A (Non-Definitive) Guide to Jewish Publishing

Deciding to publish, traditional vs. self-publishing, steps in the publishing process, fundraising, and alternatives to publishing

After working with Jewish publishers and authors/mechabrei seforim for the past few years, I thought it could be valuable to walk through the process of publishing a book or sefer, including how much doing so might cost you and a couple of suggestions for publishing your writing without having to pay at all (and maybe even getting paid!).

A couple of caveats to get started:

• This is based on my personal experience as a content- and copy-editor who has worked both with a few publishers and with authors who chose to self-publish. I’ve also partnered with my wife, a graphic designer, to bring a few books all the way from manuscript through editing/typeset/cover design/published, so I have some sense of that part of the process as well.

• This is also based on my experience as an author who has published one book with a traditional publisher and another book through self-publishing.

• Other people may have had different experiences; this is a non-definitive guide. I’m happy to update this based on feedback.

• The content below applies to publishing sefarim. A few people, including Rebecca Klempner and Rabbi Reuven Chaim Klein, noted that outside of the sefarim world, traditional publishing entails no money out of pocket for the author. Instead, the publisher covers all the costs (and may even pay an advance to the author); this model is exceedingly rare in the sefarim world, though, so I chose not to even mention it below. The timelines and steps for publishing other genres, especially novels/fiction, can be different, as well.

With that out of the way, here’s what you can expect:

• Should I publish? Realistic expectations

• Two tracks: Traditional and self-publishing

• Steps of the publishing process

• The hard part: Raising money

• Alternatives to publishing

Should I Publish?

Do you have a file on your laptop named some variation of “My Book,” “My Sefer,” or “Work In Progress”? Or a folder of notes that you’ve been working on for a few years already. If yes, you’re not alone. Many, many people have some collection of written material that they’ve labored over, refined, and, deep down, have considered releasing to the world at large. (Listing the manifold benefits of writing as part of your learning will have to be the subject of a different essay; for a taste, see here.) How should you decide if such a venture is really worthwhile?

There are a few parts to this question:

• Goal

• Content

• Cost

1. First, consider why you want to publish. Is it:

• To become rich and famous. Sorry to pull the plug on the fantasy, but probably not going to happen. Most of the time, authors don’t make back the amount of money invested in publishing a book from book sales alone. While there are different estimates out there as to how many books an author can expect to sell in our world, one major factor is how big an audience a person already has. If a person is basically unknown — say, they teach in a yeshiva/seminary or two, or preside over a shul and give shiurim around one community — they shouldn’t expect to sell more than 200–300 books, unless their book happens to be one of the very few that somehow catches fire. If a person has some name recognition, then they can up their estimate to around 500. That being said, there are other potential “rich and famous” opportunities that can come along with publishing; we’ll cover those below.

• To share a unique approach to a topic or subject. This is a great reason to publish, using either of the two tracks (depending on other factors below). Again, one shouldn’t expect to make it big — every author who has ever published a book has assumed their book was world-changing and the most important idea raised in that decade, and the world usually doesn’t agree — but for those who care about the topic you’re writing about, your book can be significant for them.

• To concretize a learning achievement or mark a lifecycle event. Both of these are great personal reasons to publish. A powerful way to reinforce one’s identity as a learner and to feel like they are making progress in their learning is to take a sizeable project and publish one’s work on it. That could be chiddushim on a perek or two of Shas, practical summaries of sugyos in halachah, mehalchim on Chumash/Tanach or moadim — doesn’t matter, as long as you worked hard on it and will be excited to hold it once its printed. Similarly, publishing even a small kuntres for a child’s birth/bris, bar mitzvah, or wedding makes a strong statement to your family about your values. In this case, use the self-publishing track, not traditional publishing.

