7 Small Product Ideas to Use as an Upsell to Bible Studies, Devotionals, or Christian Living Books

This is episode 42 of Author Audience.

Welcome to the Author Audience show. The podcast that helps you reach more people with your message, create a book, connect with your audience, change lives. Here's your host, Shelly Hitz.

I don't know what kind of product I I can sell as an upsell to a Bible study, a devotional, a Christian living book. What possibilities are there for me? And it's interesting because there's a ton of coaching that goes on in my Author Audience Academy private Facebook group. And one of my members asked this recently and I thought this would be a great topic for this training. Hi, my name is Shelley Hitz. I'm a best selling author of over 40 books, the creator of authoraudienceacademy.com and I'm on a mission to help you reach more people with your message. It's time to let your light shine in this center stage Spotlight training. We're going to be talking all about products you can create if you're a Christian author and you've written Bible studies, devotional Christian living books and even if you have other topics, I think you're going to get some ideas in this training today. So my idea number one for creating a small product for a Bible study, a devotional Christian living book is music or songs that you can have created. One of my Author Audience Academy members is a musician and so she was asking me this question about what can I create as a small product for my Bible study. And I said, well, do you have any music you've produced? And she was like, oh, I didn't even think of that. And sometimes we can't see the forest for the trees. We're so close to what we have that sometimes we can't even see. Oh yeah, that's something of value. I could offer that as an upsell to my book related songs. Maybe there are public domain songs or my husband and I, we have a book called Forgiveness Formula and we hired a a well known Christian musician to write a song, a unique song just for us related to our topic of our book. And he gave us commercial rights to use that song and so we actually had it as a bonus. But you could actually work with a musician to create music that's related to your book or you could actually find a musician that's willing to let you like work out a deal and maybe you pay them a certain percentage of the sales. I don't know, I mean there's so many possibilities with that. So that's just option number one. Option number two is an adult coloring book with the scriptures that you've used or the themes you've used in your study. So maybe you have certain theme scriptures or certain themes. Maybe one of the themes is gratitude or faith or generosity or something like that. You could have a designer or if you even are good at doodling and drawing and stuff, you could even try, but you could have a designer create stuff for you. They even have now different people that are creating PLR that you can actually purchase the rights to use them and resell them. So there's all kinds of different options for that. But an adult coloring book is actually a pretty cool idea because they're selling really well right now. So that's idea number two. The third idea was a video series. Now this is pretty common, so you'll see a lot of Bible studies that have a corresponding video series. And you can buy the dvd, you can purchase access to the video training. But as I was brainstorming with my author, audience, academy member, I was saying, well, you know, what about doing a video series? And she was like, oh, it kind of scares me, you know, I mean, I'm very comfortable on video. I'm a speaker, I've done it a lot. The way you get comfortable is practicing it. You can practice on your phone, on your device, you can practice and just record things and never intend to publish it. But the idea I gave her, I said, what if you did it in your home or in a home setting, someone else's home, where it feels more like just an organic, natural Bible study setting and you're talking with other people, you choose certain people, you want to be there. And I've seen different Bible study leaders and different people do these types of videos where they're kind of like a rounded table or they're in a living room and they're just kind of talking and discussing. And these could be videos you could have created and produced for fairly inexpensively anymore. I mean, you don't have to spend a million dollars on production to get a pretty good quality product. But anyways, I gave her that idea and she was like, oh yeah, I think I could actually do something like that.

So that's number three. Number four is a journal. So I recently created a 90 day writing journal and it's spiral bound. I published it on Virvante. I have an entire episode on my podcast all about Vivante you can check out. But I think it's a great idea, if you're writing books that are these types of topics, to have a corresponding journal that they can write in something that it gives them space to process, to write, to do their homework or to answer questions and to maybe even have a place where they doodle or they have some sort of creative experience. But those are things that you can offer as well. And really, a journal doesn't take a ton of extra time because it's a lot of fill in the blank spaces. That's another idea. Idea number five. This was a cool idea. One of our athe audience academy members shared this and I love how our members share with each other ideas and resources and really collaborate together. But did you know you can create your own custom fabric?

That is so cool. Like if you had a specific theme for your verse or a theme or a verse for your Bible study, for your devotional, you could actually have something created and maybe even it's part of your book cover design or something like that. I don't know. You could actually have your own fabric created. There's a site called spoonflower.com where you can create your own custom fabric. That is cool. That's just a unique idea. And you know what? I actually bought fabric like this. I bought fabric that had all these positive sayings and positive phrases on it. And it just had all this really cool stuff, just phrases and different things. I'm all into motivation and all of that. And you could create something like that. The options are limitless. You guys. Really, it is. You just simply need to open your mind and realize there are so many opportunities for you not only to serve your audience, but for you to actually earn income and help to pay the bills and help to provide for your family or give. You know, my husband and I tithe. And then we have. We have offerings and we give a lot of our income away. And yet the more income we make, the more we can give away. But the more I can serve my audience, the better as well. Number six is also, you could think of getting a print created, like a different type of artwork. So think about it. If you have a theme, again, if you have a core verse part of your book, you could have artwork created. And this is actually something you can do now pretty easily the place you can go. And I just researched on Etsy. I didn't actually know how to do this myself. I have not done this myself. Disclaimer. But I found a link. They were talking about how to do this on the Etsy site. It's like a forum or discussion forum. And they recommended the website iprintfromhome.com so the letter I put printfromhome.com. and you can go there and you can have different prints created and you can sell these on Etsy. You can open your own Etsy store. You could sell then your fabric and your prints on Etsy. And it can be a way for you to create additional income from your topic in your book. Number seven is you can also then have a way for people to work more closely with you. So you could have like, let's say an accountability and coaching group. So this is different than just even a Bible study discussion group. This is more of an accountability or a coaching, depending on your topic. You know, I have a book and it's 21 days of gratitude Challenge. So I could actually set up a group coaching program where they pay and I walk them through each each day of the challenge for 21 days. And we meet live now that we have Facebook live streaming in groups. You could create your own group and then you could do videos just like this where you interact with people. And you could do your own coaching or accountability group. And people could pay a fee to be part of that because they're getting access to you. The more people get access to you, the more valuable that is. So that's seven different ideas. Wow. Now, I talk a lot about what I call the author audience funnel. In marketing, there's a common theme called the sales funnel. You think about a funnel and how it's shaped, and there's going to be people that join you and a lot more people that join you.

