The Making of Inflammation Fix: What It Really Takes to Self-Publish a Book

Apparently, writing a book and finishing a book are two very different things.

 

Our original plan was to launch Inflammation Fix in September. The manuscript had been written. It had gone through rounds and rounds of edits. The layout was nearly finished. I thought we were getting close, but life happens, and we had several required changes.

 

Then I learned a lesson I will probably never forget. What looks right on a computer screen is not necessarily what comes out of a commercial printing press.

 

Somewhere in the process of converting our graphics from RGB, which is how colors are displayed on screens, to CMYK, which is used for printing, some of our colors changed. Even colors that looked black wouldn’t necessarily print as the crisp, true black we intended.  

 

It sounds like such a small thing. Change the color and move on, right?

 

Not exactly.

 

We hadn’t created a book with a handful of generic charts that could all be changed with one click. We had more than 300 individually designed tables and figures, with different layouts, colors, lines, shapes, bullets, and details throughout the book. Fixing the problem meant going back through them one by one, replacing them in the book layout, and then checking everything again because every manual change creates another opportunity for human error.

 

So there I was, working 70+ hour weeks like an AI robot (not that AI, but Adobe Illustrator) clicking through hundreds of graphics because if we didn’t fix them, the print date would get pushed out even further.

 

I will never look at the letters CMYK the same way again.

 

There were definitely moments when I wondered how making a book had somehow turned into learning about color profiles, printing registration, paper, binding, signatures, Amazon algorithms, international distribution, eBook file sizes, and things called overfill. None of this was on my list when I first decided I wanted to write about inflammation and root-cause healing.

 

And CMYK was only one of the lessons. 

 

Over the last few years, I’ve learned there is an entire world between having something you want to say and holding the finished book in your hands. I’ve traditionally published. I’ve self-published. I’ve made mistakes with both. I’ve learned things I wish I had known when I wrote Carnivore Cure, changed things I knew I wanted to do differently this time, and probably made an entirely new set of mistakes along the way.

 

I thought it might be fun (and, more importantly,  helpful) to take you behind the scenes of some of that process as we get closer to releasing Inflammation Fix. Not because every author should make a book the way we did. I can already tell you there are much easier ways.

 

In fact, one of the things I didn’t realize going into this was just how unusual it is to manufacture a book like Inflammation Fix. Lakeside Book Company, the largest book manufacturer in North America, prints and binds books on an enormous scale, and we were told that fewer than 20% of the books they produce are full-color CMYK. With nearly every page of Inflammation Fix incorporating color, graphics, tables, or custom design elements, this was far from a standard print job. One of the nicest surprises along the way was hearing from people at Lakeside just how beautiful they thought the layout turned out. (Thanks, Chris, Aubrey, et al.!) 

 

So if you’ve ever wondered what actually happens between writing a manuscript and seeing a hardcover book on a shelf, there is a lot more happening behind the scenes than I ever realized.

 

But before we get back to the 300+ graphics, my newfound CMYK expertise, and how those pages eventually make their way onto a printing press in Indiana, I probably need to explain why we were willing to redo all of them instead of just saying, “good enough.”

 

And to explain that, I have to go back much further than Inflammation Fix.

 

 

This Book Actually Started Years Before I Started Writing It

 

 

When I say I spent years writing Inflammation Fix, that’s technically true. But the book really started long before I ever opened a document and typed Chapter One.

 

For years, every time I came across something interesting in a study, saw an unusual pattern in a client, had a question I couldn’t stop thinking about, or learned something the hard way in my own health journey, I saved it.

 

Sometimes it went into a document on my computer or was a note on my phone. Sometimes it ended up buried in Google Drive. I had research papers, half-finished thoughts, clinical observations, questions I wanted to come back to, topics I wanted to teach someday, and little connections that didn’t necessarily mean much on their own yet.

 

The Individuals Carnivore Didn’t Fix Taught Me the Most

 

 

 

In working with thousands of canaries in the coal mine, where Carnivore doesn’t help enough, you learn a lot. 

 

The truth is, Carnivore does help a lot, so when it doesn’t, you get to see where other levers can also help. And if you can figure that out as a practitioner, you get to find gold that can help so many people. And that’s how Inflammation Fix was born. 

 

I originally thought I needed to write an updated Carnivore Cure 2.0 to bring back more of the science and go deeper into everything I had learned since writing the first book. But as the material grew, it became obvious that this wasn’t another Carnivore book.

