70 | Kingdom Writer: Stop Fixing Your Book Marketing Until You've Fixed This First

Put your hand up if you dread your book marketing! If you dread having to send out a newsletter because you have no idea what to say. Or if it's just easier to do what other authors are doing because frankly you have no idea what you should be doing. This episode is for you.

Because in today's episode I'm naming the three root causes that make book marketing feel impossible for most Christian authors — and none of them have anything to do with your cover, your blurb, or your ads. Because here's what I've learned the hard way: you can't build a thriving author business on an unstable foundation. And until the foundation is sorted, no novel marketing strategy in the world is going to hold.

If you've ever wondered why marketing your books feels like the last thing you want to sit down and do — and why that has nothing to do with how much you love writing, or God — click that play button, friend.

I can't wait to share what God taught me about why I hated book marketing!

Mentioned in this episode:

"Where there is no vision, the people perish." — Proverbs 29:18

🔥 The Revive to Thrive Way™ early bird price closes midnight 31st March — save $100 and get over $200 in bonuses: https://anointedscribe.com/revivetothrive

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Transcript

Put your hand up. If you hate book marketing, if you dread having to send out a newsletter because you have no idea what to say, or if it's just easier to do what other authors are doing because frankly, you have no idea what you should be doing,

Well friend, let today be the day you quit putting marketing your book last on your priority list.

Because today I'm going to tell you why book marketing feels like the last thing you ever want to sit down and do,

and why that has nothing to do with how much you love writing or God.

If you're one of those authors who would rather do absolutely anything else except market your books,

I'm going to tell you today why that is. And I promise you the reason is not what you might be thinking.

Grab your favorite beverage, find a comfortable spot, and let's get into it. This is the Anointed Scribe Podcast.

I'm Urcelia Teixeira, ex real estate agent, table turned award winning Christian fiction author.

When I wrote my first novel on a bucket list whim, I had no idea it would spark a spiritual journey that would redefine my calling. But you know what, friend?

Self publishing wasn't easy. I got caught in the hustle, chasing rankings and sales while desperately trying to stay rooted in Christ.

Now, by God's grace, I'm building my author business his way. And now he's called me to help you do the same.

Welcome to the Anointed Scribe Podcast, where faith meets business for Christian writers. Let's write, publish and grow our author business God's way. Are you ready? Well then, let's get started.

Hey, it's your author friend, Urcelia. And welcome to the Anointed Scribe Podcast. And if this is your first time here, consider this your official welcome to the Anointed Scribe Tribe.

I'm so glad you found your way here, friend. And I have a feeling today's episode is going to feel like it was made just for you.

And to my regulars. Hey friend, good to have you back.

I always love knowing you're on the other side of this. And if my stats are anything to go by, today's topic is one I know is going to resonate with you.

Now, before we get into it, I need to say something quickly about book marketing.

Sometimes books don't sell because of the packaging.

A cover that doesn't fit the genre,

editing that need another pass, a blurb that doesn't quite land.

These things matter. They really,

really do matter.

And if you're not sure whether your book is market ready,

that is Definitely worth looking into before anything else.

But today I'm talking to the author who has already done all of that. You've got a book or three or even more that you're proud of. The packaging is solid, the covers are great,

and it's still not selling the way you hoped.

And every time you sit down to market it, something in you just resists.

And even if you're still working on getting your packaging just right, stay with me, because everything I'm about to share applies to you too.

You'll just be building on a stronger foundation from the start.

That's exactly where we are going today.

Here's what I've come to understand through my own years of dreading it and through the authors I've talked to and worked with.

Book marketing feels hard because of what we are asking it to do,

that it was never designed to do.

Let me explain.

We are not just asking it to to sell books. We are asking it to prove that we are good enough.

We are asking it to confirm that the calling was real.

We are asking it to tell us whether God is in this with us or not.

We're asking it to answer the question we've been quietly carrying for months,

sometimes even years.

Which is,

does what I do matter?

And when that's the weight you're putting on a Facebook post or a newsletter or an Amazon ad,

of course it feels impossible. Of course you avoid it.

Of course every result feels like a verdict on your worth rather than just data you can learn from, right?

That's not a marketing problem,

that's a foundation problem. Friend,

let me get specific because I think naming this clearly is important.

