For the last several months, I’ve quietly been running these Christian Author group promotions on Book Funnel and Story Origin. I started them in response to some other group author promotions that I saw floating around on Facebook, with banners that have the standard woke progressive litany. You know how it goes: in this home, we believe that love is love, science is real, black lives matter, vaccines are yada yada yada.
Anyway, I saw those super left-wing promotions floating around, and thought: how can I signal to the readers who think that woke nonsense is insane that I also think it’s insane and don’t have any of that woke crap in my books? In other words, how can I organize a group promotion for non-woke authors without actually coming out and saying “we aren’t woke!”
The reason I don’t want to just come out and say “we aren’t woke!” is because if that’s the way you define yourself, you’re going to be overtly political, just in the opposite direction. For that reason, books that advertise as “anti-woke” are often just as terrible as woke books—or in other words, just as infected with toxic politics. Since the whole point was to get away from the toxic politics, I wanted to anchor the promotions on something that is very much antithetical to the woke nonsense, but not overtly political.
Hence the reason I settled on Christian authors as the theme: not on overtly Christian books, but books that are written by Christians. The thinking was that authors who self-identify as Christians probably wouldn’t go for all that woke nonsense that is, after all, antithetical to Christian teachings, and that readers who want to read Christian authors are also probably trying to avoid fiction that is infected with woke ideology.
Then I read Church of Cowards by Matt Walsh, and I realized that my plan had a fatal flaw: Christianity itself has become so infected with woke ideology that it no longer serves as an effective filter or signal against it. Of course, I knew that this was a problem, but I didn’t know serious the problem had become. In my church, we all still dress in church clothes on Sunday, still actually go to church on Sunday, believe in scripture as the literal word of God, and, you know, accept Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior. Apparently, all of those points are now super controversial among those who profess to be Christians. Go figure.
Also, Christian fiction comes with its own baggage that isn’t doing these group promotions any favors—which is a shame, because it’s not the books that are explicitly Christian, just the authors themselves. But apparently, Christian fiction has become so sappy and poorly written that I can hardly blame most readers for looking at those banners and thinking “uh, no thanks”—even the believing Christian readers. In particular, Matt Walsh took apart the God’s Not Dead series, which is apparently worse than most self-published stuff. Also, I tried out Left Behind last month, and DNFed it before the end of the first chapter just because of how ludicrous the setup for that book/series is.
(Seriously, Russia makes an alliance with… Ethiopia? …and randomly decides to wipe Israel off the face of the Earth, only to have their ENTIRE AIR FORCE destroyed in a day by a supernatural event? Every combination of the words in that sentence is laughably nonsensical to anyone who follows contemporary geopolitics. The current situation in the Middle East, with Russia and Iran basing forces in Syria, and Iran supplying Russia with kamikaze drones, is a more believable fulfillment of the Gog and Magog prophecies—and that’s before the Russo-Ukraine war spirals into a global conflict. Reality is far more terrifying—and far more Biblical—than anything the Left Behind series cooked up.)
With all of that in mind, it’s not much of a surprise that these Christian Author promotions have underperformed, not just among my existing newsletter subscribers, but among readers generally. So now I’m looking to try out some different themes for group promotions. Some of them are going to be totally non-political: I’ve always had success with the September Space Adventure group promo, after all. But how to reach that reader who thinks that this woke nonsense is insane?
The second banner might be a little too on-point (not to mention, it may get me banned from a few places), but I’m trying out this Books They Want to Ban theme again right now. I did something like it a while ago, and it didn’t do super well, but it’s worth running at least a couple of times to see how it goes.
So what do you think? Should I try running with this theme, or just totally avoid the woke / anti-woke politics altogether?
