How to Write & Publish a Faith-Based Book that Impacts Thousands with Nate Hambrick

Publishing Secrets

In this episode, you’ll also hear:

• How Nate shares his faith casually and effectively through his business
• The first step to making an impact with your book
• Why you’ve got to get your book in front of more people than you think
• The two key principles of marketing
• How your book’s success can open even more doors for you and your business
• Nate’s advice for the aspiring author who genuinely wants to make a difference in people’s lives

Don’t miss Nate’s FREE webinar on Wednesday, July 19th: How To Write a Faith Based Bestseller That Impacts Thousands of Lives. Click here to sign up!

Furthering God’s Mission Through Business

As a publishing strategist for SelPublishing.com, Nate Hambrick creates blueprints for authors to write, publish, and market their books effectively. He’s also the author of Crush Your Kryptonite: How to Conquer Your Weakness and Unleash Your Superpower, which was an Amazon #1 bestseller for 135 days consecutively.

Clearly, Nate has figured out some things about what works and what doesn’t when it comes to writing and publishing books. But for Nate, the work that he does is about more than just sales and marketing. It’s also about partnering with God to change the world.

In the past, Nate has served as a missionary to Honduras and as a church planter in the United States. But while he loved these more “traditional” ministry roles, he says his favorite way to minister to people is actually in the business world.

Many people have a negative impression of the church and aren’t interested in talking to someone with the title of “missionary.” But helping authors and business owners grow their impact and income gives Nate the opportunity to share his faith casually and consistently.

“Christ is my calling,” he says. “But because I have a business vocation — because people see the way I move their businesses forward, the way that I treat clients, and the excellence that God has gifted me with — whenever I share Christ, it lands very differently than if I were just a happy-go-lucky guy sharing the gospel all the time.”

There’s certainly a place for traditional ministry, but it’s important to remember that it’s not the only way to impact people — and that Christians can operate a profitable business while being a blessing to others.

Start with the People You Want to Impact

If you’re like a lot of aspiring Christian authors, you genuinely want to make a difference in the world and to be able to lead with your faith. You’re passionate about what God has given you to share, and you can feel that message burning inside of you — but how do you get it out to the people who need to hear it?

According to Nate, you need to start with the people you want to impact, and ask yourself: Why would a stranger want to read your book?

Here’s the hard truth: No one is going to buy your book just because it’s a good book. “There are 1.5 million faith-based books out there, give or take,” Nate points out. “And most of those books I will not read, even if they are absolutely incredible. Because I'm not going to read a book just because it's good. I'm going to read a book because I have a problem, a challenge.”

In marketing, this is often called a “bleeding neck” — an urgent problem happening in someone’s life that they need a solution to right now. That is what will lead someone to read your book and be impacted by your message.

If you want your book to impact hundreds or thousands of people, then you have to start with those people — people you have never met, in countries you may never visit — in mind. Then you’ll be able to create a product that is desirable and helpful to them.

Remember, it’s not enough just to write a good book. It’s not enough just to have a mission and a message. If you want to impact people, you have to consider the marketing piece of publishing. And that means you have to understand that your book is not going to be a perfect fit for everyone — so you’ve got to get it in front of way more people than you might think.

When Nate first launched Crush Your Kryptonite, he set a daily goal of funneling 30,000-35,000 people to his book page. That’s around 900,000 people per month, and over 5 million people within the first six months.

Of course, the vast majority of those people didn’t buy the book, and not all of the people who bought it read it. But a small fraction of 5 million is still tens of thousands — or even hundreds of thousands — of people who have been impacted by his message.

“Marketing is putting your light on a lampstand,” Nate says. “If you write the world's greatest book, if you share the most amazing testimonies of what God has done in your life, there's a ton of power in that. But your book’s only going to help somebody if they read it. And the only way for them to read it, short of a divine miracle, is through marketing.”

Think about it this way: throughout Scripture, people like Moses and Gideon were asked to take certain steps to carry out their God-given missions. Marketing is a 21st century version of taking those steps and putting your light on a lampstand for the world to see.

2 Principles of Marketing

Marketing can seem like a big, scary concept that’s difficult to grasp. And it’s true that there are a lot of complex, fancy techniques and tools out there that marketers can use. But, especially for those who are just venturing out into the marketing world, Nate simplifies it all down into just two things: credibility and visibility.

“It doesn't matter what you're selling. If you're very credible, and you're very visible, you're probably going to sell a lot of whatever it is,” he explains. “But a lot of times we get so caught up in all the bells and whistles that we forget that this is all it is: How do I make sure people know this will be worth their time and money? And then how do I show this to millions of people?”

Credibility

According to Nate, one of the biggest ways to gain credibility is by getting lots of reviews on Amazon, or whatever platform you use. You could sell a few thousand books, but if you only have a handful of reviews from friends and family, then you’re not going to be very credible.

