And, interestingly, by speaking to a specific person, you reveal more about yourself than you otherwise might. Because we’re very different when we’re sharing one-on-one than when we feel put on the spot to be open with a great big bunch of strangers. Obviously, some people are more open than others, and you shouldn’t feel pressured to reveal anything more than you’re comfortable with. But remember that being personal can be something small—a movie you loved or a picture of a pet. People love pictures of pets, and will respond with pictures of theirs. Like, always.
The cool part is that these subscriber avatars will, in a way, become a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. When you address your emails to your subscriber avatars, you will naturally attract people who are like those avatars. It’s not easy, and it’s not necessarily fast, but boy is it effective.
So now that we know what our perfect subscribers are like, we’re almost ready to go find some. But first we need to do one final thing: we need to chat briefly about the difference between strategies and tactics.
10 - Strategies vs Tactics
Way back in the Planning and Setup chapter, I told you we’d talk about the difference between strategies and tactics. This is the perfect time to address that topic, because before we dive into methods of list-building, we need to understand that there are many tactics for building your list—but they change frequently, and you can only stay on top of the current tactics by understanding the strategy behind them.
So what’s the difference? In brief: Strategies are general plans of action to achieve a goal. Tactics are the individual things you do to implement that strategy.
Seems simple enough, but it’s incredibly important—both to your success with your newsletter, and to your success as an indie author in general. Understanding of this concept is a big part of why some folks are successful and some are not, even if they seem to be doing the exact same things. If you look closely, it often turns out that the successful author did something—let’s say he started using a new advertiser that catered specifically to his genre—then a lot of other authors began to do it, too, and it stopped working as well. At that point, our hypothetical successful author saw that the industry had changed, and that he’d have to do something new to accomplish what he wanted, since the old thing isn’t effective any more. So perhaps he seeks out some social media channel or Internet forum where readers of his genre tend to hang out, and figures out a way to become part of that community and sell without overtly selling. (This works, by the way, and again I have to recommend Six Figure Author if you’d like to expand on ideas like that.)
He can no longer implement his old tactics and achieve the same results. His strategy (finding new readers in his genre) hasn’t changed, but his tactics have—and the people using the old tactics are left wondering why this thing that seemed to work so well actually doesn’t, while our savvy author is prepared to pivot at any time and find new tactics to remain successful.
Let me elaborate with an example that every indie author understands:
Having a funnel starter (what many businesses call a “loss leader”)—is a strategy. A loss leader gives a consumer a free or discounted taste of what you have to offer, to tempt them into wanting more at full price (or to tempt them into buying something else in the store, or accessories, or what-have you), and virtually everyone who sells anything does this. This is a time-honored strategy that will probably persist until people stop trying to sell things (so, forever). But the most effective tactics—what you use as a loss leader, for example, or how you call attention to it or deliver it—will almost certainly change over time.
Currently, making the first book in your series permafree on all the ebook retailers is a tactic that helps you accomplish your goal of getting people into your funnel (unless your other books are enrolled in Kindle Unlimited, but again, that’s beyond the scope of this book). Other tactics might be: creating a sampler of short stories in your story world, using that as a cookie, and driving traffic to it with Facebook ads; or setting up a newsletter swap with another author in your genre (you send your list a link to their cookie or another book, and they do the same for you); or setting up a bundle on Bookfunnel where many authors offer their cookie or a free book, and then all the participating authors drive traffic to the bundle page. You can employ a variety of tactics to implement your strategy.
I’ll reiterate, because it’s very important: tactics change; strategies, by and large, don’t. So what works to get people into your funnel now may be different from what worked last year, and it may not work a year from now. Anything to do with Bookfunnel didn’t exist a few years ago, for example, and maybe two years from now we’ll all be getting books onto devices in a different way, or maybe some other program will come along that serves that same purpose but has some added functionality that will make it the favored method of book delivery. Maybe Amazon will lose the exclusivity requirement to be in Select (cue me laughing, somehow both hysterically and bitterly at the same time), and we’ll have more flexibility with regards to offering free books. Maybe readers will get tired of all these free novellas and we’ll have to find something else to give them. We must be flexible and willing to pay attention to current best practices, while still keeping our overall strategy in mind so we can always be employing the most effective tactics that are working right now.
In the case of your newsletter (you knew I’d get back to this, right?), your strategy is using reader psychology and purchasing psychology to get people to join your list—and once they’re there, to open and click and reply. The myriad ways of accomplishing that goal (the tactics) can change. And, as I said above, they do. All the time.
So let’s talk about some strategies and tactics for doing just that, with the understanding that you want to pay special attention to the strategies. You need to be ready to abandon any tactic I might mention, as soon as it stops delivering results for you.