 

There are a couple of areas where the books naturally overlap, but Inflammation Fix became an attempt to map out the different reasons inflammation can persist and give individuals practical ways to start making sense of their own wellness journey.

 

Years of Notes Had to Become One Coherent Story

 

 

 

I started with an outline of everything I wanted Inflammation Fix to cover. Then came the notes, all the years of notes in the making.

 

I had notes everywhere: research papers, old articles, book excerpts, clinical observations, comments inside drafts, half-finished explanations, graphics I wanted to create, and questions I still needed to answer.

 

The hard part wasn’t the collection part; it was was deciding what information should stay.

 

Every chapter went through multiple rounds of review. I kept asking the same questions:

• Is this accurate?
• Is it understandable without oversimplifying it?
• Does the research actually support what I’m saying?
• Am I explaining the why, not just telling someone what to do?
• Is this useful enough to change how someone understands their health?
• Can I make this clearer with a story, table, graphic, or practical takeaway?
• Am I representing opposing views fairly rather than tearing them down?

 

Then came the details most readers will never notice: standardizing terminology, deciding when to use technical versus plain language, making the narrative voice consistent, checking hundreds of citations, revisiting studies behind graphics and tables, cutting repetition, rewriting explanations, and making sure the action steps actually matched the science.

 

Some sections were read through the lens of someone completely new to these ideas. Others through the lens of someone plant-based, someone deeply committed to conventional medicine, or someone who had already spent years trying to heal.

 

And then I did it again.

 

Developmental edits. Line edits. Copy edits. Proofreading. Citation checks. Graphics. Tables. More cutting. More rewriting.

 

The problem with collecting information for years is that eventually you have to decide what it all means, and turn it into something another person can actually use.

 

 

 

 

Client observations led me to research. Research led to more questions. One topic would connect to another topic, which would send me down another rabbit hole, which would remind me of something I had written down two years earlier.

 

At some point, I had to take all of that and turn it into an actual book.

 

So I started grouping ideas together. I had topics, then distilled them into chapter organizations, and kept organizing until it flowed. 

 

And a lot didn’t make it.

 

I would guess that more than half of what I collected over the years never made it into the final book.

 

That can be painful when you’ve spent hours researching something, but a book can’t contain everything you know. At some point, you have to ask whether something actually helps the reader understand the bigger picture or whether you’re including it simply because you find it interesting.

 

If you have seen any of my work, I find a lot of things interesting. And yes, it’s why I started Carnivore Cure with C-sections and infant death rates. I needed people to know the financial corruption of C-sections, somewhere. 

 

But I learned a lot and worked with thousands of individuals since Carnivore Cure. 

 

The bigger challenge was that I didn’t want Inflammation Fix to become a giant collection of information that left a sick person even more overwhelmed than when they started.

 

Knowledge by itself doesn’t always change everything. 

 

You can understand every inflammatory pathway in the body and still have no idea what to do Monday morning.

 

So as the chapters came together, I kept trying to turn the science into frameworks, systems, acronyms, questions, and practical tools people could actually remember and use.

 

That became one of my filters throughout the book:

 

Does this information help someone take action?

 

If not, it probably needed more work.

 

The Reality of Using AI as a Tool

Since this is behind-the-scenes, I also don’t want to pretend AI didn’t exist during this process. 

 

It did, and it was useful.

 

AI helped me move through large amounts of research faster, compare studies, organize information, and synthesize areas I was already investigating. When you’re working through hundreds of papers and 6+ years of notes, being able to accelerate some of that process is incredibly helpful.

 

But anyone who has used AI for more than five minutes also knows the other side.

 

It gets things wrong.

 

It hallucinates, removes nuance, and can confidently tell you something that sounds completely reasonable but is completely false. And in complex chronic illness and in Inflammation Fix, the nuance is a big sticking point.

 

(It also tells us all the time how Carnivore is not ideal long term… or that some water damage in a home is not necessarily bad for human health…)

 

I had in my head what I wanted to talk about, and I had all my notes to look at specifics and nuance. On some days when my brain’s sentence structure capabilities were limited, I could work with AI (instead of a developmental or line editor) to help the melody of my sentences flow better. 

 

AI became one tool for moving through that information more efficiently. As an aside, while AI helped me work more efficiently, I don’t think AI actually saved me time. Without it, I might have reviewed hundreds of studies. With it, I could work through multiple thousands. That expanded the amount of evidence available, but it also meant more information for me to process, compare, synthesize, and analyze. So AI made it possible to evaluate a much larger body of research more efficiently, but it didn’t necessarily reduce the total number of hours involved. In some ways, it simply raised the ceiling on how much research I could realistically examine. 

