@Thomas Davidsmeier This is helpful information thanks! I don't know of any online forums other than this site, but I personally have built a list of 500 subscribers. They aren't very engaged though. Learning how to get email subscribers that actually care about your work is extremely challenging I'm finding.

Thanks, E.T.! I honestly have considered getting an agent for my next books. It seems that I’m just ill equipped to navigate the marketing side of publishing. At the very least, I should probably hire a consultant.

I've heard every author and their mom swear by having an email list. Everywhere I go, the advice is always to build your email list as your first step. The problem is, I've built an email list two times, the first time up to 1500 subscribers, and now I'm up to 500 again, and it has done absolutely no good. I've tried tweaking it over and over again, I've tried changing the onboarding sequence and following successful authors' advice for how to convert subscribers to readers, and nothing changes. They only ever click on free stuff. Literally 0 subscribers left a review when I gave away ARC copies, 0 of them reply to my emails, and 0 of them ever click on anything that isn't free. The ONLY success I've found self publishing is giving away my 1st book away permanently free on amazon, and selling the other books in the series for .99 cents. Before that, I'd be lucky if I sold 1 book a month. Now I'm giving away 20-50 copies a day, and selling anywhere from 3-10 books a day for the rest of the series. I'm making about 30-50/mo by giving my book away for free. The only problem is I don't know where to go from here. I thought that maybe giving the book away for free would help recruit some more engaged subscribers since I put the reader magnet in the free book, and that way I could launch my next book to them more successfully, but I've gotten 0 subscribers from that as well. I have received a few more reviews though, which is nice, but I was hoping for subscribers because I thought that they would be more engaged and more interested subscribers than the cold ones I get from bookfunnel. I don't understand what I'm doing wrong. Given that I've given away thousands upon thousands of copies of my free book, and received 0 subscribers for the reader magnet from it, I've begun to think that readers are tired of email marketing, and it's not really working anymore. Either that, or it's a genre thing, and maybe my genre is a bad genre to build emails for. OR, I'm just really missing something. Has anyone else experienced this?

Thanks, @EClayRowe and @E.T. Newman! I will definitely take this advice!

That's a great point too! Thank you both for your input!

Thanks! This is where I was leading. My only question is, what does the market for Christian Fantasy look like? Should I market to secular readers as well but still brand myself as a Christian Fantasy author?

Hi, everyone! Excited to stumble upon this community. I've been an author for about four years, and I've been looking forward to joining a writer's group where I can grow as a writer and a believer! Thanks for letting me join!

I would consider my books to be not preachy at all. I have no idea who my readers are, honestly, other than the also boughts on Amazon. I have had a very difficult time learning how to market and what my target audience is.

I'd like to know if any other authors struggle with this, because I always am. I have a difficult time knowing how to brand myself. On the one hand, I believe a lot of my books would be appealing to secular readers who enjoy books like Artemis Fowl, and some of my other books would appeal to readers of secular books like Name of the Wind, and so forth. However, my books are obviously Christian, and I make no apology about it. But one of the reasons I write Christian Fantasy is because I want to share the gospel through story. I'd love nothing more than to reach secular readers and have them come to know Christ. So would me being so blatantly Christian in my marketing turn them off? Yet I have no shame in my beliefs, and I'm not afraid to tell anyone that I'm a believer. On top of that, I also think many Christian readers may enjoy my books as well. I can't decide if I want to market myself as a Christian author, or just as a fantasy author. I also don't want to market myself as a regular fantasy author, but then have secular readers feel "tricked" when there's blatant Christian themes in my books. I don't want to be dishonest. Any advice is helpful here!

I've struggled with this as well. One of the things I try to do is make a clear distinction between the real God, and my fictional representation of God. C.S. Lewis did this in the most brilliant way possible in Voyage of the Dawn Treader, when Aslan told Lucy that he exists in the "real" world, but he's known by a different name there, and his desire is for Lucy to know him by his true name. Almost like breaking the fourth wall, Lewis reminds us that Aslan is merely a fictional representation of the real thing, and we ought to not confuse the two. The way I see it, it's okay to have differences between how your fictional world operates and how the real world operates, so long as those differences aren't akin to heretical teachings in the real world. For example, in my story, the protagonist has the power to use white fire against his enemies, but this power is given only to him by Emery (my world's version of God). The white fire actually represents the Holy Spirit. In real life, the Holy Spirit isn't some white fire you can throw at bad guys, but no one who reads my book would think I actually believed that or taught that. It's merely representative of the real thing, and white represents purity in scripture so it makes sense. IF, however, I were to make my protagonist use that white fire to exact revenge on people, or kill innocent people, or make the use of the white fire similar to the use of witchcraft, I would say THAT is heretical. Because then I'm using a fictional representation of evil and presenting it as good. Does that make sense?