Let’s start with the one that will never stop working or being desirable: Organic list-building.
11 - Organic List-Building
So now that we understand the crucial difference between strategies and tactics, let’s talk about the strategy of organic list-building and empower you to figure out or invent tactics to accomplish that strategy.
This section is very short, because there’s not a lot to say about it. You all know what organic list-building is: putting out good books and selling those books to people who will then go on to join your list. The selling part is, of course, way too much to get into here, and the books I recommended earlier will help you with it, but ultimately, you will build the organic part of your list the hard way: one person at a time, on pure merit.
So is it at all possible to give yourself an edge here? Sure! The most important strategy to get people to sign up organically for your list, apart from writing a rip-roaring good book, is getting visible. That will never change. Once you have actual readers (which is the very definition of an organic subscriber), your work isn’t done. You have to direct eyeballs to your signup if you want to get anywhere. You need to make sure your readers see that signup link every damn time they turn around.
But how do you do it? That is to say, what tactics do you use? Here are a few that work currently:
Pin it to the top of your Twitter feed (unless you have a new release; during a book launch you want your pinned post to be a link to your new book).
Put it in your FB header. (Pinned FB posts are actually hidden on mobile so don’t do that.)
Put it in your email signature.
Calls to action in the back of your books. (If you want your email list to be priority #1—which you almost always do—the mailing list CTA should be the first thing readers see when they finish your book.)
Facebook group takeovers, blog tours, etc
Your website (header, footer, sidebar, embedded on the page, or popups. Whatever works).
Now, some of these methods will work better than others, obviously. And some of them will
probably always work, while others will fall by the wayside. Maybe Facebook goes belly-up in a year (Lord knows, we’d all get a lot more writing done), who knows? But as long as you understand the strategy—gaining organic visibility with existing readers—you will be able to figure out when certain tactics are no longer working for you, look at that strategy, and devise some new tactics to accomplish the same thing.
All of the preceding items have one thing in common, however: They are all designed to appeal to someone who has heard of you or your books, and comes looking for more—the organic subscribers. That’s great and all, but what about the people who haven’t heard of you, and don’t yet know how awesome you are?
We need to find a way to get them on your list, too, and nothing works so well as a good old-fashioned bribe.
12 - Straight-Up Bribes
Now, before we discuss the delights and benefits of bribery, I want to take a step back and dig a little deeper into the concept of a loss leader. As I said a couple of chapters ago, having a loss leader is always going to be a winning strategy. But what should you use as a loss leader, and what do you do with it? What should you use to give potential subscribers that free first taste of what you have to offer, literarily speaking, and how do you get them to try it?
What I’m saying is: Let’s talk about cookies. (Finally.)
Cookies work. I’m not opposed to them; in fact, I believe very strongly that bribing people to join your email list is not only okay but a great way to list-build. However, bribing them with the wrong thing is an absolute disaster—and we see this a lot. I think, again, it comes from the mentality of “throw the widest net you possibly can and get everybody on the list because maybe somebody will buy something someday.” That’s panic. That’s operating from a place of fear, or a scarcity mindset (if you’ll forgive me getting all Tony Robbins on you for a moment). And that gets you the thing I talked about back in Onboarding Basics—a giant list full of people who don’t care about you and can’t be arsed to open your emails or click your links, all while Mailerlite or whoever is charging you every month for the privilege of having these deadbeats (who probably signed up because they saw something free and thought why not?) on your list.
If you want quality subscribers that like the sort of thing you write, and will probably like you, what you need to do is bribe them onto your list with a good cookie—something that’s aligned well with everything else that you write and aimed squarely at people who buy and read books, particularly your sort of books. And when you get those subscribers, you have to onboard them properly. I recommend that people do what I do; if someone comes to my list through a freebie, the first automation sequence I put them through doesn’t offer any more freebies—and it’s quite long, with periodic emails stretched over two months. Free-seekers seem to figure out that they’re not dealing with someone who’s going to give away everything she writes just to keep people on her list, and they tend to show themselves out by the fourth email.
So, if you have to tempt them with a good cookie, the natural question is What makes a good cookie? What do you give these new people that will impress them and make them want more? I’ve included some links that discuss this in the Helpful Links section, but it’s worth taking a few minutes to talk about what I’ve learned over the last few years.
For one thing, if you’re giving them something you’ve written, give them a complete experience. I see people offer a free sample or the first ten chapters, or things of that nature, and I think that’s a terrible idea. Don’t tease. Give them an entire story—a short story, novella, or entire novel—so they know you can not only write an intriguing beginning or sample, but that you can actually wrap up a story in a satisfying fashion. The length of that story is up to you, but I strongly believe it must be complete.
