How to publish a Christian book

From testimony to manuscript

If you've ever shared your testimony at church — from the pulpit, in a small group, across a kitchen table — you've already done the hard part. You know the story, you know where people lean in, and you know where the room goes quiet. The gap between "I can tell it" and "I can write it" is smaller than it feels, and here's the process we've used with pastors, deacons, and everyday believers since 2017:

• Record it the way you'd tell it. Before you write anything, sit down with your phone's voice recorder and tell your testimony out loud, as if to one hurting person — not a congregation. Do it three or four times over a couple of weeks. Those recordings are your raw manuscript, in your real voice, which is the voice that reaches people.
• Shape it in three movements. Before. The turning point. After. Nearly every testimony book that works has this spine. The mistake we see most in Christian manuscripts is rushing the "before" — readers need to sit in the valley with you long enough to believe the mountain. Don't clean up your past into two polite paragraphs; the mess is the ministry.
• Write to one reader. Not "the world." The woman sitting in her car in the church parking lot, not ready to go in. The man who just got the diagnosis you got. When authors picture one person, the preaching tone falls away and the testimony tone takes over — and the testimony tone is the one that sells and, more importantly, lands.
• Don't wait for perfect. A testimony book runs anywhere from 25,000 to 70,000 words, and your draft is allowed to be rough — we work in drafts, and editing is included in every package. If writing truly isn't your gift, that's what ghostwriting is for: you tell your story in recorded conversations, from $1,600, and it's still your book, your name, your rights.

If you're starting from a blank page rather than a told-many-times testimony, our guide on how to write a book covers outlining and finishing in more depth.

Devotional structures: 40-day, 365-day, and topical

Devotionals are the workhorses of Christian self-publishing — they're bought as gifts, used in small groups, and reordered by churches. They're also more forgiving to write than a memoir, because the structure carries you. Three formats cover nearly every devotional we've published:

• The 40-day devotional. The best first book, full stop. Forty days echoes the wilderness, the flood, the fast — readers understand the shape instantly, and churches love it for Lent or a congregation-wide study. At 250–400 words per entry, the whole manuscript runs 10,000–16,000 words. That's a finishable book for a first-time author with a full life.
• The 365-day devotional. A daily-reading book is a big, valuable project — and at 300 words a day it's a 100,000+ word manuscript. We'll be honest: don't make this your first book. Write the 40-day version, learn what your readers respond to, then grow it.
• The topical devotional. Entries grouped by theme instead of dates — 31 devotions for caregivers, grief, new mothers, men in recovery. Topical books can serve one specific reader deeply, and specific books outsell general ones on Amazon almost every time.

Whichever you choose, keep every entry to the same four-part anatomy: a scripture verse, a short reflection (150–350 words — one idea, one story, one point), a closing prayer of two or three lines, and one application question or action. Readers feel the rhythm by day three and trust it by day ten. And write five entries before you plan forty; if the format fights you at entry five, better to learn it there.

Quoting scripture legally: what KJV, NIV, and ESV actually allow

This surprises almost every Christian author we talk to: most modern Bible translations are copyrighted, and quoting them in a book you sell has rules. The good news is the rules are published, generous, and easy to follow once someone lays them out. Here's the practical version:

• King James Version (KJV): public domain in the United States. Quote as much as you want, no permission, no fees, no notices. This is a real reason many devotional authors simply write in KJV — if your congregation already uses it, the decision makes itself.
• NIV (Zondervan/Biblica): you may quote up to 500 verses without written permission, as long as the quoted verses aren't a complete book of the Bible and don't make up 25% or more of your book's text — and you must print their required copyright notice on your copyright page. Past those limits, you write to the publisher for permission, which can take weeks and sometimes involves a fee.
• ESV (Crossway): more generous — up to 1,000 verses without permission, under similar "not a complete book, not 50% of your text" conditions, with its own required notice.
• NKJV, NLT, and most others: similar published policies, typically in the 250–500 verse range with a 25% cap and a required notice. Every major translation posts its policy online — search the translation name plus "permissions."