The dread around marketing for most Christian authors comes from one or more of three places.

The first one is fear.

Fear of being seen.

Fear of being rejected.

Fear that if you put yourself and your book out there fully and it still doesn't work, you'll have no excuses left.

So it's safer to half try and blame this strategy than to go all in and risk finding out something you don't want to know, right?

How can I say this with such conviction? Well, because I know this fear intimately. I lived inside it for years.

And what it looks like practically,

is an author who learns every marketing strategy available but never quite commits to any of them.

Because committing means risking putting yourself out there, right? And risking means you might find out that the answer is no.

No, they don't like you. No, your readers don't like your books.

Whatever it is, there's rejection.

The second place, it comes from is comparison.

You are constantly measuring your marketing against everyone else's marketing.

You can't write a single promotional post without mentally comparing it to what other authors are doing. Sometimes we do this consciously and sometimes we do this subconsciously. When you doom scroll and you see other Facebook posts or Instagram posts and it doesn't compare, you instantly compare with your stuff and it falls short,

right?

So mentally you are comparing your marketing to what other authors are doing.

And because you're always measuring,

you're never actually present in your own voice,

your marketing gets tainted. It ends up feeling disconnected and inauthentic because it is.

It's been filtered through a hundred comparisons before it ever reaches your reader.

And the third place your hate of book marketing comes from is the one nobody talks about much and at least not naming it like it is. And that is a lack of clarity about who you actually are as an author and who you are actually called to serve.

When you don't know that with real confidence and conviction,

marketing becomes nothing more than guesswork.

You are throwing spaghetti at a wall, hoping something sticks.

You change your messaging every few weeks because nothing feels quite right and none of them delivers right?

So you keep chopping and changing. You chase whatever strategy is working, maybe for someone else,

because you don't have a clear enough sense of your own direction or really God's direction, right?

And you don't trust it. You don't trust your own direction. How can you?

And here's the pain that goes with all of this. Guesswork is exhausting.

Guesswork dressed up as strategy, done consistently over months and months and even years.

That's the specific kind of exhaustion I dig into in my revive to thriveway program. If you've been listening to the last couple of episodes, friend, you'll know I've been sharing pretty openly about my own journey with all of this.

And if you're new here, the short version is this. I spent years not understanding why my marketing felt so hard until I realized the problem had nothing to do with my marketing at all.

There were three root areas.

These places that I just discussed. It all ties into these three root areas. These three shifts I had to go and adjust and fix first,

underneath the surface, underneath all these marketing strategies, before anything on the outside could actually work.

And figuring those out on my own took me the best part of 18 months.

What God showed me was that everything,

every task that feels heavy is rooted in one or more of these three areas.

And it's only once I fixed these, through the help of the Holy Spirit that these areas of my business supported my author business rather than drag it down.

And you know what?

I could have kept these three secrets to myself.

The old self who operated from fear and striving and competition and comparison.

I could have kept it for myself. Except I didn't.

Because I want you to experience the same joy and the fruit I have seen since God transformed me and since God fixed these things in my business.

So instead I went and built a structured program around those three areas and I called it the Revive to Thrive way. And just to also say,

because it's One of the questions I got from someone is that it is completely simple, self paced. You log in, you have your portal, you have your videos and you do it at your own convenience and at your own pace with God.

However, God guides you through it. At that pace, you'll do it. I've included extra bonuses to help. There's workbooks. There's everything that I could think of that I needed at the time that would make it easier for you to really set you off to a total transformation in your author business.

But also as a kingdom writer. You will receive transformation as a person as well as the early bird. Price is still available, just to let you know, but only until midnight on the 31st of March when I have to increase it by $100 because I have to pay for these platforms that it's hosted on.

You can go to anointedscribe.com revivetothrive and have a look. The link is also in the show Notes. But here's what I want you to understand.

I'm not telling you that novel marketing strategy doesn't matter. It does.

Covers matter.

Blurbs matter. The quality of your writing matters.

Knowing your reader matters. All of it matters, right?

But strategy sitting on top of fear, on top of comparison,

on top of confusion and not having clarity and vision and direction and competition is like painting a house with a cracked foundation or painting a house where the walls are even cracked.

