From a Crazy Idea to a Finished Devotional in less than 3 Months with Deb Potts

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.

Welcome to Author Audience, where I'm on a mission to help you reach more people with your message. It's time to let your light shine. Today I'm rolling out the red carpet and inviting you into my community for a behind the scenes look at what's working for authors just like you. I love these episodes because I think it's good for you to hear from other people that are in your place and what's worked for them. So my name is Shelley Hitz. I'm the owner of Author Audience Academy. And the most rewarding part of my job is helping others get results and reach their goals. In this episode, I'm going to position the spotlight on one of my members, Deb Potts. So welcome, Deb.

Thank you. I'm so glad to be here.

Deb is a speaker, author, and mentor to married women. She loves to share the lessons God taught her about forgiveness, healing, and destiny. I love that she says that God called her to follow him. Just at the brink of a family tragedy, she shares her story with anyone who will listen in coffee shops. Yay for coffee auditoriums. With humor and candor. Deb lives in Michigan with Bruce, her husband of 40 years. Wow, that's awesome. And together they lead the marriage ministry at their church campus. They have two married children and two grandsons. And you can find more information about her book, Make Peace with Prickly People at Deb Potts.

So this episode, I'm actually going to have you share something, Deb, that you did before you joined Author Audience Academy. But it was just such a neat story. I just felt like it would be a great opportunity for other authors to learn from the process you went through. And in this episode, Deb is going to share how she went from a crazy idea to a finished devotional in less than three months. So excited to hear more from you and just share with us a little bit about what you're doing. What happened in those three months.

Okay, well, a lot happened in those three months. So it was probably about June, beginning of June of 2016, and our anniversary was September 4th, and we started talking about what we wanted to do for our anniversary and decided we would have a party. And so we were getting ready and kind of planning for the party and we're gonna have a tent in the backyard.

Oh, fun.

All of a sudden, my husband gets this brilliant idea.

Write a devotional and we can give it away to everybody who comes to the party.

Oh, man.

And I honestly wasn't real excited about that idea to begin with because I was in the middle of finishing the edits on my print book, which launched September 12, eight days after our party. So I was really busy going back and forth with the COVID artist, the formatter, doing edits on my book. At the same time, my husband and I were planning a major event at Church for August 29th.

Oh, my goodness.

Four or five days before our anniversary. They had over 200 people invited. It was a big event to promote mentoring and try to intentionally recruit more mentors. And so I said, are you out of your mind? I'm going to write another book at the same time.

So this was during a season that you were really busy.

A lot of authors are like, I can't write a book. I'm too busy.

Exactly. That's exactly what I thought. But I didn't leave room for God, I guess. And so I started thinking about it, thinking a little bit more. You know, we have a real passion for marriage. We were 18 years into our marriage before we became Christ followers, and we're really committed to leaving a different legacy for our kids and our grandkids and future great grandchildren also. So we wanted to kind of leave something. And he kind of kept winning me over with his idea of writing this book, that it would give us an opportunity to really impact the future generations. Also to let my grandchildren into my heart a little bit. I only knew one of my grandparents out of the four, and I would love to know what their lives were like and what their faith was like. My grandparents were both sets were divorced in a time when hardly anybody got divorced. My dad grew up with no dad. My mom grew up with no mom. You know, we just really have a passion for marriage and for family. So he won me over. And so I decided, okay, let's do this. So we pray. That's where we start.

It's the best place to start.

It is. Because there is literally no other way this could have happened without God's work in it. So the first thing we did was we sat down and brainstormed. What items are we going to have in this devotional? We wanted 40 items since it was 40 years. And so we kind of just brainstormed and wrote down all the different events of our lives. And we included our wedding, times when we moved, birth of our kids, a miscarriage that I had, decision to follow Christ, and the impact on our family. Two of our parents have passed away. So, you know, all those different things, Bruce's career, writing my book, starting my ministry, things like that. So we got it down to 40 and then we chose a scripture verse for each one of those and a photo to go with it. And that took a lot of time because we started digging through all kinds of albums and we wanted to do that anyway for the party so the albums were out. And for each event we would choose a scripture, a photo, a title, and then we divided them up. So we each got 20 to write. And then we created a template, a word template, because we wanted the left hand side of the page to be the title, the scripture, the picture, and then the right hand side of the page would be the text, and it would have to fit on one page. So we thought ahead and decided what size book we wanted to have to the finished product so we could what font, what margins, things like that. Because we knew we wouldn't have much time for the formatter to take place. And so we started doing that. We created some Dropbox files so we could share the work. Even when he's traveling and out of town, he could work on it and we could share the files. So we would have a folder for devotionals yet to be written. We would have one for devotionals that needed to be edited, and we edited each other so we didn't have time to hire anybody to do the editing. Then we had a folder for the pictures and we have a folder for the finished chapter, the finished devotional. So we got to work, and that was probably around the middle or late June when we started actually getting serious about the project. Just kind of dug away at it little by little until we got to the point where we started wondering about these pictures because a lot of them we were scanning in from our photo albums and they weren't looking that great. One advantage that I had, because I was doing the other book, I already had a relationship with a formatter and with a cover artist. And I probably could have done better at getting better prices if I had been an authorotic audience academy before that, because we didn't really have a great bargain. But I knew that they worked well, I was working well with them and they could get the job done. I asked them, can you rush this? So we decided to give the formatter a file of the pictures first, just to make sure they're going to be okay. And he came back and said, all these, you know, he checked them off on list and these are not okay. So we had to go back and try to find some more. We ended up buying some photos, you know, online to replace some of them. And they're not all that great, but this is a free giveaway, and so it's okay. Some of them are a little blurry or washed out a little bit, but we thought it was okay for the use that we had for it. That was a process that we went through. We got the graphic artist. She was a real trooper, and she got it done in three days. So she got the COVID done and. And the formatter took him a month, but that was a lot of back and forth between us and him. And we were editing at the same time and getting the pictures in there. I was planning on publishing my book, an IngramSpark, my other book. So we decided to use IngramSpark for this one as well and just do it as a print book. That was easy also, because I already had that knowledge about how to go about uploading it and things like that. We ordered the print books August 22nd. They were shipped on August 26th, and our event was September 4th. We got there just.

Just in time.

Awesome. Now. And did people enjoy it? Did they really find that a significant gift?

Yeah, it was so precious when we gave them. Nobody knew about it. It was a surprise. So we didn't tell our kids. Yeah. Ahead of time. So Bruce's dad was there, and his sister came from out of state, and all of my sisters were there. Well, no one didn't make it, but we had lots and lots of family, and some of our friends who had been in our wedding were there as well. So it was a really cool day. We had a great celebration. And that was, like, the surprise at the end that we had these books for them. Some of our family members read them that night. The entire book?

Yes. And, I mean, that's something, like you said that you. That they'll cherish. I would cherish something like that from any of my family members. And just the fact that there were personal pictures in there as well. But there's several things that you did that I think were really key to your success. And the first thing was you sat down and brainstormed your outline. And basically your outline was based upon the different events. Now, every book is going to be different, but for nonfiction books, there's probably going to be some sort of brainstorming session that you can use to outline your book. And so you did that in the very beginning. And then the second thing you did was you decided on the format. So I find for Devotionals, I've written Several different books that are like 21 day type devotionals. And I have a prayer book where it's like, I have an image. So mine are stock images, they're not personal images. I have a image, there's a theme, an image. I have a scripture and then a prayer, and then there's other ones that I'll have like a scripture, a little reflection, a quote. So it's really nice to decide on that flow and the format ahead of time. So, you know, what are the pieces I need for every day? And it's almost like putting together a puzzle. And you know, once, you know, like, you know, when you put a puzzle and you have the outer edges, it's like, oh, it's so much easier then to start filling in the other pieces. And it's almost like you did that and God just led you in that process of putting out that outline, the formatting of how you were going to do each devotional. And then what's so powerful, I have a blog post all about this about having a co author. Guess what? You only had to write half of the book.

Right? Yay.

And so I've done that many times where I'll have co authors and we'll divide up the book and you can get things done a lot faster. It has to be the right person. There can be issues. If it's not the right person, you can't agree on things. But when it's the right person and for you and your husband, how perfect, you know, it can really help you get the work done faster. So I just love this. And as far as like any encouragement that you just want to share to authors and a take action tip, what would you share today?

Well, I think just planning ahead, I mean that, you know, that was huge. If we didn't do that, we never would have had the book done on time. And I just really would encourage people to just go for it because we spend all this time thinking about that book that we want to write and they say something like 95% of people want to write a book and we keep that inside of us and we never, it never becomes real and we don't have that to leave behind. And so, you know, maybe there's somebody in the future generation is going to look for that. And I have bibles that belong to my grandma and my great aunt. There's nothing, nothing written in them at all. I have nothing of them, you know, their thoughts. And so think about the future and who needs to read the story that's in your heart?

Yes, I love.

That's how I encourage.

Yeah, I love that. And you just have no idea what God will do. I always encourage people to be finishers of what God's called you to do. And once you finish that, God can then use it in a multitude of ways. You never know how he's going to use it. I would encourage you and your husband to put that devotional on Kindle for other people to have access to and to be able to have it or as a PDF download when they sign up for your email list or something like that. But, you know, allow other people to be impacted. Once you have that, once you've finished it, God can use it in so many different ways that you have no even idea. Like I get emails and it's just, it just blows my mind of, you know, what God's doing. And so, yes, I love that. Thank you so much, so much for sharing with us. And again, just share where people can find you online if they want to connect with you more.

It's deb pots.com and they can find there. There's a sign up there for my email list. You get some free goodies if you sign up for that. So come over and see what I have.

Yeah, and it's Deb D E B and it's Pots is Potts. So go check out her website, connect with her. And thank you so much for sharing your story. It's just such a fun story for so many reasons. And I just thank you for being here on the podcast today.

Thanks so much, Shelley. I really appreciate it.

Yes. And thank you all for listening and being here for this episode of Author Audience. I will see you next time. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Author Audience. I would like to invite you to attend one of my free trainings on three proven book writing formulas every nonfiction author needs to know. This is a fun and fast way to write a nonfiction book, but also a book that you're proud of. Plus, I will give you two free gifts just for attending. No credit card required. First, you'll get my 10 nonfiction book title templates and you'll also get my ebook titled Brilliant brainstorming. It's a 28 page ebook and both of these bonuses are yours at no charge. Just for joining us for the training, you can sign up for my free training by going to shellyhitz.com formulas. That's Shellyhitz S H E L L E Y H I-T Z.com formulas. This training and the two bonuses are free and I would love to help you write your next nonfiction book.

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