2025 CAN Excellence in Marketing Awards: First Place in Nonfiction Online Presence

First in a series of posts featuring the winners of the 2025 Christian Authors Network (CAN) Excellence in Marketing Awards. Janet McHenry won first place in the nonfiction Online Presence category and describes her activities here.

The 2026 marketing awards will open in November 2025. CAN members, be thinking of how you can enter the awards! See the guidelines at:  https://christianauthorsnetwork.com/marketing-award/

1. Author, title, and genre of your book?

• • Janet Holm McHenry
  • Praying Personalities: Finding Your Natural Prayer Style
  • Nonfiction/Christian living

2. Award category?

Christian Author Network (CAN) Excellence in Marketing Award, Online Presence

3. What was the goal of your marketing campaign?

My goal was to get my book known to as wide an audience as possible.

4. How did you decide what activities to include?

Years ago I learned through a marketing course to create a marketing plan that seems most natural to me. I can both write and interview well, so I focused mostly on the following:

• • Creating the Praying Personalities Quiz.
  • Securing as many podcast interviews as I could.
  • Writing guest articles for online bloggers.
  • Posting memes on social media: Facebook (profile, author page, and several groups I administer), Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, and LinkedIn. These had quotes from the book, review comments, or podcasters’ episode titles.

5. What was your favorite aspect of your marketing campaign? Why?

I loved interviewing with podcasters, as well as with radio and TV personalities, because I enjoy connecting with others on a subject I love: prayer. I created memes on each interview date—posting on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Then I posted the podcaster’s meme(s) when the episode dropped. So I got double exposure with each of those 75 or more interviews.

6. What results surprised you the most?

The Praying Personalities Quiz (its own beautiful website) was also effective—with about 8,000 quiz takers from more than 40 different countries. What was lovely about that part of the campaign is that those folks bought books but also signed up for my monthly mini-magazine—and I still have about 6,000 of those subscribers on my e-list.

7. What new skills did you need to learn for your efforts to succeed?

I already had a background of a couple hundred media interviews from prior books, but with this campaign for Praying Personalities I learned to create sticky statements to bring into each interview that would resonate with the listeners. I found interviewers often used those in memes to promote the episode.

8. How did you determine the return on investment?

This is a tough question for an author who only works with traditional publishers. Because we don’t work directly with Amazon or with other distributors, we don’t know sales results until a year or more down the road. But when your publisher immediately asks you to submit another book idea—without having to submit sample chapters—that certainly spells success to me. And Praying Personalities was named by the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association (ECPA) as one of the eight Christian Book Award finalists in the Christian living category this spring—on a list that included books by Max Lucado, John Mark Comer, and Dallas Willard. That recognition is a career highlight for me. To have my book considered one of the eight best books in 2024 was humbling.

9. What marketing advice would you offer other writers?

I have several suggestions:

• • Market to your strengths. Consider what you do well and pour your efforts in that direction.
  • Know your audience and where they hang out. Meet them there with your offerings.
  • Focus on your audience’s felt needs. Offer value to them, as opposed to a hard sell “Buy my book!”
  • Be personal, vulnerably real, friendly, and even a bit funny as you interview or do videos. Let others get to know and trust you.

10. How can readers learn more about your writing?

Author Janet McHenry

I have been writing for the Christian publishing industry for more than 40 years. Readers can learn more about the 27 traditionally published books I’ve written by going to online stores or my website: janetmchenry.com. For any new subscribers to my monthly mini-magazine–called Looking Up!–I offer a free e-book called Prayer Helps: Scripture-Based Prayers When You Don’t Know How to Pray. And they can reach out—I love encouraging readers and writers.