 

I only know this because I track my work time. Once I had the outlines built and all of my research notes semi-organized, I started writing the first drafts of the chapters freehand. An intro chapter without AI took about 10 hours to write the first draft. By comparison, a highly researched section on a specific topic, such as studies on ketogenic diets and thyroid health, took over 10 hours, even with AI, and resulted in two pages of text and a table.  Afterward, the research had to be double- and triple-checked, and the overall flow of the book had to make sense, because again, AI makes mistakes, ever so confidently. 

 

As an example, I asked AI to help me create a visual of 100 cars. Up until revision #1438318, we didn’t realize that 20+ cars were missing. Sneaky, sneaky, AI. 

 

If you’re wondering, the only AI graphics we used were an elephant’s limb and a library image. And even those took 100s of iterations. We recreated every single graphic, as I worked with two graphic designers throughout the project. The subtle light-blue shading differences you see are due to post-CMYK % changes. (This will make sense very soon.) 

 

 

 

Leveraging AI for this project (and not for my two other books) made me realize how incredibly easy it is to generate more information, what is now being called AI slop. What is much harder is figuring out which information should stay, where it fits, what the limitations are, and how to turn it into something tactical and applicable for an individual who is sick and looking for answers.

 

That is the point of this book: it needs to be for the who, what, why, and how. For example, in the reintroductions, I made the plant list for reintroductions highly individualized. There is no single list of 10 safe plant foods for every person to add back; it depends on the individual.  

 

But back to AI slop, it’s really unfortunate because, as the collective population uses AI (with unknowing mistakes), we then write, podcast, YouTube, IG, X and share content from AI (with unknowing mistakes), and then AI scours internet pages for “truth” but fundamentally reshares AI (with unknowing mistakes). Ugh. 

 

The only way out is by reviewing the source of truth, the research links AI shares. I digress, but this is super important.

 

By the time I finally had something resembling a manuscript, Inflammation Fix wasn’t really one idea anymore. It was years of complex chronic illness cases, research rabbit holes, saved notes, mistakes, new questions, and things I wish someone had explained to me when I was sick, all distilled into one place.

 

Then came another problem.

 

I knew what I wanted the book to say.

 

But after my experiences publishing the first two books, I also knew I had very specific opinions about how I wanted this one made.

 

(I talk about my Type A personality in Inflammation Fix… Yes, the book has elephants and personality types, what?!) 

 

Why Self-Publish a Book This Complicated?

Once I realized what Inflammation Fix needed to become, I needed to decide how I wanted to publish it.

 

By this point, I had already published two books in two very different ways, and both experiences taught me something. One taught me how much freedom mattered to me. The other taught me how much I still had to learn.

 

And somehow, after experiencing both sides, I decided to make the most complicated book yet; the harder way. 

 

Carnivore Cure Taught Me Why Creative Control Matters

 

 

 

The book world is a whole different world. Most people start out with a publisher. Publishers will offer advances based on your existing reach. Eventually, authors may self-publish if they want to earn more per book or to gain full creative control.

 

I was in talks with several publishers for Carnivore Cure, but the bigger-name publisher in our wellness community told me to split the book into two. I said no. 

 

The other publishers wanted me to follow this algorithmic paragraph/word count because they know it sells based on research data. I couldn’t change the content or format, but I could fill in the words-per-paragraph topic. 

 

That was an absolute no. (I see the books on the market, and it makes me smile because in an alternate universe that could have been me.)

 

So I decided to self-publish Carnivore Cure.

 

Well, I learned the economics of book printing very quickly. The cover, the paper material and COLOR (hello, CMYK) all add up. We considered printing through print-on-demand with Amazon, and Carnivore Cure would have cost me $60-80 per book. To have free Prime shipping in Canada, the UK, and Australia, we would also have to open Amazon storage accounts in every country. Neither was feasible. (And this is why Carnivore Cure has to be shipped from the US; I’m sorry!)

 

I also wanted to improve the layout. I knew nothing about that with Carnivore Cure, and the person I hired made executive decisions. (I thought that was normal.) But when I look back, why would he put my name on the bottom footer of both pages? Either most people don’t care or thought I was a major egoist. “Don’t forget who wrote this book!”

