A Christian Book Marketing Twist on an Old Concept

Last updated on June 3, 2025

It is overwhelming to navigate the web and figure out where to spend money prudently to achieve the best results. There are boatloads of companies and individuals offering various packages. If you aren’t discerning, you can quickly invest a lot of money in things that may give you exposure but not generate sales, and there is a difference. You can conduct a Google search of my name and easily find twenty pages of results. So I am no longer interested in exposure. I want to sell more books.

I tried many things to increase sales. I suspect many give up believing it’s too complicated and too expensive. How many excellent books will never see the light of day? Even with extensive exposure, it’s still challenging to sell many books. Sometimes I think authors spend so much time writing and promoting their own books that it does not allow enough time for them to appreciate what others are writing. Finding the right balance can be elusive.

The idea of working hard to achieve your dreams resonates with my core beliefs that God rewards those who seek to glorify Him in whatever profession they pursue, and at the heart of glorifying God is hard work.

One of my favorite Bible verses is Colossians 3:23: “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men.” You persevere, work hard to produce a product that others need or want, and eventually, if you are wise with the gifts God gives you, He will bless you.

With the economic downturn, it is becoming increasingly difficult to market and sell books. The publishing industry across the board is hurting, but I believe the Christian market is suffering even more. The reality for Christian publishers is that they must sell thousands of books to break even, let alone make a profit. If they fail, they won’t stay in business.

So when a mainline publishing company’s agent asks me, “How are you going to market your book?” I understand how important it is to assure him that I can successfully market my book. Until recently, however, I was unaware of how to do it effectively. So are many others, and that is something I hope to change.

Recently, I listened to a well-known Christian author compare POD publishing to traditional publishing. He discouraged writers from going the POD route, claiming that a person who publishes a POD book is not an author. I wanted to tell him that, given the current state of marketing, it’s almost impossible for someone like me to get traditionally published without a platform and a lot of money, neither of which I have.

I came away discouraged, as if I were a second-class author. It isn’t enough to have a well-written book. The reality is, you could have a book as well written as Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, and the world might never know about it.

I have read articles, blogs, excerpts, and books by unknown authors. There are some incredible stories available online. That isn’t to say there isn’t mediocre writing, but I want to help Christian authors like me who God has inspired to achieve success. If God is all-powerful, and I don’t believe any Christian would deny this, He can put our books into the hands of those who will appreciate and buy them. If anything, I think we tend to limit what God can do because our expectations are too low. We have an awesome God who is in the business of doing the impossible.

The other day, I was on a Christian writers’ website. The blog mentioned how long it takes an unknown writer to get his book published by a mainstream publisher—seven years. If I had dutifully followed the trail blazed by others before me, Children of Dreams wouldn’t be out in the marketplace until I was sixty years old (ouch, that hurts).

I will compare that to my former husband’s educational experience. I put him through medical school, which took four years to complete. His residency following that took an additional four years. In eight years, he went from building bikes for minimum wage at Toys R Us to treating cancer patients, making hundreds of thousands of dollars. If the medical system can accomplish that, surely there is something the Christian world can do to expedite that nine-year process.

I am a single mother with two daughters. I’m employed full-time as a closed captioner for television. I am taking online classes to earn my Master’s in Creative Writing. I am the president of a local Christian writers’ critique group in Gainesville, which meets monthly. I follow up with the attendees after the meetings to encourage them (we all need encouragement, even those who have “arrived”). I homeschool my eleven-year-old daughter. We also have four neurotic cats and two wacky dogs.

Of course, the above activities don’t include the stressful job of living—paying bills, cooking, laundry, running my eleven-year-old daughter everywhere (she’s a level eight competitive gymnast who spends twenty hours a week at the local gym), plus I am committed to a church, attend weekly, and am involved in a small, one-another group that meets once a week for prayer. I also try to swim laps every day at the Gainesville Health and Fitness Center (I want to be around for my grandkids). I am not complaining. God has blessed me with more than I could possibly do in my own strength.

My point is, in order to fit it all in, I must work hard, efficiently, and maintain an attitude that brings glory to God. Otherwise, I will receive the praise of man and not my heavenly Father. That’s one reason I am reluctant to enter book contests.

I believe Christian marketing is one of the most inefficient enterprises in existence. The way some of it’s currently done, I wonder if it’s even working at all. Let me digress and make one more comparison, and then I will get on to my novel idea.

In February, I received an invitation from Steve Harrison to enroll in a class, “How to Make Your Book an Almost Instant Best Seller and Sell Tons of Copies—Even if You’re a Marketing Novice.”

Steve Harrison is a guru in internet marketing. He occasionally hosts a free webinar featuring a guest who promotes a specific aspect of writing or marketing. I had attended a few in the past—I like free things, especially when I don’t have to go anywhere—and so I signed up for this one.

The guest on his show was Peggy McColl, an author who has had many bestsellers. I listened to the seminar and was intrigued. She explained how anyone can take any book and make it a bestseller on Barnes & Noble or Amazon by following a few prescribed things exactly. It didn’t have to be a new book. It could be an older book. It could be fiction. It could be nonfiction.

Most of my books have been sold on Amazon, so this was attractive to me (I was never able to get Children of Dreams in bookstores, even though I paid money to provide a restocking fee if any books were returned).

What impressed me most about her Bestseller Coaching Program, however, was that she guaranteed success if you followed all the steps in her program. I had told myself (and God) I would no longer pay for any marketing programs unless they came with a guarantee—literally. This program came with a one-hundred percent guarantee.

Enrolling in the Bestseller Coaching Program is not cheap. It cost me $2,500. I would have to sell a lot of books to recoup the money, but if I sold enough books to make Children of Dreams number one, that would make me a bestselling author on Amazon. I figured I would do whatever was required to make it work. If I failed, then I would get my money back.

I was enrolled in my screenwriting course from February to April (I just submitted my last assignment a few days ago), so I knew it would have to wait a little while, but the guarantee was valid for a year. That also sounded good, so I signed up for it.

There were many others participating in the Bestseller Coaching Program, and we formed a group that agreed to mentor one another as we launched our books. I have received emails from some of them, and I asked, since I had not started my campaign, “How is it going?” Everyone responded by saying the hardest part was getting people to support their “campaign.”

Let me explain how the Bestseller Coaching Program works. The idea behind it is that you have a launch date and direct people to Amazon or Barnes & Noble to purchase your book. You do this basically in two ways. First, you get Joint Venture Partners to promote your book through an email to their clients on the day of your book launch. The idea is to have everybody know about your book and buy it on the designated date. You add value to those who buy your book by having partners who are willing to offer bonus gifts during that 24-hour period.

The basic premise of the program resonated with what I knew to be effective.

My parents owned a small map company in Atlanta. Each summer, they would solicit orders for the new Aero Atlas to be published in the fall. Customers could buy the book map at a discounted price until September, when the price would increase, creating a sense of urgency. If the customer wanted to receive his new map at the discounted rate, he had to purchase it within the given timeframe.

Each client was contacted individually, with a focus on delivering excellent customer service. I spent several summers as a teenager working in the business, making phone calls, and encouraging each customer to buy at the lower price, ensuring they received their updated map, emphasizing how many new streets had been added. Surely he wanted to locate his customers efficiently without wasting precious time and gas. That would increase his profit margin.

Fast forward about thirty years. I provide closed captioning for television. One of the channels that I captioned until recently was QVC. QVC is the guru of home shopping, and it has its own network. The Q stands for quality, the V stands for value, and the C stands for customer service. One of QVC’s most successful marketing strategies is the “Today’s Special Value.”