College for Christians Comes to Substack

Why I've decided to self-publish my next book here at The Pietist Schoolman

No one who has published five books ought to complain too loudly about the challenges of publishing #6. But allow me to vent a bit of frustration: each time I’ve brought my proposed college guide for Christian families to a publisher, it’s been rejected. For one editor, what I’ve called College for Christians was just the wrong kind of book — too practical and insufficiently philosophical. (The first time I’ve ever heard that feedback!¹) But for the others, it came down to the bottom line: they liked the concept, but didn’t think it would sell enough copies.

They’re not necessarily wrong. Perhaps I’m the wrong person to help Christian teenagers and their parents and other advisers navigate the complexities of higher ed. Or maybe my approach to writing a college guide is misguided.

But I don’t think I am or it is — and I don’t know how to convince sales committees that there’s a market for College for Christians in a country where self-identified Christians still make up a majority of the millions who start college each year. Just last week I led a two-day workshop in central Illinois with twenty students and parents wrestling with the same questions that structure my book, and I could see doing many more such events with future readers.

So rather than beating my head against the wall of traditional publishing, I’ve decided to use College for Christians to experiment with an option that I’ve always rejected but never quite neglected: starting next week, I’m going to self-publish my college guide, as a serial book hosted here at Substack.

I don’t need a book cover per se with this approach, but you’ll see me use this logo — originally created by my colleague Sam Mulberry for an earlier podcast version of the project

Let me explain why I’ve been leery of self-publishing, then I’ll outline how I’m going to approach it with College for Christians.

Why (not) self-publish?

There are people I respect who have self-published books, a process that’s been made easier by Amazon. But like many scholars, I’ve long viewed that approach as inadequate, even illegitimate.

First, there’s absolutely no way I would ever consider self-publishing an academic history. Those books absolutely need to go through a process of anonymous peer review to be trusted as works of serious scholarship.

My college guide is not that kind of book. But it could benefit from other layers of quality control that are key to what traditional publishing has to offer authors. As my friend Nadya Williams explained earlier this year:

A professional editor brings a lot [more] than just proof-reading. All of the work that editors and copyeditors do is difficult to quantify and explain, but you will notice when it’s absent. As I wrote a while back, “your reading and writing life is better with copyeditors in it.”

For both my books so far, the editors and copyeditors indicated areas where my ideas could potentially come across wrong to certain types of readers, areas where a reference that I thought was clear wouldn’t be clear, and (most difficult for writers) places where something could be cut to improve the book. Even award-winning authors have editors go through their work and improve it! There is no writer in existence whose work wouldn’t get better with the help of a good editor.

My experience with copyediting has been more mixed than Nadya’s; at their best, copyeditors clarify and streamline, but I’ve also seen how they can start to distort the voice of the manuscript by intervening too often. But I’ll absolutely second what Nadya says about editors; they’ve improved every one of my books.

To my mind, this is the best reason for sticking with traditional publishing. Then there’s also something satisfying about holding a printed book whose cover and page layout were designed by other gifted professionals.

But that’s all irrelevant if other people at those companies decide that they can’t even sell my book, whatever value their editors and designers can potentially add to it.

Now, that doesn’t mean that people aren’t buying books from publishers. They do, in enormous quantities. But most of those books are written by a relatively small number of authors and published by a still tinier set of companies. I have a couple of friends who have broken into bestseller territory — and they deserve every bit of that success! — but almost every author I know is fortunate to hit four digits in sales, and they’re all working with very small houses with limited resources for marketing.

So while there’s the chance that there’s a publisher out there that would take a chance on something like the college guide I have in mind — and I hope that such editors will consider proposals for more academic books I want to write in the future! — at this point I’d rather go ahead and share an underedited version of my project through the version of self-publishing that I’ve been doing, in some form, since I started The Pietist Schoolman in 2011.

In other words, I’m going to use this project to experiment with blogging as a serialized form of book-writing. And I’m going to give away College for Christians, encouraging subscriptions rather hoping for royalties.

How College for Christians will work on Substack

My plan is pretty simple: starting next Thursday, then continuing almost every week through the early summer of 2025, I’ll publish a chapter of the book right here at chrisgehrz.substack.com.

I haven’t used this function before, but Substack lets authors create multiple newsletters hosted under separate sections of the same site. So while every Pietist Schoolman reader can get College for Christians if they want it, that book will also become a separate section that people can subscribe to (or opt out of) on its own.

When the book is complete, I may see if I can set up a cheaper version of my paid subscription that would essentially make it as affordable as if it were an e-book on Amazon — maybe including that subscription as part of registration for any more workshops that I do for church, Christian high school, or homeschooling groups.² But for now, every chapter will be available for free until it enters my archive (usually three weeks after initial publication), at which point it will become part of the special benefits offered to all my paid subscribers.

While it’s not that common with non-fiction, I’m tapping into a long tradition of serial publication — from Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle in the 19th century to some Substack writers in the 21st. The only functional downside with blogging-as-bookwriting is that the chapters will appear in reverse chronological order on the College for Christians section of my site, from last to first. But I’ll create a table of contents post that I’ll pin to the top of that section, and there will be internal links to help readers move from chapter to chapter… or to jump around our often interrelated topics.

And while I won’t have the benefit of an editor overseeing an entire manuscript, I can solicit comments from readers as we go, then make some edits before the book exists in complete online form.

I hope you’re as excited as I am for this experiment to begin next week! If you are, and if you have relatives, friends, colleagues, or fellow church members whose kids are somewhere in the college search process, I’d appreciate it if you would share College for Christians with them.

1. And, in a way, it was encouraging to hear that feedback. It means that I’m on the right track. That editor wanted something more like an intellectual defense of the Christian liberal arts. Having written tens of thousands of words in that vein for the last decade, I’m happy to let someone else write the book that will somehow change hearts and minds on that subject. I’d rather go straight to the people who actually make college decisions — teenagers like my kids and parents like my wife and me — and help them think more wisely about why and how Christians go to college.

2. Please email me if you want to talk about setting up that kind of event. I had a great time with the trial version in Illinois and would love to lead more workshops.