 

 

 

 

I laugh about it now, but those little things taught me something important: if I cared about how a book functioned and felt as much as I cared about what it said, I needed to understand more of the process myself.

 

Then I Went the Other Direction

I truly believe in wellness for all, and some of the complaints we received about Carnivore Cure were that there was too much science and it was too expensive, especially in other countries. Fine. 

 

So for my second book, I went with a publisher that offered a small advance, but they were based in the UK and Boston. They had greater reach to make the book cheaper and available globally. I trimmed the science and made The Beginner’s Guide to Carnivore Diet that I believed had just enough information to carry a person through the diet.  

 

My publisher was great, as they let me have free creative control, but with the book’s layout, there were just some things cut/added, and some images used that were not what I wanted. I learned a lot working with the publisher, so I have zero regrets partnering with them. They made me edit the book over 8 times with different types of editors. That gave me training on how to better edit the book than Carnivore Cure. I know there are typos in Carnivore Cure. I can’t look at the book because of it. (Hello, striving perfectionist.)

 

Every Publishing Path Has a Trade-Off

My publisher eventually offered me another book. I was grateful for the offer, but kindly declined and shared that I had to work on Carnivore Cure v2 with the science added back in. 🙂 Of course, you already know how that turned out. And by then, I had the benefit of having experienced both sides. 

 

Self-publishing had given me control, but I had also experienced firsthand how much work comes with that control. Traditional publishing had given me professional editing, layout parameters, broader distribution, infrastructure, and a much better understanding of how books are made, but I had also experienced what it feels like to give up even a small amount of decision-making over something that has your name on the cover.

 

Neither model is inherently better, as they solve different problems. If my primary goal for Inflammation Fix had been to make the simplest book possible to produce and distribute, I probably would have made very different choices. But this wasn’t meant to be a simple beginner’s book.

 

I wanted the book to work for someone newly trying to understand inflammation, but I also wanted someone dealing with complicated chronic illness to be able to return to it later and notice something they weren’t ready to see the first time.

 

So for Inflammation Fix, control won.

 

I chose to self-publish because by the time I understood what this book needed to be, I also understood that I wasn’t willing to hand over the final decision on what it became.

 

If something needed to be cut, changed, redesigned, rewritten, or redone, I wanted that decision to come back to one question:

 

Does this make the book more useful for the person who needs it?

 

Of course, saying you want complete creative control sounds wonderful. Actually having complete creative control means eventually realizing that every single decision is now yours to make.

 

And I mean every single one.

 

There are also realities of self-publishing that have nothing to do with the quality of the book itself. The chances of becoming a New York Times bestseller are next to none, even if you try to game the system.

 

I knew that was part of the trade-off. (When you hit rock bottom and make it out, the things that matter in life are vastly different.)

 

What Creative Control Actually Looks Like

When I said I wanted creative control over Inflammation Fix, I was mostly thinking about the content. I didn’t fully appreciate that creative control eventually turns into questions like:

 

How thick should this line be? What information belongs in the footer? Is this figure too complicated? And apparently, what exact kind of black is this?

 

With Carnivore Cure, I didn’t know enough about book layout to have opinions about a lot of these things. Someone else made many of those decisions for me.

 

By the time I started Inflammation Fix, I had opinions.

 

A lot of them.

 

I wanted the footer to tell you what Part and Chapter you were in because that is actually useful when you’re flipping through a large reference book. I wanted each Part of the book to have its own color identity so you could visually understand where you were.

 

I wanted tables that made complicated information easier to scan rather than simply putting paragraphs of science into boxes, and figures that helped someone see a relationship between systems instead of having to hold five different concepts in your head at once.

 

I wanted certain words emphasized, certain bullets placed a certain way, certain boxes shaped differently, and certain visuals to feel softer or stronger depending on what they were trying to teach.

 

These are tiny things, until there are hundreds of them. (I really think my layout designer was glad when the project was over. Glad is likely an understatement.)

 

Then We Decided to Design More Than 300 Tables and Figures

This is probably where we made our lives significantly harder. (My husband, Kevin, thanks me immensely.)

 

Inflammation Fix covers a lot of complicated information, and I kept coming back to the same thing: sometimes showing something is much easier than explaining it for another three pages.

 

So we kept designing.

 

A concept would begin as information. Then we would figure out what the reader actually needed to see. That might become a simple table. Or what was supposed to be a simple table.

