Successful Fiction Writing = Creating + Organizing + Marketing

I blog weekly on one of the above three topics, alternating between them. This week, I’m blogging on Marketing. Our topic today is author branding. There is no need to spend a lot of angst on this. Branding yourself as an author is simple, once you know the answers to two questions… 

Who Is Your Target Audience?

The first question to ask yourself is: Who is your Target Audience? 

Let’s define our terms first. Your Target Audience is the set of all people in the world who would love your book, if only they knew it existed. This is usually much less than 1% of the world population. It’s often much less than the population of the country you live in. And that’s OK. I live in the US, which has a population of almost 350 million. 1% of that is 3.5 million. 

And that’s plenty. My Target Audience for this blog is the set of people who want to write a novel. These are very special people. I’ve always estimated that only about one person in a thousand is really serious about learning to write a novel. That is more than a third of a million people in the US. And many more outside the US.

If you work with a traditional publisher, they’ll often send you a questionnaire about your Target Audience, asking “demographic” questions like “What is the age of your ideal reader? What is their sex? What is their annual income?” I take a jaundiced eye toward these questions. They’re relevant for a few kinds of fiction and useless for most. 

I prefer “psychographic” questions such as “What does your ideal reader secretly dream of doing, if they had the time, energy, and money? Who would your ideal reader want to have dinner with, if they could choose 5 guests from any period of time?” These questions tell you how your ideal reader’s brain works. 

Once you know who your Target Audience is, there’s only one other question to ask…

What Would Delight Your Target Audience?

You have only one job as a writer—to delight people in your Target Audience. If you do that, you’ve won the game of fiction writing. If you don’t do that, you need to rethink and retry. There’s no shame in missing the mark. Nobody’s perfect. We all make mistakes. We all have to keep improving. But once you start hitting close to the mark, your life changes. Amazingly. 

So what experience can you give your ideal reader that would delight them? Only you can answer that question. And you’ll probably be getting better and better answers to that question for your whole writing life. Finding good answers to that question is the secret to branding. It’s the whole secret. There isn’t anything else.

Constructing Your Branding Promise

When you’ve figured out what your Target Audience wants and you’ve settled on an experience you can give them, it’s time to make a Branding Promise. Let me give you a couple of examples. 

I’ll use my own work as an example, so I don’t have to guess. I respect and admire many authors, but I don’t know exactly what thought processes they went through to figure out their Target Audience or their Branding Promise. Whereas I do know mine. 

For my Advanced Fiction Writing website and (forthcoming) Substack, my Target Audience is “Everyone who dreams of writing a novel someday and successfully publishing it.” There are hundreds of thousands of people in the US who are in this Target Audience. But there are hundreds of millions of people in the US are aren’t. 

My Branding Promise for Advanced Fiction Writing is this: “I will teach you to write an excellent novel.” This appeals to people in my Target Audience, and it drives away people who aren’t. If people who aren’t in my Target Audience accidentally come to my website, I want to let them know right away that this is not the place for them. But if they are in my Target Audience, I want them to stay. 

For my fiction, my Target Audience is “Everyone who would take a vacation in ancient Jerusalem.” This is not a huge Target Audience, but I’m in it. I’d go on that vacation. I’d love every minute of it. The closest I’ve come to this impossible vacation is the four times I’ve worked on archaeological digs in Jerusalem.

My Branding Promise for readers of my fiction is this: “I will take you on an adventure to ancient Jerusalem.” I’m well aware that not everyone wants to go on my adventure. That’s fine. Other authors can take them on other adventures. But for those who want to go to ancient Jerusalem, my aspiration is to be the best person on the planet who could take them there. (A high bar, yes, and I hope someday to reach it. You jump higher when you try for something difficult.) 

Constructing Your Branding Promise

Once you know your Branding Promise, it tells you how to market yourself, forever. Everything you do marketing-wise—your website, your email newsletter, your blog, your Substack, your TikTok, your Instagram, your FaceBook, your whatever—should make your Branding Promise crystal clear. 

You can make your Branding Promise explicit or implicit. Neither way is always right or always wrong. The only important thing is that you must know what it is. That will guide your art, your layout, your presentation, your message, your everything. 

