them also

Michael D. Butler (12:01):
ISB in library of Congress. EPUB conversion all the set up, loading it to hundreds of sites, Barnes, and noble.com Books-A-Million dot com, amazon.com. That’s the, e-book the audio book, the hardcover and the paperback that includes everything except editing and cover design, because with editing is based on word count. So you could bring us a 30,000 word book, or you could bring us a hundred thousand word book, and it’s going to be based on, based on word count.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (12:28):
So you have a program to help people put out a book in only 60 days. How, how can they take benefit of that program?

Michael D. Butler (12:37):
Yeah, it’s a proven program. It’s helped 85% of the attendees complete their book 85% of their manuscript within eight weeks. And it’s at right book 60 days.com, right? Wr ITE book six, zero days.com and they can access it for free because we’re on the program here. And yeah, there’s a great testimonials. About how long

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (13:02):
Does it typically take for a book to be published?

Michael D. Butler (13:06):
Well, once somebody brings us a rough manuscript, we can have it published in four weeks. So while it’s off to edit, we’re working with the author on the cover design, we bring four or five designs to them. Once they pick the one they want, we’ll tweak it. And then we start pre-selling with 3d images launch announcements for their social media. We’re pushing it out on our side as well. We’re incentivized to push the book out everywhere and we take their books and their catalog to all the major book shows of the world.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (13:34):
That’s outstanding. Well, thank you so much for talking to us about how to publish a book. You are an expert in this, you’ve published over 350 books in the last three years, so, so thank you, Michael Butler for being on the evangelism podcast.

Michael D. Butler (13:50):
Yes, Daniel. Thank you always a pleasure. Thanks so much.

Evangelism Coach Daniel King (13:54):
The evangelism podcast today, could you do me a favor, go find the evangelism podcast on Apple iTunes and leave us a review and make sure you subscribe. So you don’t miss any of our exciting episodes

Evangelism Podcast Host (14:09):
For more information about how to share your faith or to financially support our worldwide evangelistic outreaches. Visit King ministries.com. Again, that’s King ministries.com.