 

Then the table needed a hierarchy, colors, a callout, then an image. Then maybe a bullet didn’t look right, and one section needed to be wider because the information didn’t fit cleanly. Then I wanted a subtle visual difference between two concepts because clinically they weren’t exactly the same.

 

And suddenly we were no longer making a simple table. We were designing a tiny page within the page.

 

You can see some of this evolution in the behind-the-scenes images we’ve included here.

 

 

 

Some figures went through many versions before they looked simple. That is one of the funny things about design: sometimes the easiest thing to understand takes the most work to refine.

 

Most people use Adobe InDesign to build out tables so that when you make one change, it can change all the tables. But you don’t have as much visual wiggle room. So for us, to have it exactly how we wanted, with the lines, shapes, colors, and every detail, we made it our own. And that requires manually creating every line from scratch in Adobe Illustrator, but it’s a lot more work, and a lot more manual hours (and weeks) of changing stuff. 

 

As an example, InDesign can apply the styles we designed, but it won’t necessarily make all of those subtle visual decisions for you. A Table Style alone doesn’t automatically control every element within a graphic.

 

Think of it like layers of instructions:

• Table Style = The overall table structure
• Cell Style = How individual cells look
• Paragraph Style = Text formatting and bullets
• Character Style = Specific emphasis, such as bullet or font colors
• Object Style = Graphics, boxes, icons, and frames

 

All of those styles can work together to create a very sophisticated system, but they still have to be designed and coordinated. Once we started adding custom images, bullets, lines, shapes, colors, and little variations from one table to another, InDesign wasn’t going to intelligently decide exactly how I wanted each one to look.

 

That flexibility is why we created so much of the visual work manually in Illustrator instead. It gave us more freedom to make those subtle changes and touches, but it also meant there’s no “press one button and change all 300 tables.” And all our tables look slightly different.

 

 

And the figures were another layer. They were designed separately, while still needing to feel cohesive with the tables, the chapter, and the specific colors assigned to each Part of the book.

 

Then all of those individual pieces eventually had to come back together inside the full layout.

 

And none of this, factors in whether the actual information in the graphic, is accurate.

 

The Book Had to Be Useful, But I Also Wanted It to Feel Beautiful

At some point, we also had to decide what kind of physical book all of this was going to live inside. I didn’t want Inflammation Fix to feel like a medical textbook that you read once because you have to and then hide on a shelf. I also didn’t want it to be too large to carry. 

 

But I also didn’t want to simplify it so much that it lost the information people dealing with complex chronic illness may actually need.

 

I wanted it to live somewhere in between.

 

A reference book you can highlight, tab, revisit, and keep nearby. But also something beautiful enough that you don’t mind leaving it on your desk or coffee table.

 

So that created another set of choices.

 

 

We chose nicer paper because we wanted the colors and graphics to print crisply, and chose a hardcover because the book is meant to be a resource you can return to, and I wanted it to hold up long term. Then we added a raised UV gloss to parts of the cover so some of the design elements have a subtle raised texture when you run your hand over them.

 

 

Carnivore Cure was printed almost seven years ago, and we can all feel how much more expensive nearly everything has become since then. Inflammation Fix is also a more expensive book to produce, with a hardcover, raised UV details, full-color pages, and a higher page count. Even with all of that, we chose to price it a little lower than Carnivore Cure. We wanted to deliver the best book we could for people looking for answers to root-cause healing, while still making it something beautiful enough to keep on your coffee table.

 

If we’re gonna make it nice, why not go all in, right? 

 

Creative Control Means You Also Own the Mistakes

This is the part of self-publishing that I don’t think I fully understood the first time around.

 

Creative control sounds like freedom. And it is.

 

But it also means that when you decide you don’t want the standardized table, you’re responsible for the custom one. 

 

When you want more than 300 graphics, you’re responsible for more than 300 graphics.

 

When you care about the paper, the cover, the colors, the lines, the bullets, and where every image sits, those choices eventually have to survive editing, layout, file preparation, and a real printing press.

 

There is no publisher somewhere above you who ultimately says, “This is good enough. Send it.” Frankly speaking, I don’t think many publishers would have allowed this level of complexity in the artwork, graphics, and tables. Still, when you self-publish, you get to make that call. Which is wonderful when everything works.

 

It gets a little more interesting when it doesn’t.