Your Branding Promise gives you a clear yardstick to measure your work. Look at the results of your fiction every year or so. Are you keeping your Branding Promise? If not, what went wrong? Did you lose focus? That happens to everyone occasionally. The solution is to get your eye back on the ball. 

Talking to Agents and Editors

Once you understand your Branding Promise, it becomes super easy to talk to agents and editors. When they ask, “What do you write?”, you just tell them your Branding Promise. “I teach people how to write excellent fiction.” “I write novels that take people on an adventure to ancient Jerusalem.” 

99 times out of 100, when an agent or editor hears your Branding Promise, they’ll say, “Sorry, that’s not for me.” That’s fine. You’re trying to separate the sheep from the goats, and you just found another goat. If they don’t like your Branding Promise, they’ll never like your book, so don’t bore them by talking about it. Talk about the weather or sports or food or something else equally unbook.

But 1 time in 100, the agent or editor will stare at you with thunderstruck eyes. After ten seconds of golden silence, they’ll say, “Where have you been all my life?” And now you have a potential business partner for whatever you’re writing. And not just a business partner. A true believer. Wouldn’t that be incredible, if your agent or your editor was a true believer in your work?

Homework:

• Who is your Target Audience? 
• What delightful experience could you give your Target Audience?
• What is your Branding Promise? 
• What actions could you take to make your Branding Promise clear on all your marketing platforms? 

Successful Fiction Writing = Creating + Organizing + Marketing

I blog weekly on one of the above three topics, alternating between them. This week, I’m blogging on Marketing. My topic today is what I call the Three Pillars of Marketing. Everything you will ever do to market your novel falls under one of these three pillars. But let’s deal with the elephant in the room first…

All Novelists Hate Marketing

Yes, all novelists. At least those with a conscience, and all the novelists I know are good people who have a conscience. None of us wants to be a marketing weasel. And all of us have run into marketing weasels. 

For the last few months, a robo-caller has been calling my house many times every week, claiming to be from “The Home Improvement Group.” I’m not interested. I have talked to a couple of the actual humans behind the robo-caller and asked them to put me on their Do Not Call List. But they keep calling. Over and over. And they fake their Caller ID, so it’s not always obvious that it’s them again. 

Let’s define a marketing weasel. A marketing weasel is somebody trying to sell you something under one of the following three conditions:

• You don’t need it. 
• You don’t want it. 
• You can’t afford it.

So how do you avoid being a marketing weasel? It’s really pretty simple. You aim your marketing ONLY at your Target Audience. Let’s review the meaning of that term.  

Your Target Audience

Your Target Audience is the set of all the people in the world who would love your fiction, if only they knew you existed. Let’s be clear that some fraction of your Target Audience actually does know you exist. But not all of them. Most of them never heard of you.

It doesn’t make sense to market your novel to people outside your Target Audience. They’re just not that into the kind of fiction you write. Some of them might like your novel, sorta-kinda. Most of them just won’t see the point. Some will actively hate your novel. 

It makes all kinds of sense to market your novel to people inside your Target Audience. By definition, they want your novel—or they would if they knew it existed. 

And if someone wants your novel, then they also need it, because all humans need Story. Story is how we make sense of the world. Story is what keeps us alive and helps us thrive. Story is the rocket fuel humanity runs on. 

And books are pretty cheap, as compared to most other stuff. If somebody wants your book and needs it, they can almost certainly afford it. 

I strongly recommend that you market your work ONLY to people in your Target Audience. They want it; they need it; they can afford it. If you tell them about it, you’re not being a weasel. You’re doing them a favor.  

But then how do you actually do your marketing? There are three things you need to do, and only three things. But you have to do them in the right order. I call these the Three Pillars of Marketing. Here they are:

1. Attract your Target Audience—let them know you exist.
2. Engage your Target Audience—earn their trust by being trustworthy.
3. Convert your Target Audience—ask for the sale.

The First Pillar—Attracting Your Target Audience

Most people in your Target Audience don’t know you exist. They don’t know you wrote a novel. They don’t know what your novel is about. 

