#316: Marketing Minute: 3 Types of Book Marketing

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.

The most economical way to market your book. And this is a great question. When you're writing, there is a season that's intense, right? You're writing that messy, ugly first draft. Then you go into the, we call that the first draft stage. Then you go into the final draft stage where you're self editing, you hire a professional editor, you're doing, you know, putting all of the references in there, all of that sort of thing. Then you go into a phase of self publishing and you or traditional publishing and you get that book published. And then guess what, you have a book launch. So there's a book launch phase and then ongoing marketing. So marketing it never. There's not an ending or a beginning and an ending to it, right? It is ongoing. And so I think that's why we got so many questions about it. You know, writing, it's like there's a start and end. The editing, there's a start and end. The publishing, there's a start and end. The book launch, there's a start and end. But the marketing, it's ongoing. And so I could literally do trainings for weeks. And we have a lot, a lot of training in Christian Book Academy for you on marketing. But I wanted to try to give you some, some answers that can help you. So I wanted to answer this first of all by just saying, I think most of you probably know this, but if you don't, there are three main types of marketing that you can do and the first is the most economical. To answer your question, Stephanie, the first category or the first type of marketing is the free organic marketing. So this could be things like content marketing, whether it's a blog, whether it's videos on YouTube, whether it's a podcast, you know, it can be different formats, but you can do content marketing and you know, to get your ideal audience to, to get to know you. And so a lot of times you're using like SEO, search engine optimization, you know, on your blog post, you're using keywords on YouTube videos and doing things to help your content be found right by the right person. Also, free organic marketing includes social media. And I know a lot of us have a love hate relationship with social media. I know I do. Anyone else?

Oh, and what I have learned there was a few years ago that I wanted to quit all social media and I wanted to give it up because I literally had an addiction to it. And it was not positive. It was not a positive influence in my life. And the Lord was like, shelley, this is a battle, but it's a battle worth fighting. And you know why Kingdom writers? Because your target audience is on social media, most likely, or at least a good portion of them. And so what I have learned to do is just set really, really good boundaries and, you know, really monitor the time. I'm on social media now, right now I've been in the midst of a book launch and these bonuses and so I've been on social media more and I feel it, I feel the effects. And so my word of wisdom to you is use these ways that we can market our books, but don't let them use you. And so we have an entire module in Christian Book Academy called Mini Marketing Messages. And every month I create some different templates for you. We have text templates and then we also have image images you can use. And it makes it really easy for you to just be posting and connecting and you can edit these to your voice for your audience and, you know, so that is a resource for you. But I do recommend using it, but having those boundaries and doing it in a way that is helpful and connecting with your audience. I'm sure some of you found us on social media and so that is the first type is your free organic marketing. Now the con, the pro, and the good part of it is it's free. The con is that it takes more time to build an audience, to reach more readers, to sell books and, and you have to be patient in that process. I have been marketing online since 2004. I, you know, it's not an overnight success and I've put a lot of time and energy and investment. I've planted a lot of seeds over the years to get to where I am today. And so some people, yes, God, could just take your book and your marketing and it could go off and skyrocket tomorrow. Most of the times.