They buy your book, they opt into your free list, your subscriber email list, all of those things. And then it gets less and less and less. So there won't be as many people that buy your book that might buy your prints or buy your journal or buy your coloring book, and then it gets less and less and less as you get higher price. There won't be as many people that will join your coaching or accountability group. But there's usually always someone that wants to go for further with you.

So what can you do as an author to offer more ways to serve your audience? I talk about this author audience funnel in episode 27 of my podcast. And I heard you. If you haven't to go back and listen to that episode and then the very next episode, episode 28, I talk about four reasons to create a small product. So can you. So if you haven't listened to those two episodes, go back and listen. It's episode 27 and 28. And then this episode is specifically to help those of you who are Christian authors and you're Just thinking, Shelly, it's a great idea. I think what you're saying is brilliant. It's great, it's good. But I don't know what to do. These seven ways, they're just a tip of the iceberg, really. I mean, there are so many other ways. And if you know a Christian author that could benefit from this training, please share this video with them so they can get ahold of this training. So let me recap. The seven different products you could create are number one, songs or music. Number two is an adult coloring book based on your theme or your scriptures. Number three is a video series. And you could get creative with that, maybe even film it in a home setting so you feel more relaxed and at ease. Number four is a journal. So you would have a corresponding journal. And there's a way to publish spiral bound journals on Virvante. You could do your own custom fabric. That's number five. At spoonflower.com you can help have your own fabric created. How cool is that? Number six, you could have prints made, like art prints of your main theme or your verse, your scripture. And a resource I gave you was iprintfromhome.com and then seven, you could actually have a paid accountability or coaching group where you really go through deeper and really help people in even a deeper way. You could pray with them. You could offer just that accountability they need just to really take that next step in their spiritual walk. So those are seven different ideas. I hope you found it helpful. I think it's just a really great way to offer more value to your readers. There are so many people that you can partner with if you don't have that gift. I know some of my authors in Author Audience Academy have that gift and, and so they're able to do that naturally just themselves. But there's so many people you can even partner with you could work with.

One musician my husband and I contacted for our bestseller launch for our book Forgiveness Formula. And he has a bunch of just instrumental music. It's really soothing. And during that season of life, I was listening to his music a lot. He has it available for free on the Internet. And I found it. Well, I contacted him and I asked him if it was okay if I distribute it. And he gave that as a bonus during our best seller launch. You know, he gives it for free anyways, and he gave me permission. So you never know until you ask, right? Don't be afraid to ask. Don't be afraid to reach out to someone and say, hey, I'm doing this certain Bible study, this certain book. What would you think about partnering together in this way or that way? You could actually do maybe the book and have the CD as a bundle that you sell as speaking engagements or that you do a special launch, a special book launch or a special promotion and you offer that as a bundle and they get so much. You get so much and you work together. I don't know. There are so many options. We just have to be open. I also recommend just praying and asking God for wisdom, asking him for for creative ideas. We serve a creative God in Genesis talks about how God created everything. The fish and the birds and the animals and us. And look around you just look around at creation. It is amazing, isn't it? I mean so much creativity and so many different species of fish and different things we're still discovering to this day. We have a creative God. He has the ability to give you ideas you don't even know about yet. Just be open and I encourage you to create your author audience funnel. Your Take Action tip today is if you have a book that could relate to this topic. Like I said, self help Bible studies, devotionals or different kind of a Christian living book. Choose one thing from what I shared and start doing some research. If you're part of Author Audience Academy, post in the Facebook group and we can do some coaching. I can help you brainstorm some more ideas. We can talk about resources and how to actually implement this. But just pick one thing and start moving forward with it because that's what's going to get you results. Just simply listening to my trainings, simply getting more ideas. Ideas don't make money. Ideas don't change lives unless you implement them. We can't serve our audience unless we implement and you can't do everything. And so you have to have focus and you have to choose like what is it that I'm to be doing right now? So that's your Take Action tip is to choose one thing and start moving forward and I'll see See you next time.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Author Audience Show. Connect with us online@authoraudience.com where you'll find all the resources mentioned in today's episode. While you're there, grab Shelley's free video training on how to write and publish your book using her six Step Ascent method. Join us again next week to learn how to reach your audience with your message.