Attracting your Target Audience just means that you somehow make that connection so they know those basic facts about you and your novel. There are thousands of marketing tactics to make that connection. We can talk about those later. I’ve talked about some of them in previous posts on this blog and in the Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine that I used to publish. I’ll continue to teach specific marketing tactics in future blog posts, because tactics come and tactics go. But the principle is forever—do what it takes to Attract your Target Audience and ONLY your Target Audience.

The crucial thing is that any marketing tactics you use to make the connection should be honest. They should make it crystal clear to each person that one of two things is true:

• They are in your Target Audience. 
• They are not in your Target Audience.

When choosing marketing tactics to Attract people in your Target Audience, give enough information to repel people who are not in your Target Audience. That’s right, repel them. You want to drive them away. You only want people who are in your Target Audience. If somebody is dying of thirst and you don’t have water, don’t try to sell them pretzels. Point them to somebody who sells water. 

As a side note, one reason for writing a One-Sentence Summary of your novel is that it Attracts people in your Target Audience and repels people who are not in it. Both sides of this coin are important. 

The Second Pillar—Engaging With Your Target Audience

Assume somebody knows you exist and that you wrote a novel that would interest them. It’s way too early to try to sell them your novel. 

That’s like asking somebody you just met to marry you. They may be attracted to you. But they don’t KNOW you. They don’t trust you. Yet.

Engaging with your Target Audience means that you spend time earning their trust. You earn trust by being trust-worthy. This may take a long time or it may happen quickly. If you were selling them a big-ticket item, like a life-insurance policy or a ticket to the moon, you would need to spend quite a lot of time. Big-ticket items require a lot of trust. 

A novel is a smaller-ticket item. The money is probably not the main issue. If your book is priced in the $5 to $25 range, that’s usually not a big deal to a reader. Readers pay that kind of money all the time. 

The main issue is the reader’s time. It may take 5 or 10 hours to read your novel. Your reader can never get back those hours, if you waste them. So you need to show that you can be trusted to give 5 or 10 hours worth of value. 

You have many possible tactics to Engage with people in your Target Audience. I’ve talked about some of them in the past and I’ll talk about many of them in the future. But the principle is the same for all these tactics—you must show that your potential reader can trust you with several hours of their precious time. 

The Third Pillar—Converting Your Target Audience

Assume you’ve Attracted someone in your Target Audience and you’ve Engaged with them enough that they know they can trust you. Now what? 

Ask for the sale! Don’t make it complicated. Give them a way to buy. 

Converting your Target Audience means that you make it easy for them to buy your novel. There are a number of ways to do this. The principle is always the same. Make it obvious how to buy your novel, and make it as simple as possible.

Three Marketing Rules To Live By

Let me summarize with three rules to live by:

• Don’t try to Convert somebody you haven’t Engaged with. 
• Don’t try to Engage with somebody you haven’t Attracted. 
• Don’t try to Attract somebody who’s not in your Target Audience.

Homework:

• Think about the last novel you bought. How and when were you Attracted? How were you Engaged and how long did it take? How were you Converted? 
• Have you ever bought a novel, and then it turned out you were not in the Target Audience? What went wrong that led you to buy a novel that wasn’t right for you?

Successful Fiction Writing = Organizing + Creating + Marketing

I blog weekly on one of the above three topics, alternating between them. This week, I’m blogging on Marketing. My topic today is Substack, a marketing platform for writers. 

What is Substack and Why Should You Care?

Substack started out as an email service provider that was free to all writers. Most email service providers let you start out free, and then they start charging you when you have “enough” subscribers. But Substack is free to all writers, no matter how many subscribers you have, with one very important caveat. 

What’s the caveat? Substack makes no money unless you also earn money. If you earn money, they take a percentage. And Substack makes it easy for writers to “monetize” their writing. Writers can split up their content into a “free tier” and a “paid tier”. The hope is that they’ll attract fans with their free content and then some of those will find it worthwhile to pay for the premium stuff. This model is a lot like Patreon. Substack handles the money transaction and takes a 10% fee, plus the credit card charges. 

The most successful writer on Substack is said to be Heather Cox Richardson, an American history professor who writes a daily column on history and politics. She has more than 3 million subscribers, and is said to earn somewhere between $500k and $1M per month. Yes, per month. 