  • Its worth mentioning that what you celebrate as a family is a powerful way to communicate and reinforce values. This may be one aspect of the importance of celebrating extended goals in Torah (Shabbos 118b) and mitzvos (Taanis 31a). Printing a sefer is a tangible and exciting way to concretize an accomplishment in learning, especially for children who don’t understand the concept of a siyum masechta or passing bechinos for semichah.

2. Next, consider the content you have to publish. Ask yourself a few questions:

• How confident am I that my ideas are correct?

  • If you’re basically summarizing meforshim on Chumash, you can probably be fairly comfortable in the accuracy of your ideas (although I have definitely come across egregious misunderstandings in this genre). If you have chiddushim in Halachah or Gemara b’iyun, or are looking to break ground on a new hashkafas ha’chayim, though, it would be worth double-checking your ideas with a friend or rebbi before putting them out into the world.

  • This is what haskamos are supposed to do, but it’s pretty rare for a haskamah to actually say “I read through this sefer cover to cover and sign off on the content.” Nowadays, most haskamos are really michtevei berachah: “This person is wonderful and ehrlich, so his Torah is probably good as well — but I can’t attest to that.” They’re helpful for signaling to the reader, “I identify with the communities aligned with the following gedolim,” which (heuristically) helps the reader decide if he wants to invest his time and money in your book. Ideally, you should try to find at least one or two big people who will actually read through parts of the book and give you feedback or sign off on the content itself. This becomes exponentially more important the more potentially “dangerous” or “volatile” the content is, like a book relating to aspects of ikkarei ha’das.

• How much of a contribution am I making to this area of Torah?

  • To a certain extent, this is the inverse of the above. If you’re basically restating old ideas (like many, many, many parashah seforim), than you’re probably safe accuracy-wise, but you’re also not likely contributing anything exciting to the conversation. If you are doing something new, you have a chance at making a real impact with your sefer, but that raises the urgency of making sure that your ideas are actually sound and correct.

    • Consider Reclaiming Dignity by Rabbi Anthony Manning and Bracha Poliakoff, a recent book that really broke through and became very popular. The book offers a new take on tznius both halachically and hashkafically, which is certainly interesting — but that creates a real imperative to get the content checked out by someone with broad enough shoulders to sign off on the content. (As can be seen from the wide range of haskamos, including prominent poskim, and the Forward from Rabbi Yitzchak Berkovits, the authors took this seriously and produced an admirable, valuable work).

    • This is an element of publishing which is fairly unique to our world, and we should take pride in it. There is an emes out there decided by the Creator of the World; a person doesn’t have the right to just “offer his opinions” in matters of Torah without putting in the work to confirm that they’re aligned with truth.

  • The chiddush of your book doesn’t have to be new ideas or approaches to a topic; it could also be something else, such as a new way of organizing content (see Learn Shabbos in Three Minutes a Day or Nach Daily/Journey Through Nach) or spreading a novel approach to learning (what I attempted with Halachic Worldviews).

  • If your content isn’t staking out a new position or adding a new perspective to the conversation, that doesn’t mean don’t publish; it just means self-publishing is likely the better option, with the goal of the last reason above, the personal benefits of publishing.

3. If you have a good reason to publish, and you’ve determined that your content is worthwhile to put out into the world, now consider the cost.

• Traditional publishing will generally start at minimum $20,000 (what that includes will be explained below). Self-publishing varies significantly, depending on the needs of the book, but let’s say it starts at around $7,000 for an average-sized, reasonably well-written manuscript. (In theory, you can self-publish for free — have friends and family edit, typeset in Word, make a cover on Canva, and publish on Amazon — but remember the inverse relationship between price and quality; it definitely applies here.)

  Do you have any way to get that much money (suggestions below)? If yes, great; if not, don’t rip up your life’s work just yet! Restore the file from trash! There are alternatives to explore; we’ll discuss it below.

Traditional Publishing vs. Self-publishing

Still with us? Great!

If it makes sense for you to publish, now think about which track makes the most sense for you.

