#385: Publish with a Purpose: Build Your Team

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 Foreign.

Welcome back to the Kingdom Writers Podcast. My name is Shelly Hitz and before we dive into this episode, I want to remind you that we have our next Kingdom Writers Conference coming up soon. It's the prayer edition on July 20, 2023 and you can get your free ticket at Kingdom Writers Conference.

If you're listening when this goes live, make sure to go grab your free ticket because you can join us live. If you're listening later, still go to that link because you can still get access. But this is a free one day conference to unlock the full potential of your writing with the transformative power of prayer so that God can use your words to impact lives for eternity. So come and join us. I really don't think you will regret it. This is one thing that has truly made made a difference in my writing career. So come and get signed up. Kingdomwritersconference.com forward/prayer in today's Publish With a Purpose episode, I'm going to be talking about building your team around here. We talk a lot about independent publishing or self publishing, but you can also consider a lot of this if you are a hybrid author or you're getting traditionally published. But we are personally experts in the process of independent publishing. So if you need help with that, check out our workshop procrastinationtopublication.com or join us inside christianbookacademy.com but we always talk about like you are publishing independently or self publishing, but does that does not mean that you need to publish on your own. You can see still have a team. Just like a traditional publisher, they hire a team to help you edit format, you know, a book cover designer. They're hiring a team as well. They're just being the project manager or the person kind of helping lead you through the process. And yet you can do that yourself and you can really get great results. We love independent publishing and we have another post on the benefits of independent publishing if you want to check that out. But as far as your publishing team, let's talk about first of all you can have a publishing team, second of all a marketing team and then third a spiritual team and publishing team that typically will include an editor. So even if you're an editor, you still need an editor, right. And this is something that really is probably the biggest cost when it comes to publishing a book. Unless you're doing a children's book and you're hiring someone to do the illustrations. So the editing is typically the largest cost. Now we do have a few cost effective options and recommendations for you in our workshop as well as in Christian Book Academy. But you'll have an editor on your team. You'll have someone that is a formatter. Now this is one area if you want to save money, you can learn to format your books yourself. I used to do it myself way back in the day. Then I partnered with Heather Hart and she used to do our formatting for many years. And now we have, we've had several other different people we use, but now we have someone on our team that does the formatting for us. And I personally don't enjoy it. It stresses me out. And you know, you really have to have an eye for, for details. And I'm more of a big picture person, a communicator and speaker and writer. But I, I'm not an editor, so, or a formatter. So I hire people out for both of those tasks. But the formatting is something that you can learn to do yourself as well. And then on your publishing team you'll have a cover designer. So I always recommend that unless you have a lot of experience specifically designing book covers that really should consider hiring a graphic designer to create your book cover. This is one of the, the best ways to sell books and to convert people into your readers is to have a really eye catching COVID So that kind of covers your publishing team. You'll have an editor, formatter, cover designer. And inside our workshop or in Christian Book Academy, we give you recommendations for all of these roles and you don't have to do it yourself. That's the thing I think people get confused about with SEL publishing or independent publishing. They think, oh, then that means I have to do everything. No, you can hire people to help you that can actually do a much better job at it than you would. So that's your publishing team. And then you, you could have a marketing team. Now a lot of people will come to me and say, shelley, who can I hire to do my marketing? You know, you just want to hand it off, you know, give it to somebody else. And typically that's not the best option. You know your book the best. You are hopefully the most passionate about your topic and what you want to share with the world and being able to share content and do marketing in your Own voice and with your own passion is important. And so I really feel like that you should still be involved in the process at some point. But you could hire a virtual assistant. So, so we have several virtual assistants now on our team, but you could just hire someone project based. And what you do is basically you have them do all of the behind the scenes stuff that you don't need to do. You still create the content, you still come up with this strategy or, you know, you, you do that together with a coach or a mentor and then you outsource a lot of the technical tasks to a virtual assistant. The other thing as far as having a marketing team is using templates. So inside Christian Book Academy we have so many templates for you to use that you can then edit into your own voice. But it just makes the process so much easier. For example, if you want to start using podcast interviews, we have an entire toolkit and I walk you step by step through the process. But then you also get templates for the pitch that you can edit and send to people. You get templates for the follow up templates for just about everything. We give you even canva templates for your podcast, one sheet and so many different things. Like, you don't have to start from scratch, you know how much time that can save you. Plus you get the strategy that we give you in those, those workshops and toolkits as well. And then as far as having a marketing team, I think it's great to have coaches and mentors for this. And things are changing so often. I mean, I hire people to help me, you know, and I, I take courses or I, I purchase training. And so just having different coaches and mentors to help you through the process is invaluable. Now I said that, you know, you probably don't want to outsource, you know, all of your marketing, but you could outsource something like Amazon ads. So Amazon ads are a really effective way to sell books, but it can take time to really figure it out, set it up. So if you work with someone who already knows all of the things and can really get you set up on a, on a much faster pace, but also more effective. And then once you kind of get up and running and you know, they've been helping you get things tweaked and so that it's working, then you could probably, you know, take over from there and manage it from there. So if you want to learn more about Amazon ads, check out our Kingdom Writers Conference Book launch edition. You can get access to the replays@bookDOMwritersconference.com launch, but that we've talked about your publishing team, your marketing team. Now let's talk about your spiritual team. I really believe this is the team that most of us neglect. You know, we know we have to get a publishing team in order to get that book out there. And we, a lot of us, you know, we want to then steward the message that God has given us. Well, and so we have the marketing team, but what about a spiritual team? So a lot of people call CJ&I pastors for Writers and Inside Christian Book Academy. We, we offer encouragement, almost like receiving a message from a pastor. Right. Every month on our virtual writing retreats, we host war room prayer meetings. And we have different ways that we invest into you spiritually. And so you can find mentors to be part of that spiritual team. You might have a prayer partner, so maybe it's even a prayer and accountability partner. We really highly recommend this as part of your team because writing is lonely. We are often doing it by ourselves. And so a prayer partner, and even if you want to also be an accountability partner would be amazing. And then I want to talk about having a prayer team. So having a private, small prayer team. So all you need is two or three people. I have maybe 20 on my prayer team, but I send out a specific list of prayer requests for our ministry and, and for my writing for. I just, I, I include everything that we're doing, but I send that out once a week. And then I ask my prayer partners to be praying for me. And it has been so powerful. This is something that we first learned from Ruth Mai. She was a. A person in our previous church, and she was ahead of the prayer ministry, and she really recommended doing this. And now we recommend this for writers. We. We have actually something coming up to help teach you about this, and it's our Kingdom Writers Conference Prayer Edition. Come and sign up. Get information about how to set up your prayer team. And then we also have additional training Inside Christian Book Academy on this. So go get signed up for the conference, kingdomwriters conference.com prayer and we'd love to help you create your prayer team as that support for you as you write, publish, and market your books. So just as a recap, we're talking about building your team and you could have a publishing team, a marketing team, but we also recommend having a spiritual team. And we could talk about many other things as well. But this is just to get you thinking like, you do not need to do this alone. And actually you're gonna be so so much more successful I believe if you link arms with the people that God has put in your path to help you. And so definitely check out our upcoming conference and find out about how to start your prayer team@dominglywritersconference.com prayer and I cannot wait to see what God does as you begin to build the team around you that will support your writing, publishing and marketing of your book.

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 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.