Substack is More Than Just Email

But Substack has evolved quite a lot over the years. It’s not just an email service provider anymore. It allows you to organize your content into “Publications”—each of which is effectively a mini-website, hosted right there on Substack at no charge to you. Part of that “Publication” can be a blog. Part can be a podcast. You can set up Chats with your subscribers. You can do Live Video. You can post “Notes” in a social-media feed hosted by Substack. And you can use Substack’s Recommendation feature to recommend the Publications of writers you like; writers who like you can in turn recommend your Publication. Substack itself will recommend Publications to readers who might be interested. 

The important thing is that all of this is free to the writer, unless they’re earning money. That’s what caught my attention a few years ago. Free is good. I have used a number of email service providers over the years. I used to use MailChimp. Several years ago, I switched to ConvertKit. Both of these are expensive. I have a bit more than 1000 subscribers for my fiction newsletter and blog. This blog, the Advanced Fiction Writing Blog, has around 6600 subscribers. And with the features I currently use on ConvertKit, all those subscribers costs me a fair bit. 

I do like ConvertKit. It’s a powerful tool for serious marketers who produce a lot of content. But I haven’t been producing that much lately. So I don’t get much value out of  the terrific features ConvertKit has. I use just enough of those features that I have to pay. So I’ve been thinking about other options for the past few years. 

Switching Takes A Lot of Work

Let’s be clear that setting up a Publication on Substack takes some serious effort. Recently, I’ve had a lot more time for my writing. I decided a few weeks ago that it was time to take a hard look at Substack and see if it would be worth all the work to switch. 

So I took a couple of hours and did some online research. What I learned is that Substack has made a lot of progress in the last couple of years. As I noted above, it ties together email delivery, a website, a blog, a podcast, live-streaming video, and social media. With that pesky “monetization.” 

But it all looked very confusing, so I decided to invest in a course. The one I chose is Substack for Authors, created by a fiction writer named Jaime Buckley. That link will take you to the sales page for Jaime’s course. That link is not an affiliate link. Jaime is not paying me a dime to recommend his course. He doesn’t even know I’m recommending it. But I do recommend it. Very highly. 

I worked through the course in about a week. It’s got 11 modules, each containing multiple videos plus PDF downloads. The transcript of the videos is provided online. I took a lot of notes. What I particularly liked is that Jaime tells you both the why and the how. Both of those are important. You need to work out your why first. Jaime has a very nice marketing philosophy, very much in line with the one I’ve held to for a long time—marketing is about helping people. Once you understand why you’re doing stuff, Jaime also tells you how to do it. Without a lot of fluff. If it only takes 5 minutes to explain something, he doesn’t stretch it out to fill up half an hour. I really appreciated that. My learning time is valuable. 

I’ve created two separate Publications on Substack under my account. One of them is for fans of my novels, and I named it Randy Ingermanson Novels. The other is for people who want to learn how to write and market their novels, and I named it Advanced Fiction Writing. Don’t look for either of these Publications yet. I’ve made both of them Private while I’m setting them up. There’s nothing worse than a half-baked Substack Publication that doesn’t have anything yet. 

Transitioning my Fiction Newsletter/Blog to Substack

I decided to work on the Substack about my own novels first, because that one is simpler. I don’t have any initial plans to monetize it. I’ll simply use it for my existing fiction newsletter and my existing blog about my novels. One thing I’ll be adding is a weekly post with a chapter of my novel-in-progress. Then I can get feedback from my True Fans as I’m writing the book. And I’ll have weekly behind-the-scenes posts about things that my True Fans would find fascinating about the most recent chapter posted. 

I will also replicate my occasional blog posts about my fictional world on Substack. I found it extremely easy to import the existing 60 blog posts that I’ve written over the last 8 years into Substack. It took about 2 seconds to pull them into Substack. Then I took a couple of hours to tweak the content on each post, mainly to insert a note saying that the post was originally published on my blog. But I also added what Substack calls Custom Tags that help the Substack search engine know what content is in each post.

