#367: Publish with a Purpose: 3 Reasons to Include a Free Lead Magnet in Your Book

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 day that we kick off our Kingdom Writers Conference Email Marketing Edition, we have some brand new speakers for you and we're excited to see what God does as you come and participate and learn from this content. Our goal is to help you move forward in your call to write, publish and market your books. So come join us@dommywritersconference.com email and make sure to share with your writing friends. Welcome to the Kingdom Writers Podcast. My name is Shelli Hitz and in this Publish With a Purpose episode we're going to talk about three reasons to include a free lead magnet in your book. Now we talked about last week about growing your audience, growing your author platform as you're writing, and one of the best ways to do that is to have an email subscriber list. Well, part of that is having a free lead magnet, which is a free gift. That's all it is. It can be anything and we give you tons of ideas both for nonfiction and fiction books inside Christian Book Academy. So you can check that out and join us@christianbookacademy.com and you'll find it in the Platform Challenge module. But today we're gonna talk about why would you also want to include that link to your lead magnet to join your email list in your book? I recommend, at the bare minimum, having a call to action to join your email list and get that free gift at the beginning of your book and at the end of your book. Now if it naturally flows, to mention it within your book as well. That's great too. You just don't want to be too spammy and like mentioning it every other paragraph, right? Use common sense and what you would feel is would be good as a reader. At the minimum, though, I recommend putting it in the front and putting it in the back. And there are three reasons to do this. First of all is to grow your audience. It's exactly what we were talking about in the previous episode. Your email list is a valuable asset that you will have for years to come and it's something that you can automate. It's great for introverts and it's great for writers, which we all are writers. And so I just really highly recommend using this as a primary way to grow Your audiences growing your email list. This has been my primary focus for years and it's been the number one way we've sold books, we've had, you know, sold products and so forth. The second way is to follow up with your readers so you can follow up and ask them to post a review. So if you know they're coming from your book, like if you have a specific list, a specific form that they use to sign up that you know that they have gotten that link from inside your book, you can follow up and ask them to post a review if they enjoyed your book. You can also ask them to purchase future books, future products, anything that you're working on. You can ask them to take a survey, to follow you on social media, to subscribe to your podcast. Whatever it is that you are doing, you'll now have the opportunity to follow up with them. Otherwise, Amazon does not give us our readers email lists. Don't you wish they did? That would make it so much easier. Oh, Amazon, you know, Amazon could just make our lives so much easier in that way. But, but they don't. And there's a lot of legal reasons and a lot of issues, you know, that would be around that. But you can get your reader's email list by including that call to action in your book. Not everyone's going to sign up, but those who really want either that free gift or really want to connect with you, they'll do it. And so then it gives you the opportunity to follow up with them. And I highly recommend doing some of these things on autopilot. So when you set up an email subscription list, you can set up automated emails that go out like once a week. And one of those emails can be asking them to post a review. I do this in my email list and you know, especially for my book, Broken Crayons Still Color. I just keep getting more and more reviews and I just have to believe some of that is because I ask, because that automated email is going out. I am not asking people every day. I'm not figuring out who I need to email or what I need to do. It's happening automagically. That's one of the things I love about email marketing. So, you know, you can also have an email in that autoresponder that asks them if they want to buy another one of your books, the next book in the series, or maybe you have a product or you have coaching or something else that you're offering. So, number one, the reason to have a free lead magnet in your book is to Grow your audience. Number two is to be able to follow up with your readers. Number three is to help them truly be able to be impacted by your message. So when you offer a free lead magnet, when you offer an email list and you're connecting with them, you, you help them to go deeper and truly apply the information in your book. And so like for my book, Broken Crayons still color. When they sign up to my email list, they can get coloring pages and they can get a, you know, access to the videos and, you know, just different things. And what that does is it helps them to truly apply what they're learning. But they can also use those resources in group studies. And there's just multiple things that it just helps them to apply what they've been reading. So think about it as you're creating a lead magnet. Like, what would be the next step? What would be something that would help them apply what you're teaching them easier? You know, maybe it's a journaling prompt. You know, as they're going through your book and you, you just, you know, format it really pretty in canva and you can give them that as a download. I mean, there's a multitude of things. And again, like I said before, we have a ton of ideas for you on lead Magnets and we can, I can personally help brainstorm with you inside ChristianBookAcademy.com so we'd love for you to join us over there or if you are already a member, just post in our group and we'd love to brainstorm with you ideas. But again, there are three main reasons I recommend including a free lead magnet in your book. You know, as you're going through the publishing process, as you're thinking about these things to, to think about, okay, I want to include this in my book. And okay, the other thing I want to say is that if you independently publish or self publish as we recommend, then you can update your book at any time. So if you've published previously and you didn't include a free lead magnet in your book, you know what, you can go back in and add that. You can ask the person who formatted your book to add that back in, or if you did the formatting, you can just go back in, add that into the beginning and to the end. But you can change things and you can update it. And that's the power of it. You can always do it later. But those three reasons are, number one, to grow your audience. Number two, to be able to follow up with your readers, to ask them for reviews to sell other books and products, but number three, to really help them to have transformation, you know, to impact their lives in a deeper way, to really be able to apply your book even more. So I hope that this was encouraging to you. If you're interested in email marketing, I highly recommend that you join our Kingdom Writers Conference, the email marketing edition. If you're listening live, we will be live with you tomorrow so you can join us. If you're listening later, you'll still be able to sign up, but this is a free one day conference to help writers unlock the power of email marketing to effectively grow your audience, consistently sell more books and free up valuable time for writing. And we're keeping this short, we're keeping it small. It's a one day conference with eight speakers. Each presentation is 20 to 25 minutes. And we are just keeping it to the place where you can truly absorb it, you can apply it and we're keeping it focused. This is just going to be email marketing. So join us, come over. Sign up at kingdomwritersconference.com forward slash email. Also share with your writing friends. We would love to have you join. It's free. You'll get free access to listen to the recordings for five days and then if you want to upgrade, we will have an all access pass available at a very reasonable price. And so I hope that you'll join us. We are so excited about this and we cannot wait to help you be able to move forward in your call to write, publish and market your book. All right, I will talk to you in the next episode. 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 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 bullets. So you can sign up@trainingauthors.com hit 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 hitsblit.

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 to your books. We invite you to join our community of Kingdom Writers.