#394: Publish With a Purpose: Publish a Discovery Book and Ditch Discovery Calls

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.

We start today. The Kingdom Writers Conference Write youe Story edition kicks off today, September 14, 2023. So if you haven't gotten your ticket yet, join us@dommywritersconference.com story and make sure to invite your writing friends. This is going to be a powerful conference as we help you in this one day conference to be able to take the courageous step of sharing your story so you can bring your writing dreams to life and leave a lasting legacy. Go get your free ticket@bookDOMWRITERSCONFERENCE.com story and I will see you there. Welcome back to the Kingdom Writers Podcast. My name is Shelly Hitz and in this episode I wanted to share with you the idea of publishing a discovery book and ditching discovery calls. Now, I'm not saying that you have to completely ditch discovery calls, but I did like the alliteration there, right?

And sometimes it can just be draining to be on a call all the time trying to sell your service, sell your product, whatever it is. And so this is something specifically for those of you that have more high ticket social services products that you're trying to sell through a sales call. A lot of times they call those discovery calls. And what I've been saying lately, and I've been talking about this and teaching about this for years, but now I'm actually calling it a discovery book. What if you published a short Kindle ebook? Or it could be a short print book and Kindle ebook as your discovery book. This is powerful and basically it's kind of like a lead magnet, right? You're putting together some really good quality information. And I've talked a lot about publishing short Kindle ebooks. They're about 10,000 words, 10 to 20,000 words. And in a print book, that's eight and a half. By five and a half, they could be anywhere from like 65 to 100 pages. But they're short, easy to consume, and it really is that secret sauce, you know, the thing that really can set you apart. And someone, when somebody learns this or they get a certain result and then they're like, what else does this person have to offer? So, so this discovery book, it can just be a short Kindle ebook that you publish specifically for the purpose of leading people into your sales funnel, which just means into contacting you and finding out more about your services. And so typically, I encourage you to have some sort of call to action in the beginning of the book, the end of the book, and you can sprinkle it throughout as well to join your email list to. To request more information. And you can even use this to fill your discovery calls if you want. But what if the book can do a majority of the selling for you and it can prepare the person to be ready to say yes. And so you want to have some calls to action in the book to connect with you. And that will be different depending on what you're selling, depending on what your current process is. And when you have a short Kindle ebook, I recommend creating content that is not available either on your blog or any other digital platform, like a PDF. So that way you can enroll this book in their KDP select program every 90 days. You can then promote the book for free for five days. And there's a whole strategy around this. I have a whole blog post about this. But you can submit your book to all these different sites and it gets you in front of a new audience. Your very first time you do this, it's going to be the most powerful because it's the first time anyone has been introduced to your book and these other sites that they have heard about you and that they may choose to promote you. But publishing a short Kindle ebook is a fantastic way to allow people to get to know, like, and trust you. But besides, you know, having a free day, you know, how else can you position your book so people can find it? Well, my first step was, you know, just to publish that short Kindle ebook. And we have training for you about this inside Christian Book Academy. And so if you just want the nuts and bolts and how to do this and the most affordable, fastest way, just come and join us@christianbookacademy.com we would love to help you with that. We've helped over a thousand different people become published authors over the years, and so we would be honored to help you. So that's, number one, publish a short Kindle ebook. Number two, use SEO on Amazon. So what is SEO? SEO is search engine optimization. And a lot of people think of that for blog posts. You're researching what phrases are people entering into Google and searching for. And, you know, then they can find your blog post. But SEO can also be used on YouTube. People use YouTube as a search engine. It can also be Pinterest. And guess what? It can also Be Amazon. Amazon is often like a search engine for people. They're searching for books on certain topics or they're wanting to learn something new and, or they're looking for an answer to their problem, or they were wanting to find a certain novel or fiction book that will entertain them or their kids. So what you can do is you can actually do keyword research of what people are searching for on Amazon and then you can use those keyword phrases in your discovery book title. So I did this with my book, self Publishing Books 101. This was originally content that I had started on my blog. And the book has been in, you know, it's like, and it's second or third edition now, I can't remember. But I researched. And that phrase, self publishing books, it was a phrase people were searching for on Google, on Amazon and so forth. So I actually used that in my main title. And that book is still available today. We've updated it along the years and you know, it's been, it's helped so many people to publish their books. But, but you want to think about putting those keywords either in your main book title. That's the best if you can, or your subtitle. And because you're creating this book specifically to direct people into your business, you can have a little more flexibility with that. You know, a lot of times when we're writing books like we want a certain title or we want it to sound a certain way or whatever this is, this is more for lead generation. And so you really want to focus on doing some SEO keyword research. And we also teach how to do this inside Christian Book Academy and can help you in that process with that as well. And then so number one is publish a short Kindle ebook and, you know, share it for free several days, every 90 days, get it out there, submit it to the sites, do all the things. Number two is to use SEO on Amazon. So make sure that you do some keyword research and put those keyword phrases in your book title or subtitle. And number three, consider publishing that book as a short print book as well, because it's a business card people won't throw away. And I have been saying this for years, but it's true. I really believe most people just do not have the heart to throw a book into the trash. Even if it's a short book, they'll maybe donate it or they'll give it away to someone they think might want it. But I just really believe most people are not going to throw it in the trash. And so what you can do is take that short Kindle ebook. And we've had so many of these through the years that if they start to sell well, then we would have it formatted and pay the extra expense, you know, to get the ISBN, do all the things, it costs a little bit more for a print book, but then we have that print book and you can order copies at your author copies cost, which is usually two to three dollars. I mean, I think if you were, if you're publishing a short Kindle ebook, it's typically going to be like maybe $2.30 or less, I mean per book. So it's going to be pretty inexpensive. Or you can go to different sites and order in bulk and you might even be able to get a better price per book if you're going to order a whole bunch of co. But this then is something that you can keep with you at all times. So you can keep a few of these books in your car.

In your bag, in your backpack. When you're traveling on the airplane, you might meet somebody. And I've done this before where I've met somebody and it's a divine appointment and God connects us and I give them one of our books and you can write your contact information in the front and literally it's a business card people won't throw away. So what if you published a discovery book and were able to ditch discovery calls? Now this whole system, you know, I could go much more in depth about all the different pieces. But if you want help doing this, I encourage you to join us inside ChristianBookAcademy.com this is where we help you to take a step of faith and finally finish your book. And in this particular strategy, we can help you actually bring new leads into your business through a book. And it doesn't have to be long, drawn out, expensive or difficult. We can really help you make the process a lot easier and affordable. So come join us@christianbookacademy.com and let me know if you decide to use this strategy of a discovery book. I would love to know. And send us a link to your discovery book so we can see what you're doing and I will talk to you next time. Bye bye.

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.