#290: How to Sell a Profitable Book Bundle with Jennifer Waddle

Welcome to Kingdom Writers where we help equip and empower Christian writers of all genres to share your unique gifts with the world. We're your hosts, C.J. and Shelley Hitz.

This podcast is filled with spiritual encouragement as well as prayers to help you overcome the resistance you face as a writer. Your story matters.

What a fun Month of Celebration this has been September 2021. My name is Shelly Hitz and this month marks 10 years since I took the big scary step of faith of quitting my physical therapy job and a regular income to be full time in our ministry and business alongside my husband. And now we've been doing this for a decade and we just finished our first ever Kingdom Writers Conference. Thank you all for everyone who joined us. What a fun week it has been and right now our doors to Christian Book Academy are open. We only open a few times a year and so if you want been wanting to join us, now is the time to get in. Go to ChristianBookAcademy.com and join us. We have so many great resources for you, including monthly two day virtual writing retreats to help you get your book done or your marketing done. We also have a new mini marketing messages kit for you every month. These are social media templates and email templates and things you can use in your marketing to easily begin to engage your audience and sell more books. We have so many trainings for you that go in the Order of the Kingdom Writers path, starting at the first draft, then your final draft, then self publish, then your book launch and finally ongoing marketing. And that's impact lives. And so depending where you're at in the Kingdom Writers path, you just stay focused and you'll find training you can benefit from in your stage of the Kingdom Writer's path. So we want to welcome you. There are many of you already joining us inside ChristianBookAcademy.com, but we encourage you to join us. If you're getting ready to write a book or you want to publish a book before the holidays, or if you're ready to market your book before the biggest book buying season of the year, come join us@christianbookacademy.com we cannot wait to serve you. And to continue this celebration this week I'm going to highlight Christian Book Academy member Jennifer Wattle. She was also one of the speakers at our conference and she's going to share a case study study of how she put together a profitable book bundle and how you can do the same too. So I hope you enjoy this case study. Hey everyone, it's Shelly Hitz. And I'm here with my husband, cj.

Hey guys.

And we are excited to feature one of our Christian Book Academy members, Jennifer Waddle. Welcome. Jennifer.

Hi. Thank you so much for having me here today.

Yes. And I don't remember what year it was that we first met, but it has been years ago. And you know, as a result, we started talking and you ended up self publishing your first women's Bible study and now you have 10 published books, right?

Yes, I do. I am just so thankful. It has been such a great journey and you have been a big part of that, Shelley.

Just so amazing. And I know now you are a freelance writer and you write for a lot of well known ministries online and all of this, but we just wanted to feature some of what God is doing in you. And I know you had kind of a case study that you had done recently and that you were willing to share with us.

Absolutely. So as part of your book marketing momentum challenge in the spring of 2020, I ended up selling one of my books as part of a Mother's Day bundle. But before we get into the case study, I'd like to say that the challenge was amazing. You provided us with a whole packet of ideas for marketing our books. And I still refer to that packet of information today. So this Mother's Day book bundle was one of the dozens of ideas that you offered in that challenge. And I remember that you encouraged the group to start with what we had. You told us to take inventory of the books we already had on our shelves. And because I'd already ordered a box full of author copies of my women's Bible study, I felt like this would be a great marketing strategy for the upcoming holiday, which was Mother's Day. So if it's okay with you, I'm just going to give you a quick breakdown of what the bundle included.

Yeah. And just real quick, I'll just share. That was an idea that I shared because I had done it myself as well. And I have a brush lettering workbook that I have ordered, you know, just different copies and I put together a bundle and it really helped, you know, increase the sales. And so I just, I mentioned that and Jennifer took the idea and ran with it. And I loved how creative and also how you were able to serve and impact individual women's lives, you know, through this opportunity.

