Freiling Publishing, created in 2018 as a hybrid house that uses an author-subsidized model, is expanding to offer more traditional author royalty contracts.
Company CEO and founder Tom Freiling said the success of Terrence K. Williams’s bestseller, From the Foster House to the White House, which was contracted traditionally, had led to a doubling of sales this year and encourage him to expand. Freiling aims to sign a dozen new authors in 2021 to contracts that, while not offering advances, will have royalty rates 20-30% higher than industry norms. The house will publish titles inside and outside the Christian spectrum.
“We’re not describing or defining ourselves exclusively as a Christian book publisher,” said Freiling, who is also the founder of the self-publishing company Xulon Press, which was acquired by Salem Communications in 2006. “We’re interested in reaching beyond the typical peg hole Christian genres. We are all about reaching lost and hurting people with the good news of Jesus, which means we don’t just want Christian readers searching for our books.”
Freiling Publishing is looking for books about addiction and abuse recovery, cancer survivor stories, holistic and natural medicine, suicide awareness and prevention, and dieting, as well as culture and politics from a conservative perspective. Recent acquisitions include Gracefully Broken, a memoir by former NBA star Walter Jordan via hybrid contract, and an untitled book by James E. Ward, pastor to the mother of Jacob Blake, who was shot by a police officer in Kenosha, Wis., via a traditional contract.
Spring 2021 releases include BeaYOUtiful: Fix Your Food, Fix Your Life by popular social media influencer Martha VanCamp, and The Devil Inside, by Jimmy Hinton. Hinton writes about how he stopped his minister father from molesting children in his own church. Both are hybrid contracts.
Freiling has hired three additional staff to accommodate this growth, including Christen Jeschke as editorial director; Deborah Lewis as creative director; and Jeff Parker as director of business development. The team accepts agented and unagented proposals, and will use Anchor Book Distributors.