 

And Then CMYK Came Back to Haunt Us

Remember those 300+ individually designed tables and figures from the beginning of this story? Well…

 

This is where they came back to haunt us. 🙂

 

And this one was completely my fault. Instead of giving our graphic designer specific CMYK colors from the beginning, I gave her HEX color codes and assumed we could simply convert them to CMYK later. She did exactly that. The problem was that those conversions sometimes produced CMYK formulas with tiny percentages, and even decimal percentages, spread across multiple ink colors. Below is the coloring we gave her, without the CMYK colors.

 

 

That may not sound like a big deal on a computer screen, but in commercial printing, it can matter quite a bit, especially with small text, fine lines, and graphics where multiple inks are being layered on top of one another. Those unnecessary ink percentages can make fine details look blurry or muddier and can create registration issues that you would never notice on a screen. 

 

Computer screens primarily display color using RGB (red, green, and blue light). Commercial four-color printing works differently, using CMYK: cyan, magenta, yellow, and black ink.

 

And this is the part I had never really thought about before.

 

On a commercial printing press, those aren’t just four numbers in a computer file. They are four separate inks. As the paper moves through the press, it passes through separate printing units for cyan, magenta, yellow, and black, with each one laying down its portion of the final image.

 

 

Each of those layers has to land in exactly the right place. That alignment is called registration.

 

For a photograph or a large area of color, a microscopic shift between the inks may not be particularly noticeable. But with small text, thin lines, and detailed graphics, the 300+ tables and figures in our book made the CMYK colors matter much more.

 

And this is where my HEX-to-CMYK conversion became a problem.

 

Some of our colors had been converted into unnecessarily complicated CMYK builds, meaning something that appeared to be one simple color on the screen could actually require several different inks to create it on paper. Every additional ink involved means another printing plate that has to line up precisely.

 

So before Inflammation Fix could go to print, all of our graphics had to be properly prepared with cleaner, intentional CMYK values.

 

Simple enough.

 

Or so I thought.

 

 

Take black text as an example. Something can look perfectly black on your computer while actually being made from a combination of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black.

 

For small text, that is usually not what you want.

 

A simple printing black is C0, M0, Y0, K100, just the black plate. If small lettering is instead built from several inks, those different plates all have to register precisely on top of one another. Even a tiny misalignment can make the edges look blurry or fuzzy.

 

(For the designers: some of our blacks had converted to roughly C75, M68, Y67, K90 which is almost 300% total ink coverage for something that could have been printed with K100 alone, using more ink and making those tiny details much harder to keep perfectly crisp.) 

 

It was a rookie mistake. And a painful lesson we learned the hard way.

 

Here’s the corrected version: (And yes, it looks exactly the same to the naked eye.)

 

 

So then we had to redesign each table and figure, redo the InDesign layout, and then have the layout person redo the layout again. The layout isn’t a big change, but updating 300+ figures and tables brings in the element of human error. 

 

This was the point where I became the Adobe Illustrator robot.

 

I spent a lot of time clicking through tables and figures, changing colors and learning things about commercial printing I never expected to know. Somewhere in there, I was also still making minor content edits because, apparently, I cannot help myself. I even managed to add “check plenum” to one of the HVAC tables while we were fixing everything. (Maybe that was the purpose of the newfound mold in our HVAC– we’re about to go through remediation #2, but that’s a story for another day.)

 

Was it ideal to discover all of this so close to printing? Definitely not.

 

But now we know.

 

And seeing how much precision goes into getting a digital file onto an actual printing press also made me even more curious to see the next part for myself, as Inflammation Fix was finally about to go from a file to a physical book.

 

The Strange Economics of Making a Book

Another thing I learned very quickly is that book economics can get interesting.

 

With Kindle, Amazon offers a 70% royalty option for qualifying eBooks. That sounds pretty straightforward until you learn that Amazon can also deduct a delivery fee based on the size of the digital file. 

 

In the US, that fee is currently $0.15 per megabyte.

 

So, for example:

 

A 2 MB eBook costs about $0.30 to deliver.

 

A 20 MB eBook costs about $3.00.

 

A 50 MB eBook costs about $7.50.

 

And a 100 MB eBook? $15.00.

 

Per sale.

 

Suddenly, that 70% royalty becomes a little more complicated. 

 

As of July 7, 2026, Amazon also expanded the US pricing range that qualifies for the 70% royalty option from $2.99–$9.99 to $2.99–$12.99, giving authors a little more flexibility. But for a book filled with hundreds of high-quality tables and figures, file size still matters. 