Traditional publishing means working with an established brand-name publisher (Koren/Maggid, Mosaica, Adir…). They have a team that takes care of every step of the publishing process for you, and usually a deal with a distributor to get your book into seforim stores.

Self-publishing means cobbling together your own group of professionals to bring your book from good to great. Printing can be done either by uploading to a program like Amazon KDP, which is a print-on-demand service (an individual copy is printed once someone orders the book, and the price for printing is subtracted from the price paid), or through a local book printer who will print a small run of books for you to stock and sell.

Before going through the pros and cons of each, let’s first lay down the basic trajectory of the publishing process.

The Publishing Process

Most traditional publishers follow these six steps to go from Word document to beautiful book. In self-publishing, none of these steps are mandatory (besides typesetting), but each one contributes to a higher-quality finished product. Of course, each step adds to the overall cost.

0. Pre-edit

   1. Anything needed to get a manuscript ready for editing. In most cases, the author does this by writing their book. However, I’ve worked with people who legitimately have fantastic content to share, but lack either the time or the writing skills¹ to get them down on paper. If this is you, consider working with a co-writer/ghostwriter to get to first base (the first draft). The better the first draft is, the more an editor will be able to improve the final product. This will cost more, but it is certainly worth the investment. (In fact, a badly written first draft can end up costing you more from the editor than you would have paid to someone to help you write it in the first place, depending on how difficult the mangled manuscript is to work with).

   2. Another option is for someone to work off of recordings of shiurim. A transcript is not the goal here — that can be a first step, but the goal is to transform a verbal presentation into a written one, and that goes well beyond just catching the words spoken and pasting them onto the page.

   3. An additional step to be aware of is source work. In many cases, sources either need to be checked for accuracy or marked down in the first place. This is not included in the standard publishing process, so if it’s something you need, either do it yourself before starting or mention it to the content/copyeditor (and expect to pay it, too).

1. Content edit

   1. The content editor focuses on the content of your book. He’ll be looking for things like:

      1. Does the structure of the book make sense?

      2. Is each idea supported by sources?

      3. Would examples help me understand the idea better?

      4. Are there any weak spots that the author could do a better job explaining?

      5. Are there other sources that question this idea and should be addressed?

   2. A good content editor is like a nitpicky chavrusa who questions every word you say and assumption you make. Honestly, if he’s doing his job well, you’ll probably end up a little annoyed at his comments—but you’ll also recognize how much they’re contributing to the strength of the book.

   3. Content editor sends book back to author to review and address his comments. Then it’s off to —

2. Copyedit

   1. The copyeditor focuses on the granular aspects of the book: grammar, word choice, sentence structure, style choices. He’s meant to establish and enforce consistency in all these areas — words and names should be spelled the same, italics and CAPS should be used to signify distinct messages to the reader, and headers should be predictable and useful.

   2. A good copyeditor might sometimes sound like a thesaurus, offering alternative words throughout your book — but that should be because words have nuances and associations that you may not be aware of, so take his suggestions seriously.

3. Proofread

   1. The proofreader acts like a goalie, doing his best to stop mistakes from getting through. The copyeditor sets the style and takes care of almost all changes; the proofreader fixes the copyeditor’s mistakes and oversights.

   2. After the proofreader, the book goes back to the author to consider the changes and suggestions made by both the copyeditor and proofreader. In an ideal world, this is the author’s last chance to change anything in the book; once he sends it on to the next step, he may have to pay extra and/or wait longer to make any changes.

4. Typeset

   1. Once the author approves/adjusts the changes made by the editors and proofreader, a graphics person takes the Word document and moves it into something like Adobe InDesign. They make everything look like a book — font, spacing, margins, headers, etc. Lots of this is standardized, but there is some room for personal preference based on what you think looks good.

