#340: 3 Mistakes Keeping You From Selling More Books

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 Shelli 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.

In this episode, we're going to cover three mistakes that might be keeping you from selling more books. My name is Shelly Hits, and I'm one of the hosts here at the Kingdom Writers Podcast. But I also wanted to share that we are hosting our conference right now, the Kingdom Writers Conference. And I want to make sure that you get in, you get your free ticket at. @ KingdomWritersConference.com There's a ton of great stuff that we're going to be sharing, and you can go right now, get your free ticket and share with your writer friends@th kingdomwritersconference.com all right, let's dive in to this episode.

So, you know, we all know it's not enough to just write and publish your book, you know, and make it available for the world. You actually want people to read it. Right? And that means you do need to do some book marketing. All right, all right. I've been working and mentoring writers for long enough. I know that you can insert the groan here so many times. You email me and say, shelly, I just want someone else to handle the marketing for me. Who can I hire to do this for me? And to be honest, I really don't recommend just completely outsourcing your marketing. I think you can hire a virtual assistant and somebody to do a lot of the tasks for you. But I think that you still need to be involved, and you still need to, you know, be connecting in some way with your potential readers and all of that. But I've been there. You know, I've been there, too, and we've all been there. And, you know, it's easy to feel discouraged when you're trying to sell your book and no one's buying it. But there are some simple things you can do to change that. So let's look at three common mistakes that authors make when trying to sell their books so that you can avoid them. So, number one, not finding new readers for your book. So one of the mistakes that might be keeping you from selling more books is that you aren't reaching new readers for your book, and instead, you keep marketing to the same people over, over and over again. You know, it's kind of like trying to run a business using only your friends as Customers, Walmart and Amazon would never do that. Right. Because it's simply not going to work. It's not sustainable. You need new people and you need to get out there and find new readers for your book. But how do you go about it? So that's one of the things we're going to cover at our upcoming Kingdom Writers Conference Conference conference, the Courageous Writer edition. And we're going to talk about how to use collaborations to find those new readers for your book. So make sure you're signed up@domedywritersconference.com completely free. You can purchase the all access pass if you want, but we're offering all of this for free and you can sign up right now. All right, so number one was not finding new readers for your book. And I just want to insert, you know, we, we do a lot of selling of our books, but we also, personally, I, I have a business and it's to help you as writers. And there were a few years that I was kind of like on autopilot with marketing Christian Book Academy because I was completely updating our entire curriculum. It took me about three years to really update all the curriculum and then set up all the marketing pieces in place. But for those couple years that I was updating the curriculum, I wasn't finding new people that might be interested in our Academy. And it was like I was talking to the same people, the same list of people every time I did a launch. And it just started to get less and less and less effective. And so honestly, that's one of the reasons that we started hosting this conference. It brings together all, all sorts of experts in our field that are related to Kingdom Writers in some way. And it has been incredible. Not only is it a great experience for all of you, not only is it a great experience for all of our speakers as they get more exposure and you're following them and, you know, getting connected with the people that might be able to help you. But it's a great opportunity for us as well to just let people know that Christian Book Academy exist. For example, we've had people say, oh, my goodness, I'm so glad that this conference just popped up in my Facebook feed and that I joined. This is exactly what I've been wanting. Um, Jennifer Nelson, she published her book seven days after joining, after joining because she heard about it from the conference. And then we've had others that had been dreaming of publishing books for years. They found out about us through the conference, then ended up joining the Academy, publishing their books. They would have never known we existed had we not stepped out and done something like this in a collaboration. I've done group promotions for my books in the past. I've hosted all sorts of different events, done all sorts of different collaborations. But we're gonna go into detail on this in the conference and there's gonna be a lot of different ways you can do this, even if you're an introvert. So, number one, not finding new readers for your book. Can you see, I could talk a lot about even just that one topic. All right, number two, relying too heavily on slow growth methods like social media. And you know, it's easy to set up an account on sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, now TikTok, you know, all these social media platforms and then just hope the book sales will come pouring in, you know, and these platforms, they're free to use and, and it's fairly easy to get started. I understand some of you are tech challenged and so, you know, it's even hard for you just to get set up. But, you know, it's free, it's fairly easy to get set up, and then it can be a great way to connect with your audience. And for example, in the beginning, we primarily grew our business on social media. But here's the thing. If you're focusing on social media as your entire marketing strategy for selling books, well, you're probably not going to see the results you truly want. At the end of the day, social media is a way to really nurture your current audience. And sometimes, yes, you can find new readers as well. They, you know, someone will share something or, you know, they'll, it'll come up when they're searching for something or hashtags on Instagram or, you know, so many different ways that people can find you. But social media is not typically the best way to reach new readers for your books. And so the fact is there are other ways to market your book and reach those readers. And so you can learn about other effective ideas for marketing your book without relying entirely on social media at our upcoming Kingdom Writers Conference Courageous Writer Edition.