 

It also helped me understand why so many books keep the graphics simple, or don’t include many at all. There is actually a financial incentive to make a digital book smaller. We could have made Inflammation Fix simpler, too.

 

But by this point, you probably know how that conversation went. 

 

A Special Thank You to the NwJ Community

Before I wrap up, I also want to thank everyone who helped us choose the cover of Inflammation Fix.

 

If you’re subscribed to our newsletter, you may remember when I shared a few different cover options and asked everyone to vote for their favorite.

 

Well, Option B was the overwhelming winner.

 

We made a few little changes along the way, but the final cover is a version of the one you chose. And that makes this book even more special to me.

 

So much of Inflammation Fix was inspired by the people in this community—the questions you’ve asked, the stories you’ve shared, and the difficult health journeys that have pushed me to keep researching and looking for more answers. This book was always meant to be a resource for you, so having you help shape something as personal as the cover feels like a special full-circle moment.

 

Thank you for being part of this labor of love. I can’t wait for you to see the finished version in person.

 

 

Finishing the Book Isn’t the Same Thing as Launching the Book

One of the stranger things about self-publishing is that Amazon doesn’t automatically know what to do with your book.

 

To Amazon, Inflammation Fix starts out as another new product without an established sales history. And unlike Kindle eBooks, which can be available for preorder, we don’t have that same traditional preorder runway for the hardcover.

 

There are print-on-demand options, such as IngramSpark, that can help with some of that, but for a full-color book like ours, we had already learned with Carnivore Cure how quickly those printing costs can become unrealistic. 

 

So we’re starting the launch a little differently.

 

Our plan is to use the eBook preorder period and the first weeks of release to show that there is real interest in Inflammation Fix as early as possible.

 

This was another part of publishing I never appreciated from the outside. There is an entire strategy around when a book becomes available, how early demand builds, and how concentrated those first sales are.

 

There is a lot happening in those first few days and weeks.

 

And because we chose to self-publish, there isn’t a large publishing team coordinating all of that behind the scenes for us. That’s okay. We knew control would come with trade-offs.

 

At this point, I’ve spent years trying to make Inflammation Fix the book I wanted it to be. Of course, it still has to make financial sense, and we’ll need to sell a lot of books just to approach break even. But frankly, this may be the last comprehensive resource book I write at this scale. I wanted to make this one count. (If you get my weekly newsletter, you’ve probably heard me say more than once that I think I’ve aged 10 years writing and making this book.) 

 

Now the job is making sure the people who may actually need it know that it exists. In the book world, writing and publishing a book is often compared to pregnancy and birth. Marketing it is raising the child into adulthood.

 

So apparently, I’m just getting started. Yay.

 

Next Stop: Crawfordsville, Indiana

 

 

And then, a few weeks ago, I finally got to see it. All the work for years, finally, literally, on paper. 

 

Our family checked Wyoming, Illinois, and Indiana off our 50-state adventure. (Our family is trying to go to every state before the kids are grown; even stopping in a state for one picture counts for us– yes, it counts. We have completed 29 of 50. I will say, I have seen a lot of corn and soy fields.) 

 

But, Indiana had a very specific purpose for me: I wanted to see the beginning pages of Inflammation Fix print. Frankly, I didn’t expect it to feel as emotional as I did.

 

We visited the printing facility in Crawfordsville, Indiana, and the scale of the operation was incredible. It is essentially an entire world devoted to making books, all 1.7 million square feet.

 

Most publishers also print in foreign countries to reduce costs. Kevin and I are proud to be Americans and we want to support the people here, especially because it’s the country that afforded our parents a better life from war-torn Korea. That’s one of the reasons we chose to print in Indiana at one of the largest book printing companies. (We also printed Carnivore Cure there.)

 

I learned that books aren’t simply printed page 1, page 2, page 3 until you reach the end. Large groups of pages are printed together in what are called signatures, which are then folded, assembled in the correct order, bound, and eventually turned into the finished hardcover.

 

 

Before that happens, the digital files are translated into the physical components a commercial press needs. For four-color printing, separate plates are created for the CMYK colors I’ve now become far too familiar with. Those colors have to align correctly on the page, which is where registration comes in. At this same Crawfordsville facility, the printing process includes plate-making, press checks, inspecting individual signatures, folding, binding, and hardcover production. Below you can see a section where they hold the paper (they look like large toilet rolls) and a large area where they bind the hardcover books. 