5. Straightread

   1. A straightreader reads through the book once it’s already been typeset. At this point, it feels like reading a book rather than a Microsoft Word file. His goal is to catch any last mistakes, which could have crept in during the typesetting process or were missed by the copyeditor and proofreader (because hey, they’re human). One publisher I’ve worked with expects to find around 50-100 mistakes in a straightread for a standard-sized book (say around 200 pages/60-70,000 words).

   2. This is the stage most often skipped when doing self-publishing. That’s fine, just don’t expect a perfectly clean, mistake-free finished product; the straightread exists for a reason.

6. Cover Design

   1. Cover design is separate from the rest of the process and can really take place at any point. It may take a few rounds of brainstorming and prototyping before coming up with something you’re happy with — if you’re working with a publishing company, that’s par for the course, but if you’re working with an independent designer, make sure that you include from the start that you expect to need a few rounds of design.

   2. Do your due diligence to make this process as smooth as possible — find covers whose style you like, get a sense of which colors you want to use, suggest images that could work — it’s not the designer’s job to read your mind or receive an image from Heaven on the first try.

And that’s it — ready to publish!

Choosing a Track

With this in mind, what are the pros and cons of traditional publishing vs. self-publishing?

Traditional Publishing

Pros

1. Professional quality

2. No need to track down someone for each step of the process

3. Brand

   1. Each company has a certain brand and audience most closely connected to it. Publishing your book with a company says something about the quality of the writing and about who might find it interesting/appropriate for their standards/aligned with their interests.

4. Distribution

   1. It is possible to get your books into seforim stores when self-publishing, but its certainly easier to do when you’re working with a company that already takes care of distribution.

5. Reputation points

   1. Publishing a book with an established publishing company gives a person a stamp of authority that can open up certain doors. For example, an author may be asked to speak in contexts related to the book, which can open up public speaking opportunities. This can be an opportunity for an author to actually make some money from their book — not from sales, but from the speaking opportunities that the book unlocks. Of course, this is not a guarantee, but it is a possibility to keep in mind.

Cons

1. Cost

   1. As above — a baseline of $20,000 can be prohibitive to many.

2. No choice over who you work with

   1. Not necessarily an issue, but when you choose who you’re working with for each step of the process, you know what you’re getting. This is mainly a style issue, although I’ve experienced people in both tracks who really didn’t seem to know what they were doing (others probably said the same about me when I was first starting out).

3. Length of the process

   1. Traditional publishing can take at least 8-9 months, depending on the company, and can go longer as well. Printing can also take a while depending on where they print their books — China, Israel, USA.

4. Money from sales

   1. This is one of the biggest difference between publishers, so do your homework. In general, the author gets a percentage of store sales, say between 15–30%. Regarding selling copies independently, some publishers make the author buy copies at a reduced rate, while others say that because the author paid for entire publishing process, the books are already his, so no need to pay for copies.

Self-Publishing

Pros

1. Cost

   1. Usually cheaper than traditional publishing (depending on how well-written the book is to start with).

2. Shorter process

   1. Totally depends on the people doing the work, but the amount of time from start to finish can potentially be dramatically shortened.

Cons

1. Have to find someone for each step of the process

   1. You’re basically putting together your own publishing team, so you need to find a competent editor/proofreader/typesetter/graphic designer/straightreader. There are ways around this — for example, my wife and I tag-team on some books, with me doing content and copyediting and she doing proofreading and the graphics work — but most of the time, you need to track down each person, make sure they’re good, and negotiate a price with them.

2. Variable quality

   1. Related to the above, it’s harder to know that you’re getting someone good. Just because a friend recommended their cousin to do your cover doesn’t mean they’re actually able to deliver an eye-catching, unique book cover; just because someone knows a lot of big words (see “sesquipedalian”) doesn’t make them a good editor. Get recommendations from other authors, ask for examples of previous work, ask for a page or two sample of your content.

3. Distribution

   1. Harder to get into stores. Realistically, most people will buy a book based on an interaction with you or your content rather than from seeing it on the shelf at a store, so this isn’t the biggest issue, but it’s a factor to consider.