So my Substack Publication for Randy Ingermanson Novels is almost done. It’s taken me a total of about 22 hours, spread out over the last couple of weeks. I think I have about 2 hours left to go, and then the Publication will be ready to launch. (Launch means that I’ll import my email list from ConvertKit into Substack.) I’ll hold off launching for a bit, because I also have a whole other Substack to create, and that’s going to take a similar level of effort. 

Right now, I don’t have any paid tier set up for this Publication. Maybe I will in the future, if I can think of something my True Fans might want to pay for. Some of my True Fans have been reading my fiction for many years. They might want to support the cause, and they might have ideas for cool things I could put in a paid tier. But I’m not too concerned about that right now. Mainly, I want to stop paying for email delivery. 

Transitioning My Advanced Fiction Writing Blog to Substack

Now that I’ve figured out how to do stuff on Substack, the transition of my Advanced Fiction Writing Blog will be fairly easy. But there’s still a lot to do. I expect that I’ll get it all done in about 25 working hours, spread out over the next couple of weeks. 

It’s nice that Substack can import hundreds of blog posts in an eyeblink, but I don’t want to import everything. I’ll focus on the most relevant blog posts over the last few years, the “evergreen” content. 

My regular free content will be very similar to what I’ve been doing already. My current plan is to post one blog post every week—on Organizing or Creating or Marketing. That’s a level of effort I can manage quite well. I will do all in my power to maintain the same standard of quality that I’ve always had for my Advanced Fiction Writing Blog (and the Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine before it). 

Will I have a paid tier on Substack? Yes, I will. But the content will be different than the free content. I still need to work out the details, but the core idea is to do what I call “Deep-Dives”. Each of these will go a lot deeper than I can go in a 1000-word blog post. I would like to produce a Deep-Dive on a regular schedule. I’ll decide the precise subject of each Deep-Dive after getting input from paid subscribers. And I’ll keep an archive of all the past Deep-Dives, so paid subscribers will have a growing library of material they can’t get anywhere else on the web. Because the Deep-Dives will focus on the things that I do best, that nobody else teaches. 

I can imagine other payware products that fans of this blog might like, but I’m not going to promise what I can’t deliver. One thing at a time. I have a nice list of “maybe someday” ideas. But I won’t do anything without consulting the loyal fans of Advanced Fiction Writing. Because you know what you need most. If I can deliver what you need, that’s a good deal for both of us. 

Is Substack For You?

You might be wondering if I recommend that you try using Substack to market your own work. I’m agnostic on that question right now. I’ll have a better answer in six months or a year. I’m don’t like recommending things I haven’t tried. 

Almost all of you are novelists, so I think you’ll be interested to hear how my Substack Publication Randy Ingermanson Novels works out for me. I have no idea how it’ll do. I don’t have any immediate plans to monetize it. But I do hope to do a better job in interacting with the True Fans of my fiction. From what I’ve seen, Substack gives a writer all the tools they need to create community. So we’ll see. I’m eager to try it and find out. 

Probably a few of you also write nonfiction. If that’s you, you’ll be able to watch me run my nonfiction Substack Publication Advanced Fiction Writing in the coming months, after I launch. You can’t see anything yet, as I said earlier. I’ll keep both my Publications in Private mode for at least another couple of weeks.  

Once I’m convinced I’ve worked out all the kinks, I’ll do a launch on both my Publications. And then you’ll see what can be done on a nonfiction platorm on Substack. I will make mistakes. I’m human, and mistakes are a particular skill of mine. I trust you, my Loyal Fans, to push back graciously when you see a mistake, and to help me get things on track. I would love to have a fabulous Substack Publication that helps you reach your writing goals, a place where we can all learn together. If that happens, then the project is a success. 

Stay tuned…

In my last blog post, To-Fu For Novelists, I talked about the importance of creating a Reader Magnet, a free piece of your writing that you can give away to your fans and potential fans. 

You give it away free as an inducement to sign up for your e-mail newsletter. Then whenever you release a new book, you’ll run a great launch by notifying your e-mail subscribers. 

That only makes sense if your e-mail list contains people who really love your fiction. If the subscribers to your e-mail list don’t care about your novels, that’s a problem. Your list costs you money. You can’t afford to have a large list with many thousands of non-fans. 

