86 | How to Choose the Right Author Business Strategy: 5 Biblical Filters | Wisdom for Christian Writers

Overwhelmed by conflicting self-publishing, book marketing and author business advice? In this episode, you’ll learn five biblical filters for choosing the right publishing or marketing strategy, making wise author business decisions and avoiding costly mistakes.

Whether you’re deciding where to publish, whether to invest in a course, when to run book ads or what to focus on next, these biblical principles will help you filter the advice around you and seek God’s wisdom for your author business so you can make the right decisions as a Christian writer.

You already have more author advice available to you than any writer in history. What you need is the wisdom to know which piece of it is yours. That's what this episode gives you.

Scriptures: James 1:5-6, James 3:17, Psalm 1:1-2, Proverbs 9:10, Proverbs 2:3-5, Proverbs 3:13

Want to know which areas of your writing life are making your decisions harder than they need to be? Take the free Growth Quiz™

👉 Hit follow for weekly faith, encouragement, and author business wisdom for Christian writers who write, publish, and grow, God's way.

Transcript

One of the things that held me back the most in my author life was not knowing how to make the right decisions.

I made a lot of poor choices and decisions along the way,

often because I relied on my own knowledge or followed the advice of others without seeking God's direction first.

And more often than not, those decisions ended badly, costing me time, money, or both.

So today we are talking about how to make the right decisions in your author business.

I'm going to share five tips to help you choose which path to take the next time you find yourself at a crossroads.

Because getting this right can make all the difference in your success and A Christian Author this is the Anointed Scribe Podcast.

If you're a Christian writer, whether you are starting out or want to build right from the beginning, or you've published a book or two and feel off course,

this is your home for growing your faith and building a profitable author business. God's Way. Come on in friend. It's great to have you here.

Hey, it's your author friend, Urcelia, and welcome back to the show.

If you're new here, I'm your host and founder of Anointed Scribe. I'm also a published indie author of more than 20 Christian mystery thriller novels and it is my honor to help you grow your relationship with God while you grow your author business.

If you've known me for a while, and as I've mentioned before on this show, I found it incredibly challenging. Challenging to not only stay rooted in Christ, but to also grow closer to God while at the same time trying to follow publishing industry practices to be a successful author.

I always felt torn between the two and more often than not ended up doing things the world's way instead of God's way.

If you've already written and published a book or three or more, you will have no doubt by now also encountered a few crossroads where you are faced with needing to make a choice or a decision or something in your author life, right?

And I know you know exactly the kind of crossroads I'm talking about, because you are probably standing at 1 right now.

Maybe you're deciding whether to go wide or stay in Kindle Unlimited.

Maybe you're wondering if that course all the big names are raving about is worth the money,

or whether you should be running ads, redoing your covers, or writing the next book first.

Each one of those decisions costs you something,

and when you get them wrong, they can cost you a lot. I know because I've paid for a few of those wrong turns myself,

so that's what we are talking about today.

How to make the right decisions in your author business.

I'm going to share five tips to help you choose which path to take when you find yourself at one of these crossroads. Because as I said earlier, making the right choices can make all the difference in your author success.

But before we get into the five tips,

I want to set your compass first.

Because these tips only work when you know where your wisdom comes from.

And we only need to read the Word of God to know that it comes from God, right?

Proverbs 2, 6 says, for the Lord gives wisdom from his mouth come knowledge and understanding.

We also know that God is our lighthouse, he is our true north, he's our anchor and actually he is the Creator and the controller of the seas and the skies.

And God is gracious to give us the wisdom and discernment we need to be successful Christian writers. If only we asked him.

James 1:5:6 says,

if any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given to him.

So what is wisdom exactly? I love how Charles Spurgeon put it. He said,

wisdom is the right use of knowledge.

And as my pastor explained it to me recently,

wisdom isn't an intellectual knowledge or an intellectual understanding of something.

How you define wisdom is both knowing God's will and living God's way. There's both knowing and understanding.

What does this mean for us as Christian writers when we seek godly wisdom in our author lives? It changes, changes the way we write, publish, and market our books because it changes how we see ourselves and it changes how we see others.

And when we see other Christian authors as people serving alongside us,

when we see our readers as people desperate to make sense of this world,

we no longer compare or compete or don't know what to say.

And can I just point out the relief hidden inside of all of this?

