Have You CFOM'd Today? by Bonnie Calhoun

While Bonnie Calhoun is an author, she's also publisher of an online magazine aimed at helping writers. I asked Bonnie to share how the Christian Fiction Online Magazine could aid a writer's marketing plan. -- Sandy

Bonnie -- The title of this post is the question prominently displayed on our Christian Fiction Online Magazine monthly newsletter. Now what advantage does that give to authors who do columns or advertise in our magazine? Statistics are pretty dry reading, but I hope this information adds a certain level of excitement for anyone wanting to use us as part of their marketing strategy.

The email blast announcing our new issue goes out once a month to more than 15 thousand email subscribers which includes 64 book clubs, over 500 Christian book stores, and 747 library systems. And we average 27 thousand to 35 thousand individual magazine readers each month.

We draw returning readers with an easy to navigate and read website that archives our monthly issues since our inauguration in July of 2008, a great mix of devotions, interviews, book and movie reviews, recipes, insight into authors lives and how they go about writing, and listings of new books on the market that we target with blog tours through our parent organization Christian Fiction Blog Alliance.

The visible coverage for our average blog tour, including coverage on the magazine home page, a layout on the CFBA blog tour page in the magazine, blog tour book listings in the left sidebar of the monthly newsletter, and then the combined effort among our mix of influencers and reviewers, and the CFBA Blog puts an individual book in front of 30k to 40k viewers.

We are steadily increasing our readership and earlier this year we passed our MILLIONTH reader mark! Praise the Lord.

Every good marketing plan contains numerous avenues of exposure in multiple venues. Studies have shown that any given title must be seen an average of 27 times before it is committed to memory. 

What are you doing to increase your market share?

~~~

Bonnie S. Calhoun is publisher of Christian Fiction Online Magazine, Northeast Zone Director for ACFW,Mentor of the Year,’ President of Christian Authors Network. Her latest novel Pieces of The Heart in Abingdon’s Quilts of Love series released in June. Her website is: http://bonniescalhoun.com 

Find her on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/bscalhoun or 

https://www.facebook.com/bonniescalhounsnarkandsuspense

Christian Fiction Online Magazine

This week, Writer’s Journey Wednesday features the exciting publication, Christian Fiction Online Magazine (CFOM). You’ll find it full of helpful articles written by authors, agents, and editors. Michelle Sutton - author, book reviewer, and CFOM editor shares how the magazine got started and how she became involved.


Christian Fiction Online Magazine was first created in Bonnie Calhoun's mind. She’s the Founder and Director of the Christian Fiction Blog Alliance that branched off to include the online magazine as an extension of the blog tours. The hope was to provide another service to readers, authors, and publishers.

I literally received an e-mail back in Feb or March of 2008 from Bonnie asking if I'd like to be a magazine editor. Of course, I totally thought she was kidding. But she was serious. I prayed about it and once the ideas started to simmer and then bubble over in my mind I knew it was God's will for me to work with Bonnie on the magazine.

In addition to the prayer I submitted to God, I also asked Him to hook me up with willing authors who were talented and interested in contributing to a monthly magazine. He showed me a lot of ways within which he could use my natural creativity. Then it just took off. Response was overwhelmingly positive and I’m not hurting for columnists or articles at all.

We’re always looking for new ideas, and advertising is affordable. We offer it at a range of prices. Since Bonnie and I both spend about 40 hours per week working on the magazine, plus have hired three staff to work for us, we need the money to pay them and ourselves for our efforts. Even pastors get paid, correct? While this is a ministry, we still have bills to pay including the web server and postage, etc.

One final note . . . I love this "ministry" and plan to continue until the Lord takes the desire away from me. It's a great outlet for my creativity and a positive way to spread the word about Christian fiction. I will be at the conference in Denver and giving out new business cards to anyone who wants to spread the word about CFOM.

Check out the latest issue of Christian Fiction Online Magazine.