So go to kingdomwritersconference.com make sure you're signed up and cannot wait to share this with you. So, number one mistake is not finding new readers for your book, just talking to the same people over and over and over. Number two, relying too heavily on slow growth methods like social media. And honestly, I've made this mistake too, where, you know, in, in, in, in. In Today's culture in 2022, it is crowded, there's a lot of competition and to be honest, it's really hard to reach people in the algorith media like we could before. And we're just not getting much, you know, many views or interaction on our posts on Facebook and Instagram unless we pay, which before we really could get a lot of organic interest. And so, you know, it's. It's just even becoming harder to really connect and to get into those algorithms these days. Number three is not stepping out of your comfort zone to ask for help. If you're going to sell more books, you may need to step out of your comfort zone and connect with others that have a similar audience. This will help you reach new readers that may have never heard about your book otherwise, just like what I was talking about earlier, like what happened with us with Christian Book Academy. But by connecting with other authors and experts in your genre and on different platforms, you open up your potential audience dramatically. You might find a group of people who were looking for exactly what you offer, but they just didn't know you even exist. But after working with Kingdom writers for over a decade now, I understand it's often hard for you to ask for help or to reach out. I want to tell you this. Typically the best collaborations are a win, win, win situation. So it's a win for you, but it's a win for that other author, that other expert, because they're also getting exposure or whatever it is. You know, they're also able to benefit from the collaboration and then it's a win for that reader because they're able to find the books that they really love. And so like I've been talking about, we've created something for you that can help. If you want to learn practical strategies to help you sell more books through the power of collaborations, be sure to check out this year's Kingdom Writers Conference Courageous Writer Edition. And we called it the Courageous Writer Edition because it takes a lot of courage to step out. So look back at the three mistakes we went over again. A recap is number one, not finding new readers for your book. Number two, relying too heavily on slow growth methods like social media, and number three, not stepping out of your comfort zone to ask for help. Choose one thing that you think is affecting you the most, which one of those mistakes. And then decide on one thing you can do differently. You in your marketing, moving forward, like I said, to help you overcome these mistakes and go from unknown author to consistent book sales by gaining the courage to step out, initiate purposeful partnerships, and sell more books using the power of collaborations, check out our free five Day event, Kingdom Writers Conference, the courageous Writer edition. We've got a ton of experts lined up and ready to teach you everything you need to know. And and it all kicks off on September 12th. This is one event that you can't afford to miss. It is free to sign up@domencewritersconference.com but we also have the opportunity for you to get our all access pass. And this is a really great, great deal. When you register and sign up for about 20 minutes after you register, you're gonna have an opportunity to upgrade for over 50% off. This will be the only. You'll see it at that. That deal like it will go away and you will not see it again. So you're not. You'll not only get ongoing access to all of the presentations instead of 48 hours to watch each of them, you'll keep ongoing access, but you'll also get to join some bonus zoom workshops with me and you'll get all of the bonus training from our speakers. This is an incredible value. I mean, it is going to be so good. And so if you are able, make sure to grab that all access pass immediately after you sign up because that will be the best deal that you'll ever see on that coming up. So I am so excited for this. I cannot wait to see you there. And make sure to share this with your writer friends as well. Go to kingdomwritersconference.com and get your free.

Ticket.

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.