Absolutely. So basically I took, I think I had 15 books on hand and so I created 15 bundles and this is what was in the bundle. I had my women's Bible study, which was called Scarves of replacing our issues with the covering of Christ. And I put in a small lined companion journal. These were just plain journals from Amazon that I found that I thought would accompany the book really well. And then I included a micro journal pen, a summer scarf which was white, going along with the theme of the book, scripture cards for each chapter. And then I bundled all these up into a white organza bag that was real pretty for Mother's Day, had some ribbon with it and it was just really nice. I also had to buy packing supplies and kind of determine the cost to mail each bundle within the United States. And, and so the total cost for each bundle was $21.45. And I turned around and sold the bundles for $32 each. So that was a profit of $10.55 per bundle.

Now I also, in this case study that I made up afterwards, I determined how much time I spent creating these bundles because I wanted to make sure this was going to be something profitable and not something that was just going to take up all my time, be way too much money and not be much of a profit at all.

So basically I spent one hour researching products and placing orders. I spent an hour creating a product sales page on payhip. Payhip was kind of the platform I used for my landing and sales page and then they in turn go through PayPal for the money part of it. I spent an hour creating sales emails to my subscribers. So I already had an email list which was huge and I just created a couple of different emails for them. And then of course I had the pack. I spent a couple of hours packaging the bundles and another hour mailing them in time for Mother's Day. So I spent six hours is all for this one holiday and taking into factor how much I was profiting and how many hours were involved. I ended up with an $18.41 per hour profit. Now I will say that I did the bundle sale again this year in 2021 and I sold more bundles at a higher price because I was able to include a few more details such as a blank line journal that I had created and self published and free bonus cd, a worship CD that I included in there. So it was tons easier this time around.

Were prettier. I was able to sell them for more money and we sold out within about 48 hours to a week.

It really, really can be profitable if you just start with what you have. Get creative, take the title of your book and think outside the box and add a few accessories to go with it and package it real nice. And I bet you can make some money on your books.

Yeah. And what I love about what you've done is I love the White scarf, you know, because it was tying in the title. So, you know, every time they see that scarf, wherever it is, you know, they'll think about you and your book and the message in book. Right. That's the thing. Helping the message to go deeper into their heart. But then I love how the second time around, like you had a lot of the things in place, right. So you could, you know, save a lot of time with that. But then you self published your own journal so you're able to probably profit a little bit more on that. And then you included a CD which if you don't know, Jennifer Waddle is also a musician.

And I've been, you know, thinking for years, oh, it would be so neat to be able combine the, you know, to your writing and your music. So I love that. So such a great idea. And that's exactly what happens when you do something if you are able to, you know, do it more than once. So like, for this you could do it every year and you know, be able to have a little bit of infusion of cash for your writing ministry, but also impact lives. Right. You know, every book, every bundle is a life that is impacted. And people are much more likely to give that as a gift, maybe even to someone who maybe isn't even, you know, a Christian or maybe they're, you know, on the fringe or, you know, struggling some. And so every bundle that you have shipped out is a life that God can impact. So I love that so much. Thank you for sharing.

You're welcome. And thank you for running the book marketing challenge. It was awesome.

Yes, you are very welcome. And we hope that this encouraged and inspired all of you that are listening. You know, think outside the box, get creative and maybe the first time it won't be as profitable or as successful as you want. But don't give up there. You know, try other things, add other things and you know, you can continue to see, you know, see things improve, but also more lives impacted. So thank you so much for sharing, Jennifer.

You are welcome. Thanks for having me me today.

Bye bye.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Kingdom Writers. We believe that you as a Christian writer have a specific role to play in the Kingdom of Heaven to impact lives for eternity.

And because of this, we choose to pour out our lives into encouraging writers like you to not only tell your stories, but to take the courageous step of self publishing your stories. Stories in books that will outlive you and leave behind a powerful legacy. This podcast is sponsored by Christian Book Academy, where we help you give birth to your books. We invite you to join our community of Kingdom writers.