It'S going to take time. And so that's. And the other, the other thing is you don't own those assets on social media and at any time your account could get shut down, that sort of thing. So that's why I really recommend also having an email list as a writer so you always have a way to contact and connect with your readers, no matter what happens. When with social media, you know, with, you know, SEO, with all that sort of thing that you're building, that in addition to doing that free organic marketing, the second type of marketing. So what was the first type? The first was free organic marketing. It takes longer, requires more time, but it's more cost effective. The second one is paid ads. So that's where you are paying for that visibility to get directly in front of your target audience. And for authors, typically the best platform for paid ads are Amazon ads. And we have an entire lesson on this in Christian Book Academy. But there is a learning curve and things do change. You know, there's also Facebook advertising. Personally, my personal experience with Facebook advertising is that the profit margins on a book, it's not enough to be able to make Facebook ads profitable. Whereas if I am advertising Christian Book Academy, which, you know, there's a higher profit margin, then it makes more sense for me to do that. But there is one caveat. I have a colleague, Alana Terry, some of you probably know her and she teaches 50 Facebook ads for authors. And she has a really long series of fiction novels. And if she promotes the first novel on Facebook ads and the person then reads the next one, the next one, the next one, the next one, she has a certain read through rate, then it can make sense for her to advertise on Facebook. Otherwise if you're just have a standalone book, you don't have products or services or courses or anything else. I recommend using Amazon ads. There's also book by ads, there's like individual, like one off type places you can do ads. And we have an entire lesson on this in Christian Book Academy. But we have had great success with a few of our books on Amazon. We have a huge backlist of books. Not every book has sold well on Amazon ads. But my book Broken Crayons still color it has. And so I always recommend authors try it, you know, because it is a way to get directly in front of your target audience and you don't have to spend a ton of money to do it. So the first. So we have three types of marketing, right? The first is your free organic marketing, that's your content marketing, your social media. Second is paid ads. Typically I recommend Amazon ads. Third is partner marketing through strategic relationships. And so this is very, very powerful. But I don't see very many authors doing this. And this is something we're really trying to push forward and help you with. In Christian Book Academy I am doing workshops called Courageous Writer Workshops. And it's all about this partnering together because it does take courage, it does mean that you have to be a courageous writer, to, to reach out and to form these relationships, to ask people to do different things with you. But it's like you're connecting with others in your genre or in your niche that have a similar platform to you and a similar target audience and.

It can be very powerful. So, you know, there's all sorts of ideas that you can do with this. You know, it could just mean that you're a guest on someone's podcast or you guest blog on someone's blog, or you show up and you do a social media takeover on their account one day or you do a solo email swap. So if you both have email list of the target audience and you agree, you'll send an email for them, they'll send an email for you. So you can do that type of a thing and then you can do bigger things. Like, you know, Maybe it's a 10 book giveaway and you're giving away books of 10 different authors in your genre and everyone shares that giveaway so they're sharing to their audiences and it makes it more powerful. My conference conferences that I do, that's an example of it because I'm hosting all these speakers and then they all share the conference and people are signing up to our email list to get access to the conference. And a lot of you have found us through that as well. So there are a lot of ideas that you can do. And I actually have a video where there's 11 ideas for building an email list. But you can also use it to sell your books, partner marketing ideas. And so that's definitely something to check out and take advantage of. I will tell you, there's no like quick, easy button for marketing. Right. Can I just be honest with you? Can I just give you the, the truth to it? People who are saying like, you know, you know, sell all these books and become a best selling author and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, it's like all this hype. There are some things that you can do. Yeah, you can even like change, you know, add more categories and you know, you can, you know, there's all sorts of campaigns you can run and just different things you can do. And we share a lot of those practical step by step tutorials in Christian Book Academy. But I just want to be honest with you, there's not one button you can push that all of a sudden all your target audience is going to come and find you and buy your book. Don't you wish there was? But I would say if you want the quickest results in the shortest amount of time and with the least amount of cost. Partner marketing, it's going to take the most amount of courage because you're going to have to reach out, you're going to have to show up and you're going to have to do it. Afraid. I already feel like a little bit of like, like when I think about stuff like that and I've been doing this for a long time, but it's worth it. And so we're teaching you a lot of those things and I'm giving you templates, I'm giving you step by step and like recently we did a media kit workshop with Christian Book Academy and people who had been wanting to do podcast interviews for years finally got their media kit done and are getting booked. Podcast that gets me excited. So I know that's just the tip, tip, tip of the iceberg, but definitely wanted to just kind of share that with you and know that there are a million and one different ways to market your book. How many of you have downloaded our PDF? It's 27 book marketing ideas. So it's 27 different ways you can market your book. If you don't have that yet, you can go to training authors.com forward/ideas and you can download that PDF. So that will give you a great starting point as well. And we have a ton of, like I said, training and just practical workshops and accountability to actually help you to do it in Christian Book Academy.

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 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.