The Gate was Never the Door

Why I stopped seeking approval from the Christian publishing industry and started stewarding the stories God gave me.

I remember the phone call that changed my season of life.

It was May 2019, and I took it while pacing my dining room, annoyed by the mint green on the walls and the too-big-for-the-room table. I shoved a chair in so I could stand between it and the window overlooking our front yard. The old man across the street was mowing his lawn for the fourth time that week.

Our lawn looked like one that would be nominated for an episode of Curb Appeal. Something to get to the next day.

I focused my attention on Lisa’s voice as she answered my question about the type of help offered by the online writing community she was in.

I took a breath, trying to humble the tone of my voice before responding to her. “You see,” I wondered if I even understood what it was I was looking for, “I went to school for creative writing. I’ve been a writing tutor at the local community college. I’ve done freelance work. Interned after college with a well-known Christian publisher. It’s just been a bit since then, and things have changed. The thing is, I know how to write. I don’t know how to get published.”

“Oh! The live training each week focuses on that side of things, not just the craft.” Lisa assured me.

That’s all I needed to hear. I paid the fee and joined that night.

Becoming part of that online writing community changed my life. They marketed it as a group that would bring clarity and community around your message, a message that was worth sharing. It did just that.

It also filled in the gaps between what I had been told as an intern and what had changed in the publishing industry since.

When I was interning, my supervisor told me it was only a matter of time before they would stop accepting unsolicited manuscripts because the number of submissions was too much to keep up with, and the majority were poorly written.

“How will authors submit?” I asked, trying to hide the panic in my voice.

“They can submit to a literary agent. Or they can come to a writing conference.”

“Oh.” I tried to hide the disappointment. My broke, recently graduated butt knew I wasn’t getting to one of those expensive writing conferences anytime soon.

That was the beginning of the shift. To this day, the way to be considered by a publisher is to have someone recommend you (a literary agent or another author) or talk with an editor at a conference, ideally in a pitch meeting.

I learned it wasn’t enough to just get in front of an agent or editor, you also needed to have a solid proposal, including a strong social media presence and email list. This made sense to me; having also majored in business management, I noticed the trend toward online marketing while working in the professional non-profit space and encouraged the organizations I worked for to lean into it.

A good size platform for an author, I was told, was between 5k-10k. I dutifully got to work by joining Instagram.

Simultaneously, I started an online business with my mom serving the homeschooling community. I earned my business degree before social media marketing became a thing, so I set to taking courses, attending webinars, listening to podcasts, reading books, and joining masterminds so I could get up to speed.

The basic business and marketing principles I learned in college emerged from the place in my mind where they sat collecting dust. I added their new online applications to my knowledge bank. As I did, however, I became increasingly aware of disconnects in the Christian publishing industry.

Disconnects such as:

• Authors encouraged to spend thousands on website and email hosting, courses, online communities, and conferences¹ so they could “invest” in their business, while being cautioned not to expect income from their books beyond their advance.²
  

• Calling it a partnership between author and publisher while expecting authors to sell rights³ to their product for a low advance that devalues the investment and risk shouldered by the author while overstating the business risk of the publisher—perpetuating the idea that the author is lucky to be picked,⁴ rather than someone who earned their spot at the table.
  

• Prioritizing books authored by big-name pastors, speakers, or influencers because they guarantee sales for the publisher—not because they bring a unique or deeper conversation around orthodoxy or orthopraxy, or because they tell a beautiful story from a biblical perspective.⁵
  

• Authors being told, “If God wants your book published, He’ll open the door,” leading to authors questioning if they misheard God when, years into the grind, the doors still aren’t opening.

It made me uneasy.

As the industry encourages authors to reject hustle culture, resist striving, and trust God, their expectations for us and ways of operating tell a different story.

I jokingly told a friend that if the Christian publishing industry stood before the investors on Shark Tank and pitched a typical contract they’d offer an unpublished author, the response would be (after scoffing) “I’m out!”

They would call it a poor return on investment.

The Bible calls it poor stewardship.

In addition to joining that writing community in 2019, I started practicing a weekly 24-hour rest. You can’t practice Sabbath week after week without accounting for how you are stewarding the other six days, how you are stewarding your life.

I remember the moment that shifted me into a new stewardship season.

It was November 2022, and I walked out of a writing conference, holding back tears until I climbed into the rental car where my husband waited for me. The door closed on the song of the birds in the tree he had parked under. The southern sun shined bright, and I lowered the visor to block it.

Through sobs that required napkins from the glove box (for both my eyes and my snotty nose), I shared with Steve how during a panel, a literary agent dropped a new platform number to aim for: 25K-50k.⁶ This applied mainly to non-fiction books, the panel explained, but encouraged fiction writers to still aim for a large email list: 5k-10k.