Some people say give subscribers a whole book—and if you have a lot of books, that’s a perfectly valid method. If you have a 5-book series, maybe it isn’t a huge financial hardship to give away Book 1 to get subscribers, especially if you tend to have good sell-through and you can count on people reading through the rest of the series, or your whole catalog. But there are definite drawbacks to this approach, not least of which is that giving Book 1 to your mailing list does nothing to help sales of Book 1 on the retailers, and if your Book 1 isn’t selling on the retailers (particularly on Amazon), its visibility will decline. It’s also worth mentioning that this makes your cookie worthless to those organic fans we talked about earlier, the ones who come to you from a back-of-book CTA. They’ve almost certainly read your Book 1, so why should they sign up for your list?
Some people give Book 2 away to people who sign up from the CTA at the back of Book 1, but I feel that has the same pitfalls as giving away Book 1—with the added issue that if Amazon, which is entirely algorithm-driven, sees that people buy your Book 1 but no one goes on to pick up your Book 2, how visible do you suppose that book is? (Spoiler: not very.) Again, Chris Fox and David Gaughran cover this in the books I recommended in Your Perfect Subscriber.
Some authors have their books enrolled in KDP Select, which means they aren’t allowed to make the ebooks available anywhere else, which would preclude them being able to use one of their books as a cookie. On the other hand, there are authors who could give their books away, but don’t want to give up that income (valid), or don’t want to give away an entire book because they don’t want to lessen the perceived value of their books (also valid). And some people simply don’t have enough books to make this a viable alternative.
Fortunately, there’s a much better alternative—at least in my opinion. Bookfunnel did a great series on options for reader magnets; rather than reinvent the wheel there, I’ll link to it in the Helpful Links section. But here are some real-life examples I’ve seen work well:
A prequel. One author I know has a five-book series available on Amazon, and it’s enrolled in KDP Select. His cookie is an exclusive novella that tells the story of how the villain of that series grew up and became the evil bastard we love to hate.
An epilogue or extended epilogue. This works especially well in romance, where readers never seem to be able to get enough of that happy ever after, but it really can be done in any genre. Revisit your characters a little (or a long) way in the future and write a few thousand words about what they’re up to. Readers who loved those characters will be thrilled to have the opportunity to check in on them.
A “sideways story.” Another author I know uses a short story that takes place alongside the main action of her novel, but is not part of the novel. It's something that happens "offstage," so to speak, between chapters, and the book doesn’t suffer for the absence of it. The CTA in the back of the book is “Would you like to hear what happened when X and Y did Z?” and the natural answer, for any reader who enjoyed the book, is Hell, yes!
The first episode of a serial story (if it can stand alone; remember we’re aiming for a complete experience here). One of my romance pen names does this, using the first episode of a billionaire serial. That episode, which does stand alone but hopefully leaves everyone wanting more, is not available by itself anywhere other than by joining my mailing list. The complete serial, in one volume, is sold on Amazon and other platforms (and so this first part is not subject to rules about exclusivity).
You can also use an unrelated short story or novella, but if you do, remember that you want to keep it aligned with the other things you write. So if you write Urban Fantasy, don’t use a romance novella (duh). But if you write three different kinds of romance—say military, sports, and billionaire—you might be able to use the same cookie across those subgenres.
And best of all? If your cookie is exclusive to your mailing list—if readers can’t get it any other way—you will get more signups than if a potential subscriber can get whatever it is somewhere else. I’ve seen several real-life examples of someone putting a cookie up for sale and watching newsletter signups drop dramatically.
Note: If your cookie would
spoil a book, put the offer for that cookie at the back of that book. If reading it out of order will be confusing, make sure the offer comes at a point that won’t deliver a confusing experience. For example, if one of your cookies is an extended epilogue, you don’t want to give that to people who have never heard of you. If it’s a sideways story, only offer it in the back of the book during which it took place offscreen. When deciding where and when to offer any specific cookie, ask yourself:
How does this lead into my catalog?
Will it entice people to read more?
Does it make sense out of context, or does it need to come after something else?
Will people be at risk of reading out of order something that should be read in order?
One thing that should factor heavily when you’re deciding what cookie to use (or write! Lots of my students end up writing new cookies once they understand what’s most effective) is whether it would appeal to readers who have never heard of you, or whether it will only appeal to people who have read some or all of your catalog. If it will appeal to anyone at all, it’s an excellent candidate for all kinds of promotions, bundles, and newsletter swaps.
And, lastly, when you’re coming up with ideas for cookies, consider things other than books. Fantasy authors might find that giving away maps works well. Thriller author Mark Dawson used to give away a fake intelligence dossier (heavily redacted, of course) on the main character of his flagship series. Or a writer of family sagas might include a genealogical tree.
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