#366: Writing Well: Grow Your Author Platform as You Write

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.

Welcome back to the Kingdom Writers Podcast. My name is Shelly Hitz, and today we're going to talk about how to grow your author platform as you write. And so many of you are in the process of writing a book or publishing a book, and when you release the book and you launch the book to the world, you may want to have an audience ready to buy it, right? You may already have an audience and you're writing a book after the fact. But I know many of the authors we work with, they have decided to write the book and they don't have an audience yet. So what does it even mean to have an author platform? Well, typically that will include your website, an email subscription list, and social media or some type of content marketing. And this can look different for many of you. In Christian Book Academy, we teach you how you can create a mini author platform. That means you don't have to worry about a website and all the things right now. And you can just get started with the bare minimum. But the bare minimum that I recommend is setting up an email subscriber list. And I know some of you right now are groaning because this does require some technology. But just hear me out. When you're on social media, you don't own the platform. You could get your accounts closed at any time and lose all of those followers. But also you are dealing with algorithms and with just trying to get seen. With email marketing, you own your own platform. You are not vying for algorithms. Now, you could be dealing with people who are overwhelmed with their inbox, but I still find that I get decent open rates. And it's the primary way that we sell our books, our products. And I really recommend that you consider, at the bare minimum, setting up an email subscription list and you can also put a link to it in your book. I usually recommend a call to action in the front of the book and in the back of the book. And that way, you know you're right now you're probably writing your book and that's just something that you can have set up. You can start gathering all of your friends and family, followers, audience, anyone that's asking you about your book, you can start gathering them into this place, this email subscription list. And then when your book is released, you can let them know. You can send them an email and let them know. So how does this work? Well, there are many free platforms you can use. Mailerlite is one one of the best right now that we recommend. A paid platform that we recommend is ConvertKit. And you can start free on ConvertKit, but you're really limited by what you get free. And so if you want to start for free, I recommend Mailerlite. And it's a great option to get started. It's free for, I think, up to a thousand subscribers. And then you have a place that you own that you can stay connected and communicate with your followers without dealing with all of those algorithms on social media. So one of the things that I really want you to think about is, you know, what can you offer for free as you're building your email list? Well, one thing that you can offer is an excerpt of your book, and that's something super easy that you can offer. If you are a fiction writer, maybe you have some deleted scenes or some things that you have decided not to include in your book, but you can share with them. Or maybe you have a map of your area that your book is going to be based in that you can share, or a recipe based on your content. If you're nonfiction, there are so many things you can offer. It can be a checklist, it can be a video, it can be some. A challenge, something like that. But at the very minimum, just start with an excerpt and say, coming soon, here's my book, here's an excerpt. And give them a place to sign up. Now, why do you want to have an email subscription list and not just send out through Gmail? Well, technically you. It is against the law to send a bulk email to people through Gmail without a way for them to unsubscribe. It's the can spam act. And so you can kind of get away with it for a little while using a Gmail account or your regular email account. But I really recommend everyone to do this just to. To take some time, get it set up. And then most of these sites, like Mailerlite or ConvertKit, they will give you the opportunity to have a link to what they call landing page. You can just use their landing page right now and use that link for getting people to sign up. Make it easy. Now, if you have a website, if you have a blog, you know, you can create a dedicated page where people can sign up as well. But this is a key thing that I highly recommend that all of you have. I know there Are some of you, you've already published your book and you still have, haven't set up your email subscription list. It just feels too overwhelming. Well, we know this. I mean, I've been mentoring authors for over a decade and over 12 years now and we hear it over and over again that this is a pain point for you. And so I'm excited to share that our next Kingdom Writers Conference is all about email marketing. And you can get signed up for for free right now at kingdomwritersconference.com forward slash, email. And this is going to be a conference. We're just, we're doing things a little bit different. We're going to have a one day conference where it's going to be just eight speakers. We're going to keep it short, you know, focused to the point it's all going to be on email marketing, so, so that you get a lot of value out of it. You don't feel overwhelmed. Each of the presentations are going to be like 20 to 25 minutes and then we're going to have one day where you can join us live. So that's going to be tons of fun. My husband CJ will be kicking it off on a zoom call and then I will be closing it out at the end of the day. And then we encourage you in between those calls if you can listen to the other presentations so that you can come in the evening and ask any questions that you have. So this is all happening on March 9th. Even if you can't participate live, I recommend that you sign up get access. You're going to keep access to the recordings for five days. So even if you can't join live, if you can listen sometime over that five days and then if you want to, you can upgrade to an all access pass, we're making it very affordable for you. And so this is our email marketing edition of the Kingdom Writers Conference. It's a free one day conference to help writers unlock the power of email marketing to effectively grow your audience, consistently sell more books once you have that book published, right? And then free up valuable time for writing. And so I know so many of you don't want to get bogged down with marketing and yet you know you need to do it right, you know, once you've published your book. And so email marketing is ideal for writers because it's all about writing. It's about connecting with your audience and you can set it and you can forget it. Like you can automate it, you can schedule it, you can, I mean it is just ideal for introverts. It's ideal for writers and I just really encourage you. Even if you just get one tip for from this conference, it will be worth your time. So go ahead and get signed up over at kingdomwritersconference.com forward/email and we look forward to serving you and seeing you there that day. I will talk to you soon. Bye bye. Would you like more? If you are enjoying this podcast but want more, I have something exciting to share with you. We have released what's called a private podcast. So a private podcast you will not find by searching an apple. You have to know specifically how to subscribe to it. It's more private and exclusive and it just can be more relaxed behind the scenes. And my new private podcast is called Hits Blitz and it's wisdom for writers that you're going to learn from my 18 plus years of experience in publishing and online marketing so so that you can move forward in God's call to write. I am best known for injecting energy and enthusiasm into everything I do and inspiring those around me to take action. So I encourage you to listen in to this exclusive private podcast. It is free, 100% free. You don't have to pay for it. And be prepared to be inspired by my next Hits Blitz. So you can sign up@trainingauthors.com hits blitz and if you have any other writing friends that you think could benefit from it, definitely share it with them. They can go to the Same link training authors.com forward/hits blitz to get access. Again, this is a private podcast so you cannot get access to it any other way. It's completely free. All you have to do is sign up and then you'll get all the information on how to add it to your podcast player of choice. So I can't wait for you to join me over there. I share a lot of things behind the scenes and more content just in a real time basis. So it's more like chatting with a friend or following someone on stories on social media. Except you don't have to get caught up in any of the algorithms. You'll just have this in your podcast player and be able to listen in wherever you're at, whatever you're doing. Some of the listeners told me this week that they were listening while waiting in the Target parking lot, while brushing their teeth. You can fit this into the pockets of time that you have. So I hope you'll join me. Come over to trainingauthors.com hitsblitz.

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.