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This blog is Lisa's other passion, helping people sell more books, especially those of us with a limited budget and not much energy.

Get some great marketing tips from the daily blog and also check out her forthcoming ebooks on all kinds of book marketing ideas, from sales and promotions, to working with nonprofits as an author, to using your blog to build your platform. Lisa shares how she has sold thousands of books and how you can too!

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If you are the author of a new book or a book you are working on and wondering about how to network with Rest Ministries here are some ways that we recommend the following!

1. Send Lisa, Rest Ministries director, a copy of your book to review. She may also be willing to write an endorsement if it has not yet gone to print. You can email an attachment at a Word document file. If she doesn't respond in 3 weeks or so, please call us at 888-751-7378 and just let leave a message for her to check her spam folder. Occasionally this kind of email can be lost. To send the book, mail it to PO Box 502928, San Diego, CA 92150. If you've received any press a copy of it, or a copy of your press release is appreciated.
   
   
2. If you believe it may be a good fit for our Comfort Zone bookstore to carry on a regular basis... please include an outline of what points in the book would particularly be of interest to our audience. Feel free to stick a few Post It note on pages of particular interest. If you've actually quoted Lisa or one of her own books, be sure to point that out as well. Also include ordering info, such as where we would order the book and the breakdown of wholesale prices. Let us know if you have postcards that we can use to stuff in the packages of all of our orders. If we carry the book, we often will give the author this benefit now and then.
   
   
3. Have you received press for your outreach to the chronically ill in your neighborhood? (We could announce your book signing!) Did you just win an award for your book? Do you have you an interesting angle on your book that might get some media attention? If you have any unique angles to sell your books, please let us know. If we can send out a unique press release about you and your story in order to sell more books at our web site, we may be especially interested.
   
   
4. Let us know if you may be interested in splitting some costs of printing and mailing out a postcard. If we truly believe in a book and think it will fit our audience, we will sell it through our web site. If you are able to help split the cost, we can send out a postcard to the 13,000 on our mailing list. Have other ideas? We're open to all kinds of things!
   
   
5. Go to our HopeKeepers Magazine sign up page to join our ezine and at the bottom check the box about wanting to receive materials about marketing opportunities. We'd love to have more co-op opportunities for writers who meet the needs of our audience.
   
   
6. Consider advertising in HopeKeepers Magazine. We try to keep our rates doable for individual authors, and the response can be terrific if it completely meets the needs of our niche audience.
   
   
7. Send Lisa an email here to receive news about her upcoming e-book series on marketing one's books. She's put together hundreds of pages of information on how to market books on a budget and we will notify you as soon as it's available.
   
   
8. Sign up for our networking groups
   
   
9. Are you doing some public speaking or a book signings? We'd love to offer you some brochures of Rest Ministries, magazines, our tracts, and even some of our books at a discounted cost. As the largest Christian organization that serves the chronically ill, we are happy to help fill up your book table so people have a variety of resources to choose from. And we are a nice organization to be associated with too :) Just email Lisa the scope of your event(s), what you'd be interested in having available and a postal address. We will send whatever we can complimentary and just enclose a donation envelope for what you can give. Books can be purchased at a discounted rate, so let us know what you're interested in. We have available the following:
   • Mosaic Moments: Devotionals for the Chronically Ill
   • Why Can't I Make People Understand? Discovering the Validation those with Chronic Illness Seek and Why?
   • Beyond Casseroles: 505 Ways to Encourage a Chronically Ill Friend
   • So You Want to Start a Chronic Illness/Pain Ministry: 10 Essentials to Make it Work
   • 5-Lesson Bible study: When Chronic Illness Enters Your Life
   • 5-Lesson Bible study: Learning to Live with Chronic Illness
     
     
10. Are you looking for a publishing house for your book? We are very small and publish niche books for the chronically ill that have a Christian theme. We typically don't publish books by other people, but we do have the ability to do so. The upside is we have a distributor which could get you listed with Ingram and Spring Arbor, you'd be associated with the audience you want to reach, and your book may be able to be printed at a more efficient price than as a POD (print on demand.) The downside is that you won't get rich (none of us do) and most marketing and publicity efforts would come from you. We would promote it within our organization and media contacts, but most of the marketing would be done by yourself. If you're still interested, check out our publishing web site Rest Ministries Publishers for more information.
    
    
    These are just a few of hundreds of ways that we work with authors. Please know that sometimes we simply love a book and believe it's a good fit, but we've simply run short on money and space to actually carry it in our bookstore (in other words, Lisa can't walk through her garage.) Please know it's nothing personal.
    
    If you have any ideas to help promote your book through our organization, we'd love to hear them! You may want to volunteer to write an article for our ezine hopenotes or HopeKeepers Magazine. You may want to purchase a sponsorship ad in hopenotes that leads people directly to your site or Amazon, etc.