Our problem has never been a lack of information.

You and I have more author advice available to us than any writer in history Courses, group chats,

podcasts, blog posts, entire conferences are nothing but marketing and making more money.

Friend, if information helped us make right decisions, we'll all be making them.

The knowledge is everywhere.

What's scarce is the wisdom to know which piece of it is right for you.

In this season,

with the books God gave you to write using the particular set of gifts God gave you.

And that's why one author can follow all the standard advice and still end up somewhere they never wanted to be.

They had the knowledge but they were missing the wisdom. They were missing the right usage of that knowledge.

We want wisdom, but we want God's wisdom. That's the wisdom we're after today.

So with that compass set and hopefully firmly in place,

let's get to those five tips I promised you.

Tip number one for helping you make the right decisions in your author life is watch whose advice you are taking.

The Psalms open with a warning and a promise, and it's worth hearing in full. It says this blessed is the one who does not walk in step with the wicked,

or stand in the way that sinners take, or sit in the company of mockers. Some translations say scoffers,

but whose delight is in the law of the Lord and who meditates on his law day and night.

That's in Psalm 1:1 2.

Notice the slow slide in that first verse. Walking,

then standing, then sitting.

So how do you avoid getting to the place where you sit with scoffers?

Who do you find yourself getting advice from?

Who do you go to?

The ones who don't follow him.

Now hold on a minute. I'm not saying the marketing experts and the author gurus are scoffers.

Don't misunderstand me or quote me.

Some of them know their craft very well, and I've learned useful things from quite a few of them.

But think about where you go first when you are facing a decision.

A huge decision Sometimes in your author business,

is it the Facebook group,

an author forum,

ChatGPT or Google even for years,

my first stop was always another expert and God was somewhere down the list if he made the list at all.

That order makes a massive, massive difference.

The voices you sit with the longest are the voices that end up steering your decisions and in turn, steering your business.

So before you take advice from anyone,

look at who they follow.

Tip number two Filter everything through Scripture.

Here's the tip that would have saved me the most money if I'd learned it earlier. And it's not as if I didn't know it, I just didn't apply it.

The world's wisdom says pursue your greatest desire, the desires of your heart.

But Scripture says the heart is deceitful above all else.

We need to filter the world's advice through Scripture and reject anything that doesn't align with God's instruction.

In practice,

that means holding each strategy up against the word before you act on it.

When a book launch tactic asks you to manufacture urgency that isn't real,

or a growth hack asks you to promise readers more than your book delivers,

your scripture filter catches it. Not because the tactic won't work, plenty of them do,

but because the tactic asks you to build your author business on something God calls false.

And likewise, your scripture filter can pass a strategy too.

Learning your craft,

serving your readers well,

being a good steward of your ad budget. Those will most certainly hold up beautifully against scripture.

And if you are now wondering how to tell these two kinds of wisdom apart in the moment when you're sitting facing a decision,

James 3:17 gives you the marks to look for. Just listen. It says this,

but the wisdom that comes from heaven heavenly wisdom is first of all pure,

then peace loving,

considerate, submissive,

full of mercy and good fruit,

impartial and sincere.

That's a nice little list. That's James 3:17. If you want to write it out and put it somewhere you can refer to quickly, do that.

Hold your next piece of author advice up against that list. Does it produce peace in you or panic?

Does it give you room to pray about? Or does it push you to buy before midnight because the doors are closing?

Wisdom from heaven, friend, never has to rush you because God's timing doesn't run on a countdown block.

This is a tactic I've personally used and was convicted of.

There's no need to use countdown timers or to fall for them.

The verse right before this one says, where envy and selfish ambition live, you'll find depending on disorder. So when a strategy stirs up comparison and pressure in your heart makes you lose sleep over it, that's your answer about where it came from.

Advice that carries God's wisdom will leave you at peace. It'll leave you sleeping peacefully even when it stretches. You do that and every decision you make in your writing life will be the right one that brings the joy and abundance you pray for every morning.

Okay, tip number three Start with a fear of the Lord. And I'm not talking about shaking in your boots fear. We are talking about reverent fear.

Proverbs 9:10 tells us that wisdom is made of this kind of fear.

It says this the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,

and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.