4. Reputation

   1. Because the barrier to entry is so low, there’s some amount of stigma associated with self-published works. That can be overcome through developing a name and reputation, but on its own, a self-published book is starting out with negative points in the “should I buy this” department.

Fundraising

By far, the most common challenge I’ve heard people face is the cost of publishing. To the best of my knowledge, it is uncommon for an author to pay for publishing entirely out of pocket. What are some strategies to deal with raising the money?

• Most people either find someone to dedicate the book, covering the full costs of production, or fundraise by asking for sponsorships at different levels, maybe even with perks attached.

• If there’s an organization closely aligned with the subject of your book, you can ask them if they would be willing to cover all or some of the costs in return for some solid PR once the book is published.

• Publishing a book is a significant source of nachas — family members may be willing to chip in to help make that a reality. (I’ll add my hakaras ha’tov to my parents and grandmother for sponsoring Halachic Worldviews in memory of my grandfather, Rabbi Dr. Allen Goldstein.)

  • One author shared that for their first book, they reached out to family. It took donations from ten family members to get the amount he needed rather than five, as he initially expected. Now, working on a second book, he made a GoFundMe page and shared it with friends. He was surprised by how much easier this way was. While each individual donation is usually smaller, money has been coming in quickly, and in just a couple of weeks he has almost raised the same amount this way as from family.

• I’ve never tried this, but you could always take a step back in time and try bartering for services to bring the cost down. If you have a valuable set of skills that the other person is likely paying for anyway, offer a trade and see what they say.

• Occasionally, there are grants or contests for new books or authors that you can apply for.

If Not…

Try Substack

Publishing may just not be in the cards for you at the moment — and that’s fine. Consider the writer’s equivalent of building in public — writing on a platform like Substack. Substack (where you’re reading this right now) is a cross between an email list and a simple, sleek home for past articles.

Take pieces of your writing, upload them to Substack, and start sharing with family and friends. You can also post on social media (remind yourself that you’re not looking to grow your ego, you’re sharing because you believe your ideas can benefit other people). Hopefully, if your writing resonates, people will subscribe, and over time, you’ll build up an audience of readers as well as name recognition as someone with things to say on a certain subject. That can help set the stage for when you are ready to publish — maybe even with the help of some of your readers who care about the ideas you’re sharing as much as you do.

Your Substack won’t necessarily take off; you might get 10, 30, 50 subscribers and that’s it. A couple of points to remember, though:

• If you had that number of people in a room listening every time you gave a shiur, how would that feel?

• Remember how beneficial the writing process is for yourself, no matter how many people are reading it.

A couple of practical tips for taking advantage of the Substack platform:

• There are a lot of ways to break up straight blocks of text — bulleted or numbered lists, pull and block quotes, and even images or video clips. Use them to make things more interesting for the reader in a way that you can’t do in a book or regular article.

• If you’re reading other people’s Substacks, remember: likes and comments are free and take seconds, but they mean a lot to the person writing (and they’ll often do the same for you, too).

Serializing in Newspapers or Magazines

Depending on the nature of your content, you could try reaching out to newspapers or magazines to see if they’re interested in serializing all or some of what you have to offer. (I’ve tried this, and it has actually worked.) The more often they publish — daily/weekly/monthly — the more interested they’re going to be in regular high-quality content — and in many cases, they may even be willing to pay you for it. In other words, instead of paying to publish, you’re getting paid to publish (you just don’t end up with a book at the end).

Concluding Thoughts

Hopefully, this overview of the publishing process will help you decide your next steps forward with your manuscript. If you have a specific question, feel free to reach out. Otherwise, I’m looking forward to seeing what you put out there!

1. Most importantly, organizational ability — the ability to structure a piece of writing with a logical beginning, middle, and end — and expressive vocabulary.