Family Crest Books
Endless Creeks, Surviving the Death of a Child, It's Good to Be Married, etc
Well, we’ve gotten far enough along in the process that I feel comfortable officially announcing it: Emily and I are launching Family Crest Books at the end of this school semester.
It’s a family-owned and operated business dedicated to creating books, booklets, and magazines for Christian families like our own. One thing that makes us a little unique is that we’re deeply committed to physical distribution. We have no intention of making e-books and will likely avoid Amazon as a distribution channel altogether. The one exception is audiobooks, we’ll eventually release those. Some of our content will likely make it onto Sherwood Kids, since I’m a part owner in that business.
We know this model may mean less reach, but we think this is the direction things are heading anyway. People are genuinely yearning for more tactile, tangible things. Hence, all my talk about the revenge of analog. We also think the market is going to get saturated and clogged because of AI. While we have zero problem using AI for formatting, proofreading, and some research, these will be "human-generated" stories with real human art. Being hyper-focused on your type of content (stuff for Christian Families) and the audience you’re writing for is a wise tactic right now. More than anything, we want to develop a real relationship with our readers.
I’ve had a lot of projects stall out over the last several years because I kept spreading myself too thin. I was eager to build coalitions and started projects, then later realized that while I appreciated the people I was working with, I really wanted more control. I wanted the profits to stay within the family and for us to build a more direct relationship with our audience. I didn't like the limitations of semi-traditional publishing and wanted more freedom to experiment. I’ll still do some podcasting, but I much prefer writing and producing tangible things. That’s why I stepped back from podcasting and started focusing on building a Substack, figuring out my voice and the topics I want to write about.
Late last year, Emily and I talked through all of this. I began organizing stalled projects and ideas so we could work on them together. I didn’t want it to be just me out there spending all that time away from the family. I wanted it to be a family project. I wanted the royalties and the long-term benefits to stay with my family, Lord willing, even after I’m gone. That was the genesis of Family Crest.
Our first long-form book will be It’s Good to Be Married. We've already made a ton of ground in it.
We do intend to finish Surviving the Death of a Child as well. That one will take the form of a longer booklet. I kept getting stuck trying to make it into a full-sized book. Anyhow, to get things started and work out the bugs on physical distribution, we’re rolling out a short-run magazine as a test case. It’s a children’s magazine, primarily for boys, called Endless Creeks.
The inspiration comes from a couple of places. I spent a good chunk of my childhood on isolated farms, and when I ran out of things to explore, I read comic books. One of my favorites was Marvel Comics Presents. What I loved about it was that every issue had four stories featuring different characters. Sometimes they were standalone. Other times, they were multi-part stories that stretched across several issues. You wouldn’t love every story, but there was usually one that really stood out. I also read a lot of short stories and always loved the idea of pulp magazines. They were cheap little readers packed with sci-fi, fantasy, detective, and mystery stories.
Endless Creeks follows that same four-stories-per-issue format. Some will be standalone; others will stretch across the entire series. All of them will have a direct connection to Indiana, the land of endless creeks, where I spent most of my childhood exploring. Most of the stories will be fictional, but I’ve also written several non-fiction pieces from my own childhood that my kids get a kick out of.
I finished the first draft of What Boys Do. It’s a survival story centered on four twelve-year-olds who steal a canoe and get stranded on an island in the middle of Lake Michigan, where they have to work together to survive. It has that Hatchet / My Side of the Mountain feel, and that’s exactly the kind of material we want to produce. Stories for boys that inspire them to get outside and conquer stuff with other boys.
We’ve also noticed that a lot of magazines have launched recently, but they’re incredibly expensive. Many run $30 or $40 an issue. We don’t think that’s practical for most families. One of our goals is to keep Endless Creeks inexpensive, channeling what made pulp magazines so popular in the first place. We haven’t landed on an exact price yet, but affordability is a priority.
Assuming no problems with our local printer, the first issue should be available for purchase in May. There will be a new website up soon, and it’s remarkable how easy those are to put together these days. I already have version one ready. So, it'll be up soon.
That’s what we’re up to: a family business focused on making real things for our people, based in and around where we live. The future is local and tangible.