Potential readers who don’t know anything about you yet don’t see how many copies you’ve sold or how your book helped people around you — they see reviews. So you’ve got to have a strategy for getting those reviews.

In Nate’s experience, this also means you need to give yourself permission to charge for the product and make a profit. This can be challenging for many Christians, who feel uncomfortable earning money from putting their God-given message out there.

But, as Nate explains, “you have to charge for your product for people to value what you have. Otherwise, it's just something free, so they don't value it, they don't even look at it, and they don't get any of the gold that you're putting in your book.”

If you want to make an impact, you need to show people that your book is valuable, and that you have something worth their time — and money.

Visibility

There are plenty of ways to get more visibility, but one of the best ways is by appearing on podcasts. After all, you only have to record a podcast episode one time, but that one episode has the potential to be heard by thousands of people, even years into the future.

Other ways to increase visibility include buying ads on Amazon, Facebook, Google AdWords, or other sites, and posting on book promotion sites like BookBub. But it’s important to remember that these two things — credibility and visibility — must always go hand-in-hand.

“There are lots of ways to get traffic,” Nate says. “But if you think about it, just make yourself really credible, prove to your readers that you're worth their time and money, and then get a lot of people to see your book, and you're going to be in a really good spot. And you will be able to help the thousands of people that you want to help.”

Credibility Opens Doors

The more credibility and visibility you have, and the better your book sells as a result, the more doors will continue to open for you. But you often have to establish that foundation first. “When you're just starting out, it's virtually impossible to go up to a sizable podcast and say, hey, would you interview me on your podcast?” Nate says.

He knows what it’s like to send out email after email and get back nothing but generic rejections over and over again. Once he had a successful book out, he started getting accepted by a lot more people with large audiences — but he still had to market his credibility to them. He had to show them the success his book was having, and convince them that he would be a valuable guest for their show.

“Nobody cares who Nate Hambrick is,” he explains. “What podcasters and event hosts are looking for is that they want to look good. And so the question is, how can we make the host of this live event or podcast look really, really good? And if we can prove that to them, lots and lots of doors will open up.”

The more you build credibility and show podcast or event hosts that you can bring value to their show, the more excited they’ll be to interview you — and the more often you’ll have people reaching out to you instead of you always being the one reaching out to them.

Let Your Book Do the Hard Work for You

Publishing a successful book can open way more doors than you might think. In fact, if you do it right, your book can be the #1 source of revenue for your family or of clients for your business. After all, once your book is out there, it’s essentially free marketing for you.

Here’s what that looks like for Nate:

• He markets the book to millions of people.
• A fraction of those people buy the book.
• On the first page and throughout the book, he offers free tools or audiobooks.
• When readers sign up to get those free tools, they opt into his mailing list.
• Automated emails to that list drive more traffic to his business.

“That's leveraged impact,” Nate says. “I wrote the book once. I set up the funnel once. I wrote the emails once. All of that's automated. And what it's doing is it's helping weed people out, because not everybody’s going to be a good fit for your business or organization — but some of them will.”

Instead of spending all your time marketing your business to potential clients or customers, let your book do a lot of that hard work for you.

It Starts With “Why?”

After having worked with thousands of people to help get their messages out there, Nate says the key to success starts with one question: Why are you wanting to impact people? Are you in this for bragging rights about how many people you’ve helped, or do you genuinely care about making a difference in people’s lives?

The people who truly care about how their book is going to help other people are the people who have a truly lasting impact on others. So before you can be successful, you need to be sure you are pursuing success for the right reasons.

Then, once you’re sure your heart is in the right place, you need to understand that you can’t do this alone. Just like we as believers need the church to help us grow in our faith, we as authors need a community to help us — and our books — reach our full potential.

“There's no way you can possibly have the impact that you want by yourself. It's impossible,” Nate explains. “I've personally published about 1,000 books myself, so I know what I'm talking about. And yet, when I go to launch my next book, I'm still going to have a team of over 300 people. I have the knowledge, but I need the community to get me that result.”

Think of it this way: if you’re the only person telling people how amazing your book is, why should people, especially strangers, believe you? But if you have hundreds or thousands of people shouting from the rooftops about how your book changed their lives for the better, it’s going to draw even more people in to check it out for themselves.

If you want to learn more about how to write and publish a faith-based bestseller and get all your questions answered directly by Nate himself, you won’t want to miss the FREE webinar, “How To Write a Faith Based Bestseller That Impacts Thousands of Lives” on Wednesday, July 19th, at 2 pm ET. Sign up today to reserve your spot!

BIO:

Nate Hambrick is a publishing strategist for SelfPublishing.com where he creates blueprints for authors to write, publish, and market their books effectively. He’s also the author of Crush Your Kryptonite which was a #1 Best-Seller for one hundred and thirty-five days consecutively.

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