This means that your Reader Magnet needs to align well with your novels. If somebody likes your novels, they should like your Reader Magnet. If they like your Reader Magnet, they should like your novels. 

Getting the Word Out

You have three different groups of people that you want to give your Reader Magnet to:

1. People who just finished reading one of your novels. 
2. People who come to your website. 
3. People in your Target Audience who never heard of you. 

Group 1 is the warmest group. They know and love your work, and they are eager to read something else you’ve written. If you offer them your free Reader Magnet, they’ll sign up in droves.

Group 2 is not quite so warm. They know something about you, or they wouldn’t have come to your website. But they may not know much. If you offer them your Reader Magnet, some will take it and most won’t. 

Group 3 is the coldest group. They don’t know anything about you, so you’re going to need to reach lots of them, and only a tiny fraction will sign up. But the good news is that you have hundreds of thousands or millions of people in this group. 

Now let’s talk about how you reach each of these three groups with your Reader Magnet offer.

Reaching True Fans 

It’s easy to promote your Reader Magnet to True Fans (people who just finished reading one of your books and loved it). Just put a note in the back of all your books offering your Reader Magnet as a free welcome gift to anyone who signs up for your e-mail newsletter. Include a link to a “landing page” on your website. 

What’s a “landing page?” It’s a special page that does one thing only—it makes an offer for your Reader Magnet. Ideally, no page on the internet should link to this landing page. Then only readers of your books will know the link, and they’ll be the only ones who ever come to the landing page. That way, you can track how well it works. 

Reaching Website Visitors 

Every page of your website should have an e-mail signup form. There are multiple ways to do this. You can have an actual form visible on the page. For visitors using a desktop machine or laptop, you can display a popup form. For visitors using a phone or tablet, a ribbon form works better—it displays in a thin “ribbon” on the top of a page, and the user can either dismiss it or click it to display a full popup form. 

You have a lot of options for signup forms. If you’re tech-savvy, you can create these signup forms yourself. If you’re not, then have your webmaster do it. But you should write the copy for the form yourself. Your webmaster may not be any good at writing marketing copy. 

If you don’t know how to write the copy for the signup form, a good place to learn is Tammi Labrecque’s two books:

• Newsletter Ninja
• Newsletter Ninja 2

These two books are packed with much more info on newsletters and Reader Magnets than I can put into a blog post. They’re inexpensive and super valuable. I highly recommend them both. 

If you’d like to see how I’ve set things up on my website with my own Reader Magnet, you can visit any page on my personal website that I use for promoting my novels. On my home page, I have an embedded signup form that promotes my Reader Magnet. All other pages of my site have popup forms (for desktop machines) or ribbon forms (for mobile and tablet devices). So you can easily find examples of how I do it. 

I expect that only a small fraction of readers of this blog care about the kind of fiction I write. Please don’t sign up for my e-mail fiction newsletter unless you happen to be in my Target Audience. 

Reaching People Who Never Heard of You

The great majority of your Target Audience has never heard of you. (By definition, a Target Audience is the set of all people who would love your novels, if only they knew you existed.)

How do you reach these people? You can’t expect them to wander onto your website by chance. If you’re going to find them, you have to get proactive. 

You have several options:

• Occasionally promote your books on the “deal sites,” such as BookBub, E-Reader News Today, etc. The way these work is that you lower your price for a few days to free or to 99 cents and pay these deal sites to promote your deal to their subscribers. This can bring in dozens or hundreds of new readers. The ones who like your book will eventually sign up for your e-mail newsletter. 
• Run paid ads on Facebook to promote your Reader Magnet. Facebook ads take time to learn how to run correctly, but if you do this well, you can reach thousands of people who never heard of you. A good ad will make an enticing offer for your Reader Magnet. Just remember that Facebook ads can be expensive. I’ve heard this works well, but I haven’t tried it myself. Yet. 
• Use the social media platform of your choice and post offers there for your Reader Magnet. This can be extremely effective or extremely ineffective, depending on how well you use your social media platform. Nobody is good at all social media platforms. My advice is to choose one and learn it well and see how it works out for you. Social media is “free,” but it can cost you enormous amounts of time. So think carefully before you commit. But if you commit, then give it your best shot. 

