How Beth Jones Used Facebook to Help Her Publish a Best-Selling Book

This is episode 26 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.

Welcome to Author Audience, where I'm on a mission to help you reach more people with your message and 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. My name is Shelly 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 particular episode, I want to position the spotlight on one of my members, Beth Jones. Welcome, Beth.

Hi. Thank you, Shelly.

And I'm just gonna share your bio real quick just so people can get to know you. Beth Jones is an international speaker and author. She's wife to paramedic Ray Jones and mom to three beautiful daughters. And I think you now have a grandchild, right?

Four.

Four. Oh, my goodness.

Four grandkids. One last night. Yeah.

Wow. She resides in Kansas City, Missouri, and her mission is equipping women to use their gifts for God, doing what they love and prospering in all areas of life. She encourages women to dream big. I love that because we serve a big God. You can find out more about Beth speaking and books@bethjones.net so, Beth, I'm so excited for you to be on this podcast episode and for you to share a little bit because you really had a transformation when you came into Author Audience Academy. You'd already written several books. I think you have. You said you have seven, now you're working on three more. And by the time this episode airs, who knows, you may have even more because you're on a roll now. But, you know, before you joined Author Audience Academy, your books had not hit the bestseller list. And so tell me a little bit about the process of what really made the difference for you and how were able to then become a best selling author.

Well, before, like Shelly said, before I had joined her training, I had written some books and I gotten them on Amazon. But with Shelley's training, Shelly's training is amazing. She inspires me so much with her success and I is just jam packed with valuable content and it just, it taught me and it is teaching me so much. What made the difference for me was learning about the keywords and the categories. I had never really paid a lot of attention to that. And Shelly's training, I really felt that area made a huge difference in my book sales. The way they were ranking and just understanding that the categories and the keywords could make a real difference and getting your book ranked high up, even on the bestseller list. So I just love, I'm learning so much about that and that's made a big difference.

Yes. And so when you choose your category and really I recommend usually choosing one that has less competition so you can rank higher in the bestseller list for that category and then one that has a bigger audience and is profitable. And we really went into detail in the Take Action workshop in July, which is in the members area and tons of information. But for you, you really went through, you researched the categories for your book and the book that you know. Tell us about the book that you. The first book you published after joining Author Audience Academy.

Okay. I got the idea for the book in Shelly's training. It is my signature talk topic, the Cinderella Story. And so with Shelly's training, I got the idea during the training. I wrote the ebook and then I uploaded it to Amazon and it an Amazon bestseller. It's the first time I've ever done that with a book. And I just, I was so excited.

Yes. It was really neat too, watching the process because we're friends on Facebook and I noticed you surveyed your Facebook friends too, asking, saying, these are some of my ideas for the book I want to write. And everyone was like, do the Cinderella one. Do the Cinderella One.

That's a great tip too for people, is that when you're looking to do a topic and you're not sure. I. I do share my book topic formula in Author Audience Academy. And if you want to join a live webinar, I share on one of my webinars about that too. It's shellyhits.com livewebinar but I loved how you did that. You surveyed your Facebook audience, you surveyed your Facebook friends and said, okay, I'm getting ready to write a book. What do you think? And it really worked. It really helped for you to get clarity and decide which book to write next.

Right. I did that. And I also asked them, you know, which picture do you like for my cover? Because my graphic designer gave me two options and I was amazed at the response. And people want to share their opinion and their voice. So that was, that was really encouraging and fun to watch that.

Yes. And that's something I really encourage authors to do because it also what you're doing. And you were, I don't know if you fully realized I think you did. But you were also building buzz for your book and you were actually marketing your book before it was done because you started sharing about it. And you're pretty good about doing that on your Facebook as well. And I do that as well, where you're sharing about what you're doing in a way that doesn't feel too salesy but is telling people like this book is getting ready to come out. And so when you do things like that, you not only get people engaged and people love getting giving their opinions. I recently asked for an opinion on a book cover and there was like, I don't know, a lot, maybe over a hundred responses. I don't know. There was a lot of responses. I was like, wow. And you can't always, like, you don't want to crowdsource everything. So if you ask people their opinion on everything, you're just going to get confused. So I think you even commented on my post where I was asking for opinions. Sometimes you just have to make a decision to move on and you do, and I totally agree with that. But getting people involved also builds buzz. And you know when people are commenting on your post, the more people interacting, the more people commenting, the more Facebook's gonna show it in the feed, so the more exposure you're gonna get. So anyways, that was a really great thing that you did as well as you started to build buzz in that you asked people for the input and on your what topic but also your book cover. And then I think it's really great that you chose based upon a talk. You're a speaker. I'm a speaker and I've done that before too. I've actually created books based upon talks that I've given presentations I know that are already successful, already really are well received. And then you can use that as an outline to create a book. So talk. Just a couple minutes on that process of if someone's a speaker, they already have a talk. What kind of things are. Do you have any tips for turning that speech or that talk into a book?