It might look better for a little while,

but it won't hold up when the root is addressed, when fear stops driving your decisions around marketing and everything else,

when comparison loses its grip, when you actually know with clarity who you are as an author and who you are called to reach.

Something interesting happens to our book marketing.

It stops feeling like a performance and it starts feeling like you're having a conversation.

You stop trying to convince people to buy your book and you start genuinely telling the right people that something exists that was made for them.

That's a completely different energy, friend and readers feel it. They really, really do.

I can tell you the exact moment my marketing changed for me. And it wasn't when I found a better ad strategy or when it finally clicked how to do Facebook ads.

It wasn't when I rewrote my blurb or when I changed my book covers on one set of books, probably about three or four times. It wasn't then.

It wasn't even when I updated my keywords.

My exact moment when my marketing changed for me is when I stopped needing the result a sale or a KDP graph to tell me something God has already spoken into existence before I even picked up my pen.

It changed when a book sale became good news rather than a testament of my worth or skill. It changed when a reader came back in a review and said, wow, this changed her life for the better.

Wow, this helped her through cancer. Wow, wow, this helped her reconcile with his sibling.

That's when it changed. When a slow month stopped feeding my doubt that I heard God's call on my life wrong.

That's when my marketing changed.

From that place, marketing becomes something you can actually show up for. Consistently,

not perfectly. It'll never be perfect.

Not fearlessly either. But consistently.

And consistency over time is what actually changes things.

When you are set free from those three places that make your book marketing hard,

you'll soon discover that your heart has turned from serving idols to serving God and His people.

So I hope this has helped you a little bit. Friend, if you've been nodding along through this episode,

if you've recognized the fear or the comparison or the foggy sense of not quite knowing who you are in all of this and what your message or your mission is, I want to say something directly to you.

You're not too far gone or down the road to turn things around.

I know there are authors listening to this episode right now who have tried everything, all the marketing tactics known to the indie author world,

and yet you are still feeling like you're on a road to nowhere,

that it would be easier to just pack away your laptop and give it up. Well, friend, I'm here to tell you that you're feeling this because the enemy is making you feel like you have no hope and nowhere to turn,

that it's all over for you. That's what he's making you feel.

And it's not. This is just the beginning.

Just like when you first answered God's call to turn your life over to him, he's asking you right now to turn your author life over to him too.

Take the call friend.

Allow him to transform you in those areas that are holding you back from doing what he's called you to do. And that is to write what is laid on your heart to write and to get it out into the world who is desperate for him.

Because the truth is, if you are where I was just a few years ago,

then you are an author who has been trying to do this in her own strength,

building your author house on unstable ground.

And once your foundation is right, your novel marketing, I promise you, gets lighter.

Your vision and mission and strategies become divine downloads that you simply need to implement.

Here's what I want to leave with you today.

Proverbs 29:18 says this where there is no vision, the people perish.

When you do not know who you are and who you are called to reach what your mission is,

you're essentially marketing without vision and without vision, as the Scripture says, nothing holds.

And know this, if marketing your books feels hard,

that feeling is information,

not failure information.

Don't let the devil cone twist this episode into condemnation and guilt now, okay? It's pointing you towards something that needs attention and that something is almost certainly not your strategy.

Start here. Go underneath the surface.

Ask yourself honestly which of those three routes fear, comparison, or lack of clarity is quietly running your marketing decisions. Take that to the Lord in prayer. Sit with it. Let him speak with you.

And if you want a structured path through all of it, let what God showed me when I went beneath the surface help you.

It's not another course, friend.

It's a way for you and God to connect so that His Spirit can lead you out of your valley and into your promised land.

Make use of the Early Bird pricing. Head to anointedscribe.com/revivetothrive and get stuck into this today.

I would love to see God transform your author life the way he did mine.

Friend, if today's episode stirred something in you,

if you found yourself thinking, yes, this is exactly where I am, I want you to know you don't have to navigate this alone.

There comes a point where information isn't enough and what's really needed is a deeper reset, a rebuilding in the right order.

The Revive to Thrive Way is a guided spirit led experience for Christian authors who are done striving,

done forcing growth, and ready to build from a place of clarity,

alignment and peace.

It's the exact shifts I made myself that changed everything for me in my author life.

If you sense that this might be your next step, go to anointedscribe.com/revivetothrive.