What I Learned from my First Book Launch

Last week's Galatians Bible Study launch was the biggest thing I've ever done and  I want to talk with you about it for a minute and share my heart.

I've had this blog since about 2009.  It was started as a way to document our story of changing our lives with the Dave Ramsey program (thus the name Stone Soup for Five, because that seemed to be figuratively all we were eating...soup made from nothing while we were paying down the crazy amount of debt we buried ourselves in).  Then I blogged randomly about Christian life and raising boys until MacKenzie from BoldTurquoise found my Bible Journal pages on Pinterest and asked me to do the Bold Year Challenge with her.  These studies are a direct result from that Challenge.

In order to commit the time and energy to seeing if this blog and the Bible studies could go anywhere (and find out if this was where God wanted me), I decided to take a year off my other hobby that I did from home and concentrate solely on writing.  It was a painful decision, because I love what I was doing (making doll clothes for adult fashion doll collectors and repainting fashion dolls) and right after I made that decision, a doll blogger posted some of my doll work and brought in a huge surge of traffic.  I could have easily gone back and left blogging on the side again.  But I had committed and wanted to follow through.

The original studies written during the Bold Year Challenge last year are good, but I knew they could be better, so almost everything was changed in Galatians since I now had the time.  And since it changed so much, I thought I might try to market it a little better than before.  So I got Jeff Walker's LAUNCH and committed to following his plan since I had NO IDEA how to launch anything.

Subscribers agreed to help by joining my launch team and I contacted a few bloggers asking

them to share (which was SCARY stuff.. "Hey, I don't know you, and I have this thing...could you tell your people about it?").  But some of those awesome bloggers took a chance and I'm forever grateful!

Jeff Walker also says if you work the launch right, you can actually make a year's worth of sales on launch week.  A year!  THAT was FUNNY stuff!  I snickered and set my goal to sell to 5% of my list, which some people consider nearly impossible... I would sell 60 copies of Galatians for the week.  That was my goal.  However unattainable.

So when May 23rd hit, I was eager to see if I could get 5 or 10 sales, but at the end of the day I had 61 sales.  What?!  My week goal in one day?!  As the week went on and I followed the plan, the sales kept rolling in.  And after all was tabulated, I ended up doing exactly what I thought was impossible... Galatians sold almost exactly a year's worth by the end of the week!

Now, the Launch book is good.  It was so nice to have a system of how to go about marketing with some wisdom... but, God is better.  It wasn't just chance that I hit that exact mark.  I hit it too closely for it to be coincidence.  This was God and maybe this is where He wants me right now.

I'm floored.  Humbled.  In tears with His overwhelming love.  I'm a sinner.  I'm scared.  I don't know what I'm doing.  But if He can provide for me in that way, I'll keep doing what I can to follow Him.  

I have so much to thank you for.  Without you I wouldn't have gotten this confirmation. Without you I wouldn't have had a successful launch like this.  He is doing something in all of us and I'm so thankful for the chance you took on me and the support and love you send.

For those of you who have been asking why these studies are coming out in such a weird order (rather than the order of the Bible), I'm roughly following the original Bible study plan that I started with the Bold Year Challenge.  We were reading through the 5x5x5 Bible reading plan, and that's the order I'm continuing to write in.  It's a great mix of the longer books with the shorter books and makes it fun.

This month I'm updating and expanding Ephesians to the new format (of which all of you will get a free copy for being subscribers and supporters) and finishing writing 2 Corinthians.  I'll continue writing as long as the Lord lets me and I hope you'll stick around for the ride!

He is good.  All the time.

See all the Bible studies here: