Most pastors who dream about writing a book think of it as something they’ll do someday. When things slow down. When they have a block of uninterrupted time. When they can figure out how to take everything in their head and get it onto a page.
That day rarely comes. Not because pastors aren’t capable of writing a book, but because the way most people think about writing a book is backward.
You don’t have to start from a blank page. You’ve probably already said everything you need to say. You’ve just said it from a pulpit instead of a desk.
The Book That’s Already There
Think about the series you’ve preached over the years. The topics you’ve returned to again and again because they matter deeply to you and to your congregation. The passage of Scripture you’ve taught three different ways across three different seasons of ministry. The theme that runs through your preaching whether you planned it that way or not.
That’s a book.
Not a rough idea for a book. Not the outline of a book you might write someday. An actual book, delivered out loud, week after week, to the people who needed it most. The content is already there. The research is done. The illustrations are drawn from real life. The theology has been worked through carefully enough to preach publicly.
The only thing standing between your sermons and a published book is the process of getting them from audio to text and from text to manuscript.
Step One: Audio to Transcript
The first step is transcription, and it’s the step where most pastors get stuck before they’ve even started.
Transcribing your own sermons is not a good use of your time. A professional transcriptionist with the right equipment, software, and years of experience takes approximately three hours to accurately transcribe a 45-minute sermon.
A pastor attempting the same thing without specialized tools or training could easily spend two or three times that long, and still end up with a rough draft that needs significant editing before it's usable. That's a full day of work, or more, for a single sermon. For a pastor already managing the full weight of ministry life, that time simply isn't available.
SermonScribe handles this step for you. If your sermons are posted on your church website, we download them for you every Monday morning. If they’re in digital format but not posted online, we set up a shared folder and handle everything from there. If you have older sermons on cassette, CD, or DVD, we can convert those to digital format and transcribe them as well.
The transcript you receive isn’t a rough draft that needs cleaning up. It’s a professionally edited document with grammar corrected, filler words removed, Bible references verified, and proper names researched and spelled correctly.
Step Two: Transcript to Manuscript
This is the step that’s yours to do, and for most pastors it’s more manageable than they expect.
You’re not writing from scratch. You’re revising. You’re reading through a clean transcript of something you already said and shaping it into a document that reads like a chapter. That means adjusting paragraph breaks, adding subheadings, changing a specific name to a fictional one where confidentiality matters, and adding a sentence here or cutting one there where the spoken version doesn’t quite translate to the page.
Most pastors find this process significantly less intimidating than they anticipated. You already know what you were trying to say. You already made the argument, told the story, explained the passage. Your job in this step is to make sure the written version communicates it as clearly as the spoken version did.
When you’re done, what you have is a rough draft manuscript. It doesn’t have to be perfect. That’s what editors are for.
Step Three: Manuscript to Book
Once you have a rough draft manuscript, the path to publication is more straightforward than most first-time authors realize.
A publisher or editor can help you with everything that comes next: refining the manuscript, developing a title, designing a cover, registering your ISBN and bar code, listing your book with the Library of Congress, and getting it onto Amazon and other retailers. Most publishers who work with pastoral authors have done this many times and can walk you through the process without requiring you to figure it out on your own.
SermonScribe is happy to recommend editors and publishers who work specifically with pastors and ministry leaders. We’ve seen this process work from beginning to end, and we know who does it well.
Why the Transcript Quality Matters for Your Book
There’s a reason professional transcription makes the book-writing process easier, and it goes beyond accuracy.
A clean, well-edited transcript is a pleasure to revise. The grammar is already correct. The sentences already read smoothly. The Bible references are already verified. When you sit down to turn a transcript into a manuscript chapter, you’re working with material that’s already close to publication-ready.
An AI-generated transcript is the opposite experience. The errors are unpredictable. The sentence structure is often garbled. Names are misspelled. Scripture references may be wrong. Revising an AI transcript into a publishable manuscript chapter can take longer than writing the chapter from scratch, which defeats the entire purpose of starting with a transcript.
The transcripts that become books most easily are the ones that were done right the first time.
The Book You’ve Been Putting Off
If you’ve been thinking about writing a book for years and haven’t started, there’s a good chance the barrier isn’t time or talent. It’s the blank page. The sense that writing a book is a different kind of work from preaching, requiring a different kind of preparation and a different kind of skill.
It isn’t. The content you’ve already delivered from your pulpit is the foundation of a book that only you could write. Your voice, your theology, your illustrations, your way of explaining the things that matter most to your congregation.
The first step is a transcript. Everything else follows from there.
Ready to Get Started?
Schedule a free consultation call with Ginger to talk through what the process would look like for your sermons. Whether you have a specific series in mind or just a sense that there’s a book somewhere in your preaching, we’d love to help you find it.
Schedule Your Free Consultation Call →
You can also learn more about how SermonScribe helps pastors turn their sermons into books at the link below.
Learn More About Sermons into Books →
SermonScribe has provided accurate, beautifully designed sermon transcripts for pastors and ministry leaders since 2008. Learn more at SermonScribe.com.