You might want to go back and read and meditate on this scripture after this episode, because this is where it gets practical for us as writers. Writers. When you know down in your bones that the God who called you to write is also the God who parts seas and raises the dead,

his instruction stops being one opinion among many.

You stop weighing his word against the latest algorithm advice as if they carry equal weight.

The fear of The Lord says, settles the question of authority before you ever reach that crossroads, and that alone removes half the agonizing from your decisions.

Ask God for It Wisdom guides us through a decision or circumstance. We often say we ask God to help us make decisions in our writing life, but have we ever stopped to consider the mechanism he uses?

We often look for giant flashing signs, but more often he guides us through the wisdom that he gives and he tells us plainly how to get it. He says in James 1:5,

if any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you.

So, simply put, this is where we start when we face choices and we have to make decisions.

Proverbs 2, 3, 5 says, Ask for it. All we need to do is ask and he will give it to you.

And here's something else. We can't talk about wisdom and knowledge and not think about Solomon.

When God asked Solomon to ask him for anything he wants,

Solomon asked for wisdom and knowledge. He could have asked for wealth or a new house or a new carriage or five horses or anything else, but he didn't.

And here's what strikes me about that. Solomon was standing at the biggest crossroads of his life,

a brand new king with no idea how to lead.

And instead of asking God to fix his circumstances,

he asked God to grow his ability to choose well within them.

That's what I'd encourage you to pray at your next crossroads to not God make the decision. Go away or help me make a decision,

but God give me the wisdom to make the right decision.

And while you're there,

ask God for a righteous fear of Himself to increase your awe of him, so that when that decision turns out to be the best decision you've ever made, you can say, I stepped out with a righteous fear and was left in awe of him.

Okay, my final tip. Tip 5 Ask without doubting Now, James doesn't stop at asking for wisdom. In verse 5.

The second half of this passage deals with doubt. Verse 6 shows us that there's a connection here between wisdom and doubt. James 1:6 says, but let him ask in faith with no doubting,

for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea that is driven and tossed by the wind.

To have wisdom, you must have the belief that the Lord is who he says he is,

that he has a power to be revered in such a way that his commands beg to be followed.

There is no room for doubt.

This verse paints this beautiful picture of waves crashing and receding. There's growing and there's falling. Never constant,

never steady. And if you've ever made a decision,

second guessed it by lunchtime, reversed it by that evening, and then lay awake wondering all night long if you got it wrong, you know exactly what that wave feels like from the inside.

That was me for years. And I can tell you, friend, it is exhausting.

By contrast,

wisdom guides you. It's like the North Star, never changing,

always bright,

always leading you home.

So when you ask God for wisdom, ask in faith, without doubting his willingness to help.

He's not reluctant. James already told us he gives generously and without finding fault.

And if you doubt God, if you do get to that space where you where you catch yourself doubting,

ask God to take away those doubts and to replace them with his steady wisdom.

And by the way, I also later came to learn that the reason I sometimes made these bad decisions, these poor choices,

was because there were certain areas in my writing life that I lacked grounding in.

And once I allowed God to transform those areas,

making the right choices and decisions became a lot easier.

And if you'd like to find out which areas are preventing you from making the right decisions, and if maybe you are at a crossroads right now and you don't know which way to go,

go ahead and take the Growth quiz.

It will tell you exactly why you are struggling to make the right decisions and it'll help you to change it so that you can see growth.

I'll leave the link for you in the show Description okay friend, before you go rushing into your day today, resolve to pursue wisdom in your life right now,

right this minute. Today,

make a commitment to ask God for increased wisdom as you make decisions and go about your daily tasks,

no matter how big or small, begin a habit today of anchoring God's wisdom for everything.

Because Proverbs calls wisdom a thing to be chased and treasured.

Proverbs 3 says, Blessed is the one who first finds wisdom,

not the one who stumbles into it, the one who finds it because they went looking for it.

So friend, go looking for wisdom. Chase it in your writing, in your publishing, in your book marketing, in the small daily choices no one else can see.

Your author business will be built on one decision at a time, and every one of those decisions can be made with a creator of wisdom and himself leaning in to guide you.

May your pen stay faithful, your roots grow deep, and every word you write bear fruit for his glory.

If you've been building your author business feeling exhausted, overwhelmed, and unsure of your next steps, the Revive to thrive way was made for you.

Check it out at anointedscribe.com/ReviveToThrive link is in the show notes.