#184: Prayer for Marketing Your Book - Strategy and Favor

Let's pray for strategy and favor in marketing your book on an ongoing basis. Marketing can feel overwhelming, especially for Christian writers who I know you and you don't want to feel salesy or pushy. That's me too. I don't want to feel that way either. But marketing is simply sharing what God has given you. If he's called you to write this book, he has also prepared the readers who need it. So we want to pray for divine connections, favor and strategy as you market your book. And we really encourage you to have regular business meetings with God, especially at this phase, because marketing is where I see so many writers give up. They publish their book, they don't see the initial results they want, and so they just give up and move on to something else when God had so much more for their book. So I don't want that to be you and God gave gives the best ideas in business meetings with God. One small testimony is I was had my whole day planned a few years ago and then God led me to reach out to a subscription box company that ended up forming a partnership. And we ended up selling like so many books through that partnership and impacting thousands of lives. But I had to go and do something different than what was on my plan, what I had scheduled. And that was just a God connection. And he gave us faith favor. And so I want that for all of you as well. So CJ Why don't you pray for us?

Yeah. So we're looking at two scriptures here. First one is Proverbs 16:3 and it says, commit your actions to the Lord and your plans will succeed.

Amen.

James 1:5, if you need wisdom, ask our generous God. Ask and he will give it to you. He will not rebuke you for asking. Father, regarding our ongoing, ongoing marketing and the strategies that you want to give us and Lord our hearts, just as Shelley has said, we don't want to come off as sounding like some greasy used car salesman or some of those stereotypes that we have in our minds regarding just the selling of things. We want to do this in such a way that honors you and yet is responsible in terms of now carrying out actions that help lead our books to the right people at the right time. And so Lord, we commit these actions to you. As you've said that our plans will succeed. And we don't know exactly what the definition of that success is. It may be lots of fruit, it may also be financial gain, but Lord, we're going to leave that in your hands. And then, Lord, we are asking you Specifically for wisdom regarding our marketing effort. We're asking our generous God, as James says, knowing that you will give it to us. And we do trust that it'll come in your timing, not just people, when we snap our fingers and we want it right now, but we're going to trust that your wisdom and your guidance regarding our book marketing is going to come according to your divine timing and will so that you could receive the most glory possible, so that those books would end up in the right hands at the right time. And so, Lord, we trust you. We're seeking you. Many of us feel like fish out of water when it comes to marketing. And yet, Lord, we are asking you for wisdom so that we become better and better at this area. May we not look down upon it as that, like going to the dentist or something, but may we look at it like this is a part of the whole process and we want to be excellent in this area, just as we would sit down and want to be excellent in our writing. So, Lord, we give you this, we place it in your hands. It's all part of the process of you getting these books into people's lives that need them most. And we ask this in Jesus name, Amen.

Amen. As I was pray, praying for you that are in this phase of the ongoing marketing, a few years ago, we updated all of our curriculum and I think it was a couple years ago, but I created the Book Marketing Compass framework. And then we have the Book Marketing Adventure, I think it's called, or Book Marketing Explorer, that's what it's called. So we created the Book Marketing Compass and the Book Marketing Explorer to help you with this. And some people are just like, I just want you to tell me what to do. And that's the Book Marketing Compass just gives you tasks to do. But the thing is, we have to be patient. We have to. My friend Shay Bines, she's the founder of Kingdom Driven Entrepreneur. She says faith and patience are the power twins. If I would have given up with this whole business of Christian Book Academy when I was discouraged years ago, I tried to sell it twice already. God wouldn't let me. Then all of you wouldn't be here and there'd be so many books that wouldn't have been birthed. And there are just so many things waiting for you on the other side of faith and patience. And so doing those just regular, consistent marketing activities, planting seeds every day and just waiting to see what God is going to do and the doors he's going to open as you do that I got a picture of skipping stones, like when C.J. and I live in Colorado. And so we often go to places that have rivers, mountain rivers or the lakes or things like that. And C.J. grew up in Oregon, and he always, almost always, I'll say, wants to pick up, find those smooth stones and see how, if he can skip those stones across. And it was making me think of, like, the ripple effect, the skipping of the stones. But also, even if one big stone comes, there's those ripples that come out, and there are ripple effects to your steps of obedience that Kingdom writers, you will never know. This side of heaven, you can see some of them. Like you. You can for sure see some of them. And then some of them, you just have to trust God in heaven. One day he will show you. Like CJ and I, we just trust that we're putting all of the seed, all of these things out there. And we do a lot of things for free, but we also have our paid resources and Christian Book Academy. But we're just putting all these things out there. They're trusting that God is using it. And so I want you to think there is something more. Somebody gave me a word of encouragement years ago, and they said they were seeing, like, a sunrise, and it was just barely peeking up. And the phrase that they sensed God wanting to say to me at that time was, there is more. And I want to tell you Kingdom writers, there is more for you as well. God has more ripples, more impact. But we often have to take the steps of faith. We have to do those boring things, like writing another email, writing another blog post, pitching another podcast. Like, it's just boring. I get it. I'm in it. I wanted to give up so many times. Those of you that don't know, I had a career as a physical therapist for 12 years. I just show up and get a paycheck. That's not the way it is now. I can just show up, but it doesn't mean that I'm going to get a paycheck. So it's. I have to do the marketing. And so I want to pray for you that there would be more for you that you would press into that, that you wouldn't give up, that you would keep going out there and doing the mundane, boring things. The compound effect. That's a book that we love. And you can go. It's not Christian, but it's like those little things you do day after day, if you keep doing these marketing tasks day after day, in five years, there's going to be a harvest. It may not be five weeks from now, but are you willing to steward this book? Are you willing to parent it? You've given birth to it. But just like a child, the parenting process continues. Even my mom, Now I'm almost 50, she still parents me. Right?

Let me pray for you, God, thank you so much that there is more. There is more for each one of us for our books and that you are inviting us into this adventure of book marketing, which most writers hate. I will say that most writers come to me and say, I don't want to market my book. I just want to write. I want to write. We can. We can use our gift of writing for marketing. We can write blog posts, we can write emails. We can write all sorts of things. We can write another book that will promote this book. But Lord, there's so many ways to market. It can get so overwhelming. Just give us the next thing we need to do. Just show us the strategy, give us the clarity for this quarter, for these three months, and then give us the strategy for the next three months. And help us to be faithful to steward the message you've given us. And we pray this in Jesus powerful name, Amen.