How Long Will This Take?

Putting together a good Reader Magnet and promoting it well will take you months. So why should you create a Reader Magnet, as opposed to doing nothing? Two reasons:

• A Reader Magnet is one of the very best ways to promote your books. 
• “Doing nothing” will also take you months. Time keeps on ticking, whether you use it productively or not. Months and years and decades are going to pass you by, and you can’t stop them. You might as well spend your time on something that works. “Doing nothing” doesn’t work. 

If you work hard, in three months, you could be done. It’ll pay off when you launch your next book. 

“ToFu” is marketing slang for “top of funnel.” 

And what is a “funnel?” That’s a standard marketing term that refers to your system for attracting potential new readers, engaging with them, and ultimately converting them to paying customers. 

It’s called a funnel because it’s wider at the top and narrower at the bottom—you attract more people than you engage, and you engage more people than you convert. 

Every novelist needs some way to bring people into the top of their funnel. A very common way to do that is by giving away a sample of your wares. If people read your free stuff and like it, then there’s a decent chance they’ll buy your not-free stuff. 

Your Reader Magnet

Authors call that free sample of their writing a “Reader Magnet.” Reader Magnets vary widely. Some examples that authors use are:

• A full-length novel. 
• A novella. 
• A collection of short stories. 
• A single short story. 
• Scene outtakes from your novel. 
• An extra scene “after the end of your novel.” 
• Backstory on your characters. 
• Backstory on your story world. 
• Maps for your story world. 

That’s not a complete list, but it gives you some idea of possible Reader Magnets you could create. 

My thinking is that a good Reader Magnet is closely aligned with what you’re selling. So if you write cozy science fiction mysteries, don’t give away a steamy werewolf romance as your Reader Magnet. Nothing wrong with werewolves or romance or steam, but your Reader Magnet is a promise of what your novels will deliver. 

Delivering Your Reader Magnet

Generally, authors use a Reader Magnet as an incentive for potential fans to sign up for their email newsletter. Then the Reader Magnet promotes books you’ve already written, and your email newsletter promotes all the books you’ll write in the future.

So the Reader Magnet is very much a quid pro quo, and your email signup form should make that clear—you’re giving away a free gift to people who sign up for your email newsletter. But you should also make clear that it’s not a forever contract—they can unsubscribe from your newsletter at any time.

Virtually all email software makes it easy to deliver a Reader Magnet automatically to anyone who subscribes to your email list. See my page, Marketing Tools for Writers, for much more info on email software. 

In case you’re delivering an actual e-book as your Reader Magnet, there is a technical problem to solve. A lot of people who read e-books don’t know how to load an e-book onto their e-reader device, because they usually buy from a retailer (like Amazon) that automates that process for them. 

The solution is to use a service that helps your fans through the techie problems of loading your Reader Magnet into their e-reader. The service I use is called BookFunnel, and again, the details are on my page, Marketing Tools for Writers. 

Producing Your Reader Magnet

Do you already have a Reader Magnet? Is it working well for you?

If not, here’s a short checklist of questions for deciding what Reader Magnet you could create: 

• Which book or series of books are you most interested in marketing? 
• If it’s a single book, could you give away another book like it? 
• If it’s a series, could you give away the first book in the series? (Many authors do this, and it can work very well, if it sells all the other books in the series.)
• Can you write a novella or short story or collection of short stories using the same characters from your book or series? 
• Is there any other material you could write that would align well with the book or series that you want to promote?

It might take you weeks to create your Reader Magnet. Is it really worth spending all that time making something you’re just going to give away for free? 

Most successful authors will tell you yes, it is. Most successful authors are successful precisely because they took that time to create something their potential readers would love. 

You might be wondering how you use your Reader Magnet. How do you put it in the hands of lots of potential readers? That’s a big subject, worthy of its own blog post. My plan is to cover that subject in my next blog post, so stay tuned. 

For the moment, get rolling on your Reader Magnet. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Just make the best Reader Magnet you can with the skills you have now. Next year, when you’re earned some money and developed your craft, you’ll be able to make a better one. Every time you create a new one, you’ll get better. Each one is the necessary step on the road to the next one.