Book Marketing Strategy Plus a Publishing Idea

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.

So how can you have a book marketing strategy and a publishing idea all in one? That's what I'm going to share with you in this training. It's actually a new idea I'm going to implement with my latest book project. Hi, my name is Shelly Hitz. I'm an author coach@authoraudienceacademy.com the owner of shellyhitz.com and I'm on a mission to help you reach more people with your message. It's time to let your light shine. And in today's training, I'm going to talk about working smarter and not harder. So doing something one time and not only using it to market your current book, but also using it as a way to publish a new book. Interesting, isn't it? My current book project is Broken Crayons Still Color. And I have about four other books that I'm working on as well. It's all come together at once. I have three books I'm working on with a co author, Heather Hart. I have another book, prolific publisher. It's getting almost ready to publish. And then I have this really big project, Broken Crayons Still Color. But I have this project and I was thinking, how can I market this book to really draw in my target audience? Knowing your target audience is key. If you know your target audience, you can know where they hang out, what they're consuming online, where you might reach them, whether it's speaking or being interviewed on podcasts, or what kind of methods you can use to reach them. So my target audience for Broken Crayons Still Color tends to be Christian women. And it's open to anyone. I didn't make it just a women's book study, but that tends to be my target audience. And so I decided, and it was interesting because I've had a prayer team praying this whole time, every week, praying for me. And I give them specific requests and I asked them to be praying for marketing ideas as well. And I just had an idea come to me one day that this book is not just about me. It's not just about my stories and sharing what God has taught me through His Word and what transformational things have happened in my life. But it's a project about so much more than just me. It's about sharing other people's stories. And I knew that I wanted to do that, and I just, I knew I wanted to do interviews and I thought these interviews would be either on Facebook Live or on video somehow. And they would be something that could be shared, it could be go viral. The person that's being interviewed is most likely going to want to share it because they're sharing their story. But then I was like, you know, how can I do this work one time the interview of the people that are going to be sharing their stories and benefit from it in multiple ways. And it's been on my mind and I've been thinking about it and praying about it. And I specifically had an idea to transcribe these audios and then use those transcripts in a follow up book. But I still wasn't sure, like, how is that going to work? I don't just want another anthology book. I mean, I love anthology books. I've published many of them. But I want something different, something new, something fresh and something that really is a good follow up for this particular book. And I had my prayer team praying. That's the power of a prayer team. If you don't have a prayer team yet, get one started. And the idea came to me this last weekend when we were traveling to make it a devotional. But not just a devotional. It'll be kind of like a devotional with journaling prompts and journaling space. And then it will also have additional coloring pages. I created coloring pages for my book for each chapter. And so all of a sudden it was like, ah, that is great for my target audience, a devotional book. And I asked my beta readers and so far the feedback has been really.

I already have a basic outline of how I'm going to format each of the devotionals. So the transcripts will be heavily edited and it will kind of be in a different format. I'll make sure that after I do the interviews, I'll decide which particular interviews I want to invite to be part of this devotional book. And then if they agree to the terms and service, then we will move forward with the project. But all of a sudden I'm like, ah, not only is this going to be an amazing marketing idea, it's also going to become another product, another published book. And I am so excited about it. So it's going to be a video which is going to be on YouTube and I could upload it to Facebook, which, yeah, probably upload it to Facebook as well. The video is going to have the audio stripped out of it for a podcast, a broken crayon still color podcast. And then the transcript is going to be used for a devotional book. Wow. So how are you thinking outside of the box for your marketing ideas? Are there marketing ideas that could actually become additional products or books and so forth? If there are ways that you can actually use the things you've done to market your business, your ministry, your website, your book, and actually repurpose and use them in additional ways. My very last training was all about repurposing for your book, but this is now even repurposing your marketing marketing material. Are you getting excited? Like you don't have to be spinning your wheels doing a million things. Think about one thing you could do really, really well and then use it in multiple ways? That's exactly what I do with these trainings. I record them live on Facebook and then it gets edited and the audio goes on my podcast, the video goes on YouTube and then the transcript with the audio and video go on my blog. And I get a lot of leverage from from this one 15 to 20 minute video. Plus some of the transcripts are going into future books. So there are so many ways that you can use marketing for future publishing ideas. What kind of ideas do you have? Has this sparked anything for you? If you're listening on itunes, I would just love nothing more than for you to leave an honest review. That just means the world to me. I do read all of them and it just helps spread the word. If you're on Facebook, you can subscribe to my live updates and share the video from Facebook. And if you're on YouTube, please subscribe and like the video. Leave me a comment. But I'm so excited to hear the ideas that you come up with. And as always, I'm going to continue sharing what I'm learning as I go through this journey as well because I'm in the trenches with you. If you have not yet taken my free 5 day platform challenge all about marketing your book, I encourage you to sign up@shellyhits.com platformchallenge. You'll get a ton of information on how to make your marketing even more effective to work smarter and not harder. I will see you next time. Bye Bye.

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.