After two years of hard work, I had about 500 on my email list, mainly from my podcast about Sabbath, not even fiction. So, essentially, I was at zero.

I told Steve next that the number of non-fiction from first-time authors had increased slightly (good news), but spots for fiction titles, especially from new authors, had dwindled at well-known publishers, making the competition even harder.

I’d notice the increase in Christian lifestyle books over the past decade as secular publishers bought Christian publishers. As other Christian publishers went out of business or merged with other Christian publishers, I noticed the emphasis on publishing fiction decreased. This news from the conference confirmed my suspicions.

Finally, I told Steve the reason for my tears: I had two editors ask me to send them proposals for two of my books, one non-fiction and the other fiction.

The poor guy couldn’t figure out how that information led to tears, and he told me so.

I shared how one of the editors told me to find his colleague, a longtime fiction editor, at the conference and ask her about another novel idea of mine listed on my one sheet. Fiction wasn’t his area, but he thought it was an intriguing premise and suggested I ask her for her thoughts.

Excited, I searched her out, waited for some time at a respectful distance while she was busy. When she had a minute, I told her that her colleague had sent me her way, then shared my novel idea with her, and asked her if she thought there was a market for it.

She threw up her hands and blurted out, “Who knows what the market wants?! I don’t know.” She slung her purse over her shoulder and hugged her notebook close to her body. She shrugged. “Maybe there is a market for your book, maybe not.”

Not knowing how to respond to her apparent annoyance at my question, I thanked her for her time. The editor turned away from me and, seeing another well-known author, smiled big. She joined the author, leaving me there with my embarrassment, disappointment, and sense I had wasted her time.

Acquisitions editors are supposed to be the ones leading the call for fresh stories. They are the gatekeepers with their pulse on the wants of readers. How could she not know what the market wanted? The confusion directed my steps out of the building and into the car with my husband.

Later, when telling my writer friends about the interaction, one joked that maybe the editor had had a bad burrito for lunch. Another tried to give her the benefit of the doubt that she was just having a bad day.

In the car, I acknowledged to my husband that agent and editor personalities, and how they matched up with an author’s, factored into this whole getting published thing. “This probably just means she’s not the right editor—”

How long will you strive for their approval instead of stewarding what I’ve given you?

My words trailed off, and the hand I’d been using to punctuate them fell into my lap.

My eyes noticed the landscaper riding a mower around the soccer field next to the church. He expertly maneuvered around the goal and continued in steady lines—back and forth, back and forth.

I rolled down the window, and the hum of the mower joined the birds’ song, filling the silence in the car.

How long would I try to appease an industry that wasn’t set up for my success?

And by success, I mean the effectual stewardship of the stories and readers God entrusted to me.

Success that leads to both positive impact and income.

Not breaking even.

Not losing money.

Not others feeding their families off of the field given to me to plant, while my family doesn’t benefit from the fruit of my labor.

Not equating the value of this story entrusted to me by the approval of gatekeepers who don’t know more than I do about it.

The Christian publishing industry is right about one thing: if God wants the story out there, He’ll open the door.

The problem is, at some point, they started believing they were the door.

The door was never a publishing contract; it has always been God’s invitation to the author to partner with Him in stewarding this story into the hands of a reader—in abundance, not scarcity.

So I walked away from the gate, and through the door God had already opened.

Last summer, I released my debut novel: Image of the Invisible.

This novel, the one that the editor didn’t know if there was a market for, found its way into the hands of readers almost three years later.

Readers who saw their particular life situation play out in a novel for the first time, and thanked me for it.

Readers who shared the book with friends because they knew they would not only enjoy the story, but be encouraged by it.

One reader picked it up and finished it the same day because she became engrossed in the story and couldn’t put it down.

Another reader donated copies to a prison because she felt it could have an impact there.

Another told me the novel made her think differently about her life and faith.

It made its way into the hands of readers. And it generated income.

Not because someone said it was worth publishing.

Not because I was picked.

But, because I was obedient.

1. Please note, I don’t have any problem with businesses charging for these services, or charging the prices they do. They have costs to cover and a profit to make. That’s the point. Authors should be allowed to do the same.

2. Read this article for a well-done explanation of how advances work, and the average amount.

3. Read this article to understand how rights work in the book publishing industry.

4. While this blog post is over a decade old, the point she makes about the sense of being “chosen” still prevails today.

5. This is not to say the books from these big names aren’t wonderful books! But, the reality is that these authors are often pursued by editors, and their proposed titles take spaces from unknown authors, even if that unknown author’s manuscript brings something positive to the conversation.

6. There has been a shift in the conversation around platform numbers in recent years as publishers realized engagement matters more that follower count, however, as this article demonstrates, higher numbers are still encouraged—just not the staggering ones mentioned at the conference.