 

 

Kevin took a quick picture of me during the Inflammation Fix print run. Behind me are the specific pages they were printing.  

 

 

I was probably most nervous about some of the white text printed over darker backgrounds. After everything we had learned about color and registration, I wanted to see whether it would actually reproduce the way we intended.

 

And the first round of registration looked pretty good. 

 

 

There are still steps between those printed pages and the finished hardcover, but this was the first time the book felt truly real to me.

 

Now I was standing in Indiana watching those ideas come off a printing press. That was pretty surreal.

 

Inflammation Fix Is Officially Launching December 8

 

 

And I can finally share the date:

 

The hardcover of Inflammation Fix will officially be available December 8.

 

The eBook presale will begin in October, with special presale bonuses and additional launch-week bonuses. Beginning December 8, the book will be available as an eBook, hardcover, and audiobook.

 

If you want a hardcover copy, I highly recommend ordering the first few weeks. Not only will you be part of the launch week bonuses, it will help us get the book out. Amazon will only stock a limited number of copies, so depending on demand, there may be periods when the hardcover is temporarily unavailable or may take longer to ship. (Thanks, self-publishing.)

 

I especially recommend the hardcover because we worked really hard not only to make this book useful, but to make it genuinely beautiful. It is full color, with hundreds of carefully designed tables, figures, and graphics, and I really wanted it to feel like a book you would keep, reference, and come back to for years.

 

And if you are a fellow book lover, I highly recommend watching the vlog. I originally thought I would simply document some of the behind-the-scenes process of making Inflammation Fix, but it turned into a much deeper look at what actually goes into creating and manufacturing a book like this. I toured the facility for over two hours and it was truly an unforgettable experience. 

 

Why Do This to Yourself?

In a recent interview, I shared that I may never write a book again. While self-publishing gave me full creative control, it also took a lot out of me. As I already shared, I truly feel I aged ten years, lol. Outside of my family and our clinical practice, I was also living as a hermit for the last 2ish years. 

 

But. I believe this book can help those who really want to fight for root-cause healing. Frankly, my friends asked me why I don’t have a practice that works with less complex illnesses. Or why I’m not a practitioner who simply manages diabetes and Mediterranean diets. 

 

I don’t have an answer other than God placed me here. I teared up and said, “If I don’t write all that I learned and researched, and give possible solutions, where will these marginalized ill individuals find answers?” (That sounds very arrogant, but I hope you understand what I meant. I discuss assisted suicides in the book, too, which will give better context.)

 

So much of the internet is sell, sell, sell. Sure, we all have to make a living, but we can also do it with integrity. 

 

Even though Carnivore Cure released 6+ years ago and things were way cheaper then, we are eating the cost and pricing our book a couple of dollars lower than Carnivore Cure. And this time, we checked 1000+ times for errors. I’m sure there will still be one, and I will cringe again. But I am a little more confident this time. 

 

At the end of the day, I just wanted to stop being so sick. I didn’t even want my full life back; I just wanted to be less sick. And I made a promise to God that if I got better, I would serve. And the truth is I got my full life back and so much more. So, Inflammation Fix is me keeping my promise. 

 

The Story Isn’t Finished Yet

Inflammation Fix may finally be heading toward the launch, but there is still more of this story to share. We now have a newborn to raise!

 

The eBook presale begins in October, the hardcover launches December 8, and we’ll continue sharing behind-the-scenes updates, special presale bonuses, launch-week bonuses, and the final steps of bringing the baby, I mean book into the world.

 

If you’ve enjoyed following the process, or if you think Inflammation Fix may be a helpful resource for you or someone you love, please consider supporting us by purchasing your copy during the first couple of weeks after launch. Strong early sales help signal demand to Amazon and can increase the likelihood that Amazon shares the book to more readers.

 

You can also join our book updates list to be the first to know when presale opens, when new behind-the-scenes content goes live, and when the book is officially available.

 

I have a good feeling about this book. I was recently very humbled to be contacted by a very notable publisher about potentially acquiring Inflammation Fix or working together on a future book. 

 

And if you’ve read this far, you can probably guess my answer when it comes to Inflammation Fix. Still, I take their interest as a very encouraging sign. For a publisher of that size to reach out because of this book tells me that what we’ve created is resonating beyond our own little corner of the world.

 

Thank you for being part of this journey with us. I can’t wait for you to finally hold the finished book.

 

Join here for the latest Inflammation Fix updates and check out the eBook here which will be available beginning October.