Three practitioner habits that keep you out of trouble entirely. First, pick one main translation and note it once on your copyright page ("Scripture quotations are from…"), marking any exceptions verse by verse — mixing translations without attribution is the most common correction our editors make on Christian manuscripts. Second, if you're anywhere near the verse limits, count; a 40-day devotional with one verse per day sits at 40 verses, nowhere close, but a Bible-study book that reprints whole chapters can cross 25% faster than you'd think. Third, paraphrasing scripture in your own words needs no permission at all — "Paul tells the Philippians he's learned contentment in every circumstance" is always free. When we publish your book, checking the notices and attribution formatting is part of editing; you won't be left to guess.

Your publishing paths: CBA traditional vs assisted publishing

Christian publishing has its own traditional industry — the CBA world (named for the old Christian Booksellers Association): Zondervan, Thomas Nelson, Tyndale, Baker, B&H. Wonderful houses. Here's the honest picture of getting in: they almost all require a literary agent, agents want authors with a "platform" — meaning a large congregation, a broadcast audience, or tens of thousands of followers — and the road from query letter to bookstore commonly runs two to four years, with most manuscripts turned away no matter how anointed the message. If you pastor a megachurch, pursue it. If you're a retired Sunday school teacher with a 40-day devotional, that road mostly wasn't built for you — and that's the publisher's economics, not a verdict on your book.

Self-publishing is how the majority of testimony books and devotionals reach readers now, and assisted self-publishing — what we do — means one team handles the editing, cover, formatting, ISBN, and store setup while you keep every right and every royalty. Our packages run $699 to $7,999, one payment, a finished manuscript typically publishes in about 60 days, and your book lists on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books, and more by tier. The details live on our Christian book publishing page, and the full comparison of every path is in our guide to how to publish a book.

One warning we'd be wrong to leave out: Christian authors are heavily targeted by predatory "publishers." The pattern is always the same — a warm call, prayer on the phone, talk of how the Lord is going to use your book, then a $6,000–$15,000 invoice, a claimed share of your royalties, and pressure to sign today. Test every company, including us, against three questions: Is every price public and in one payment? Do I keep 100% of rights and royalties, in writing? Does nothing publish without my written approval? Anyone who stumbles on those three, walk away — prayerfully, but walk.

Ministry economics: pricing your book to fund the work

Plenty of our Christian authors don't measure success in sales rank. The book is a ministry tool — something to hand the grieving widow, sell at the women's retreat, send with the missions team. That changes the math, so let's do the math honestly:

• Retail royalties. You keep 100% of your royalties with us — we take zero, ever. The stores take their standard cut (roughly 30–40% plus printing), and the rest goes straight to your own account, paid out every 60–90 days. On a $20 paperback, that's typically $7–$12 per copy to you. Devotionals tend to price at $9.99–$14.99; testimony books and memoirs at $14.99–$19.99.
• Author copies at print cost. This is the number ministry authors care about most. You can order your own copies at printing cost — typically a few dollars for a standard paperback — and sell them at the book table for $15, or give them away for less than a greeting card costs. A box of 100 for a conference is a phone call, not a negotiation.
• Bulk orders for congregations. Churches running your 40-day devotional as a study will order 50–200 copies at once. Sold near retail, one congregation-wide study can return more than a year of Amazon trickle — and it puts your book in hands that pass it on.
• Recovering your investment. At $7–$12 per retail copy plus book-table margins, authors commonly recover a $699–$1,199 package within a few hundred copies. We won't promise sales — nobody honest will — but the arithmetic is yours to check, and we'll walk through it with your actual numbers on the phone.

When you're ready for readers beyond your own pews, book marketing runs from $499/mo plus a $500 setup — and we'd rather you launch to your church first and add marketing when the book has legs than pay for ads on day one.

Who's handling your message — our promise to Christian authors

A fair question we get asked plainly: "Will the people editing my book respect what's in it?" Yes — and here's what that means in practice, not as a slogan. Our editors correct grammar, tighten pacing, and check your scripture attributions; they do not touch your theology, soften your convictions, or trim your testimony to make it more "marketable." Where a doctrinal word choice matters — and in Christian books it often does — the edit comes back to you as a question, never as a silent change. Your final proof, printed and digital, gets your written approval before a single copy publishes. And if your story includes things you're not ready for the world to know before release day, an NDA is available for the asking.

We've published testimony books, devotionals, Bible studies, Christian children's books, and books of sermons since 2017 — over 1,200 authors across all genres, with faith titles among the most common calls we take. The message stays yours. We just build the book around it.

Faith titles we've published

Testimonies, devotionals, and studies — most by first-time authors.