Members of these mid-size, neighbourhood churches naturally organize lots of fun extracurricular activities…like potlucks and rummage sales and choirs and card parties.  But over time, what seems to happen is that people participate in these social events without any element of spiritual responsibility and the church becomes akin to a country club! (Perhaps I’m naïve in thinking that everyone has come to church for spiritual progression and maybe there are many who are simply there for the weekly card party.)

Whatever brought them to church, people sadly forget that first and foremost, this is the place where they are supposed to pray and meditate and constantly dig deeper to know themselves better. Instead, the church becomes a hotbed of gossip, mistrust, and backstabbing. Various dramas, factions and mini-wars break out that are microcosms of all that is wrong in the world.

I remember Bruce McLeod once making the point that prayer is really about listening for God. I can’t remember his exact words, but it seemed to me that his point was to be wary of intercessionary-style prayer intended to change the way other people are acting. The point being that it is our responsibility as so-called spiritual or religious people, to listen for the voice of reason (non-ego) within us that is our truest nature–compassion, love, understanding–and to consider how to change the way we are acting (or reacting).

We spend a lot of time and energy at my church talking about how to attract “the younger generation” to church. How to keep the church alive. We come up with lots of great ideas, new programs, hip branding. The problem is, until we get our shit together as individuals and as representatives of a spiritual community, who would want to hang out with us?

As an example of how wonderfully explicit church can be in this lesson (which never happens often enough for me in a Christian church), here is one of my favourite sung prayers:

God be in my head
And in my understanding
God be in my eyes
And in my looking
God be in my mouth
And in my speaking
God be in my heart
And in my thinking
God be at my end
And at my departing.

H. Walford Davies - click for a nice video

So I scoured the various options and chose iUniverse’s “Premier” package for around $800 bucks. Their web site impressed me with the most complete and helpful information, plus they had strategic alliances with Barnes & Noble and Amazon so your book gets sold through those channels.

My manuscript was basically finished so all I needed to do at that point was clean it up to match iUniverse’s editorial guidelines and hit the submit button. Everything is handled by email (“Only about 10% of our communication will be by phone…” they tell you) and the process is pretty fast. They have a schedule of when things get done and are pretty good about sticking to it. I think there was only one time when I had to follow up on a delay. Once you get started, they assign a single “PSA” (Publishing Services Associate) to you, so you only have to deal with one person. Although this drops off instantly the second your book is finalized and published. Now whenever I have a question I get bounced around to new associates and have a hard time getting my questions answered. More on that later…

So after you submit your manuscript, you wait about 3 or 4 weeks and then you get an “Editorial Evaluation” by email which is an impressively thorough review of your book, your marketing copy, and your title. The feedback I got was both encouraging–they felt the book was marketable–and constructively critical. There was a slew of great suggestions, but they were pretty tough on me, and I ended up doing a complete re-write of the entire book.

The nice thing about the process was that you could move it along as quickly or as slowly as you wanted. You can do the whole thing in about four months or you can take up to a year to complete your book. After the next submission, my booked moved into the typesetting and design phase and here’s where things took a bit of a turn from the blissful self-publishing path I’d been on.  The typesetting of the manuscript was done quite nicely…a fair bit of back-and-forth ensued with the occasional mistakes on their part that I suppose is to be expected. However, the disappointing part was the cover design. It was really awful. Very basic, ugly font, ugly colours. It looked like they used a template and just dropped my book title into it.  They give you a second kick at the can as part of the package price, so I sent them a mock-up idea and a bunch of sample book designs and colours that I liked. The second version they produced was an exact and very basic set up of my mock-up (which was meant to just give them a few ideas).

I was pretty frustrated at this point because what good is a book if you have a crappy cover, so I actually had to hire my own graphic designer and shell out another $300 bucks to get a decent cover design. Luckily, in my corporate writing business, I work with a wonderful designer from Guelph, Ontario named Art Kilgour. He did a beautiful cover design for me that I am really pleased with.

Throughout the publishing process, iUniverse was very good about asking for feedback on their services, which I diligently provided in written form two different times. In both surveys I mentioned my problem with the cover design and how I had to solve it by spending more money separate from their publishing package. I told them I wanted someone to follow up with me and discuss the situation. I heard nothing. I also sent two different emails to two separate PSA’s and they did not respond to either of those complaints. When I get a chance, I’ll try to press them further and let you know what happens.

All in all not a bad experience and I’m happy with my first book. However, next time I will probably try a different company because of the cover design issue and the lack of customer service follow-up by iUniverse. –C