equip the Church

Most of us learned to market books by watching the way the world markets their products. Lead with price. Create urgency. Limited time offers. Highlighting new releases. Championing bestselling authors. Buy now!

And it works. Discounts move books. I am not against it. A well timed promotion can get a book into someone’s hands who would never have bought it otherwise.

But if that is all you are doing, you have only done half the job. And most Christian publishers have never thought about the other half and if they have, they put very little effort into it.

I have thousands of books at home. I suspect most people reading this do too. And our shelves are full of books we have not read yet

That is not a failure of discipline. It is the normal condition of someone who acquires books faster than life creates space to read them. But here is what I have noticed. The thing that finally makes me pick up a book I have owned for two years is almost never a marketing email. It is a conversation with a friend wrestling with a question the book answers. A pastoral situation that makes the title feel urgent. A podcast where the author says something that makes me think, I have that book, I need to read it now.

Relevance arrives through life, not through discounts. And when relevance arrives, the book on the shelf is suddenly exactly where it needs to be.

This is why I am not pessimistic about giving books away. A book in someone’s home is a seed waiting for the right moment. The book sits for a year, and then a marriage struggles, or a doubt surfaces, or a friend asks a hard question, and suddenly the person knows exactly where to go.

But here is what we almost never ask: are we doing anything to help that moment arrive?

When we gave away 25,000 copies of Gentle and Lowly in French, we did not simply distribute the books and move on. We built an entire campaign around making the ideas feel relevant and important. An online conference, podcast episodes social media that did not say buy this book but surfaced the questions the book answers the question about whether God is actually tender toward struggling and failing people, a question that sits quietly in the hearts of Christians who might never say them out loud.

We were not marketing a book. We were showing people why the ideas inside it would help them in their Christian life.

Some people encountered that campaign and bought the book. Others had already received a copy and the campaign was the moment that finally made them open it. That is what sustained marketing around ideas can do. It does not replace the distribution. It completes it.

The person struggling in their marriage does not care that a book is new or 20% off. They care whether it will help them. Newness is a publishing category. It is not a pastoral category. Price is a commercial concern. It is not a discipleship concern.

Most of our marketing is aimed at people who do not yet own our books. But we have almost completely ignored the most important audience we have: the people who already own our books and have not read them yet.

That person exists in enormous numbers. They bought on impulse. They received a copy as a gift. They picked it up at a conference. And then the book went on the shelf and we never spoke to them again.

We moved on to the next launch. The next promotion. The next title.

But that person is still out there. The book is still on their shelf. The idea inside it could still change them. What would it look like to take that seriously? Not as a sales campaign but as a pastoral responsibility. A quote from chapter three that makes someone think, I need to read that. A question the book wrestles with that connects to something happening in their church right now. A short video of the author saying: if you have this book and have not started it, here is the one idea I most want you to encounter.

That is not manipulation. It is finishing the work we started when we put the book in their hands.

This applies to your backlist more than anywhere else. We treat last year’s books like yesterday’s news. But the truth inside them has not expired. The pastor who needs a book on suffering did not stop needing it because you published it three years ago.

Your backlist is not your archive. It is your most proven content, sitting largely unmarketed, waiting for the person it was written for to finally discover it exists.

The sale is the beginning of the mission. Not the end of it.

A book sold and unread is not a success. It is a very expensive way to clutter someone’s shelf. The idea never arrived. We just moved a unit.

Run your promotions. But complement every sales campaign with the slower, harder, more important work of showing people why the ideas in your books matter for their actual lives. Follow people into the weeks and months after they received the book and give them reasons to open it.

We are not in the business of moving product. We are in the business of moving biblical ideas into minds and hearts where they can do their work.

The goal is not the sale. It is seeing people transformed by the ideas they read.