That was something that I learned also in your training and you really emphasized it. But with the Cinderella story, the Power of Shoes, I was already talking about that. And it's what I love to talk about is a Cinderella story. I really relate a lot to Cinderella. I believe that God's got huge plans for our lives and I just, I want to encourage women to use our gifts. So through your training, I was learning that you can take your talk it into a book or an ebook. And so that's exactly what I did. And I thought that was such a great idea from you, is to turn your passion, the things that you normally would talk about, and put it into an ebook with the Cinderella story. When I showed the people, the graphic designers, two covers, I had such a great response and it kind of surprised me. I had such a great response to that that I decided to go ahead and do a series.

So I'm going to actually have another E book in a series with the Cinderella story. But you can take whatever is your passion, your taught and put it in your book. Like one of the ideas I have on my website, which was a blog, was on a speaking. A speaking blog. I had a series of blogs on speaking. How to start out speaking. So you can take that idea and make different little ebooks.

Yeah. So you can even take blog content and repurpose it. I love repurposing. One of my talks I actually had transcribed, I use Rev.com, rev.com and so you can have that transcript and then you have information and content that you can repurpose and it will need edited quite a bit. But you have a starting point and you can take that or one of my talks I took just the PowerPoint slides and use those as like chapter headings and main points. And I already knew kind of the flow. I've already spoken that presentation so many times and that was from my book forgiveness formula. So there's so many ways to do it. My very first book was repurposed content from my website. But we could talk forever and ever. But I want you to be able to give a take action tip. And so I want you to share. What would you recommend a take Action tip for our listeners today?

Okay. It would definitely be the categories and the keywords because before I took Shelly's training, I really had not paid a lot of attention to that. And I was actually watching your July webinar, Take Action webinar. That's in our author audience academy training. I was watching that this morning. And Shelly just teaches you to drill down deep with the categories because it can get you higher ranked in Amazon, it can improve your sales, it can get you num. It can get you way up there in a way that you would not normally do. And that would be my Take Action tip is to drill down deep to get very, very specific for your categories. You can choose two categories on Amazon for the Kindle and just get very specific. Let me give you one example for the Cinderella story, the Power Shoes. What I did is I went on Amazon and I searched on their search bar and I looked at, you know, what are the best categories, what are the other best selling books in this category. So what mine were were Kindle, Kindle ebooks, religion and spirituality and that would be the broader category, the more popular then Christian books, Bibles, Christian Living and then Women's Christian Living and that Women's Christian Living was a very, very narrow specific.

Category which helped me to rank high up on the Amazon's bestseller. So that would be my take action tip is really narrow down your categories and your keywords to help you reach bestseller and then like Shelly was saying in her training from July that will it will improve your sales and you can Amazon Bestseller on your bio as a speaker or Amazon Bestseller on your bio as an author. And that's really fun and exciting.

Yes it is. Thank you so much Beth. And if you would like a step by step training with video and exact tutorial on how to do that, we'd love to have you join us in our community@authoraudienceacademy.com Beth is one of the most active members in the forum. So if you join us you'll definitely see her there and we would love to have you join us. Thank you again so much Beth for sharing with us today. What is the best way for people to connect with you online if they'd like to connect further with you?

Okay, you can find me@bethjones.net and you can find me at Amazon bethdjones. I've got my seven ebooks on there and also check me out on Periscope ethmjones.

Awesome. Thank you so much. And again thank you for joining us for another episode of Author Audience where I want to help you reach more people with your message. This was a behind the scenes episode with Beth Jones, one of my members of Author Audience Academy, helping you to know how to really get more exposure on Amazon through categories and keywords. We'll see you next time. Thanks Beth.

Thank you.

Also make sure to get all the show notes and the resources for Today's episode@authoraudience.com 26. That's the number 26. Before we end, I want to give you a backstage pass in this week's Godly Gain segment. This is where I share a scripture from the Bible and relate it to the training that I shared in the episode. Now today Beth talked about how she used her community on her personal Facebook profile to help her publish a best selling book. And it got me thinking about how important people are in our success. We need each other. And it reminded me of Ecclesiastes 4:9 12. It says, Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their labor. For if they fall, one will lift up his companion. But woe to him who is alone when he falls, for he has no one to help him up again. If two lie down together, they will keep warm. But how will one be warm alone? Though one may be overpowered by another, two can withstand him, and a threefold cord is not quickly broken. Now this scripture is often used in weddings or to talk about marriage, relationships, relationships. But I also believe that when we have business relationships and accountability relationships, coaching relationships, this verse can apply as well I formed a free Facebook group for Christian entrepreneurs who want to keep Christ the Center and I'd love to have you join. It's a place to have support emotionally and spiritually and in your business and and you can join for free@godlygain.com we'd love to have you join us there. And I also love our community in the forums of authoraudienceacademy.com would love to invite you to join our paid community. But if you haven't joined yet, please go on over to godlygain.com and get access to the free Facebook group. It's my hope and my prayer that you're getting tons of value from this podcast and it's helping you move one step closer to your goal. I love working with action takers. I don't want you just to keep listening to this podcast week after week, but to actually find something that's relevant to what you're going through and take action. So thank you for being here, I appreciate you so much and I'll see you next time.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Author Audience Show. Connect with us online@university 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.