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Hey,

Last week we spoke about how you can Choose Your Own Bookselling Adventure - not just how to get started (or to level up), but how to enjoy the journey too.

Today we are returning to the topic of email, and we are going to specifically look at that first stage in the Subscriber Journey I spoke about a couple of weeks ago: Baiting The Trap.

As I said then, you need an enticing piece of reader-cheese to encourage all your future superfans to sign up to your list.

It's not compulsory, of course, you can operate a newsletter without offering a freebie to your audience. However, you will see a much more muted uptake. Free offers really do work, and the right free offer can work very well indeed.

Piping Hot Reader Magnet

Assuming you have done your job with the book itself, and put all those pesky words in the right order, your readers should be Officially Into You.

This makes it the perfect time to ask them for something, such as to purchase Book 2, or to sign up to your list. Offering them a freebie can really seal the deal, and these are commonly referred to as reader magnets as a result.

A reader magnet can take many forms:

• An entire book
• A short story
• Deleted scenes
• An extended epilogue.
• Various ephemera (like everything from FBI case files to wedding inventions or interstellar spaceship schematics or maps of your cursed Orc kingdom).

Some of those things work better with others - and we'll get into specifics in a moment, but generally speaking the best reader magnets have two qualities: they are enticing, and they are exclusive.

Many reader magnets fail at one of those and some even fail at both. (But it's an easy thing to mess up, and I did it myself for years so don't take that personally!)

Lets zoom in on what the above means, and how all that looks from the perspective of your Ideal Reader. And then we'll look at some next level stuff for the experienced cats too.

Can we make this exclusive?

The exclusive bit is the most straightforward part of the equation but most of us (myself included) mess this up when starting out simply because we don't have a lot of spare stories at that point in our career.

Beginners often make the mistake of giving away a book that they have for sale on Amazon, as a result, which isn't ideal for several reasons.

Most importantly, making your reader magnet exclusive to newsletter subscribers makes it special. It also gives you a free and powerful marketing angle (“a book you can’t get anywhere else”) and this will really help drive sign-ups. That's not the only reason why your reader magnet should be exclusive to your mailing list, but that should be enough to sway you.

Of course, that gives beginners a new problem: what to give away. But we'll get to that.

Experienced authors might disagree here. I see some of them saying something like "Well, I'm actually giving away a starter library - which is the first book of each of my three different series, and that would cost readers $15 to buy on Amazon, so I think that's a pretty cool gift and they seem to like it."

It's not a bad counterpoint and if doing something like that is working for you... fine. But I personally think one really enticing reader magnet is more powerful than just throwing books at them, especially if they are available everywhere.

So let's explore what that might look like.

Could I be any more enticed?

There's often an obvious difference between a marketing campaign designed by someone with professional experience and someone who is basically self-taught. And that's focus.

Professional marketing campaigns will tend to have a singular focus - and by that I mean that the messaging will generally focus on one key benefit for the purchaser.

For example, if Spotify was running a marketing campaign it might focus their messaging around "Listen to all your favorite music for just $9.99 a month."

The marketing images wouldn't necessarily mention all the exclusive podcasts you can listen to now, or the nifty interoperability tech around device switching, or the social aspects like how you can access your friends' playlists.

The campaign will be focused. The specific focus in the particular ad might change depending on who exactly they are targeting, but you get the point.

It's a mistake I often see authors making with their BookBub or Facebook ad images - they have a price offer, a tagline, a review quote, a comparison with a more famous author - and the reader's attention is just dragged from one thing to another without anything really sticking the landing.

A more effective ad image will probably be more focused, with just one or two of those elements (or designed cleverly so that one or possibly two of those elements is the chief focus, drawing the eye first).

So it goes with reader magnets - in my opinion. Feel free to differ if you like, and I'm sure some of the more established authors will do just that, but my view is that it's better to have one totally awesome thing and focus on that... rather than present three things to the reader - one or two of which they may feel tepid about.

It just dilutes the overall impact of what you're doing.

Instead, I suggest putting your strongest foot forward, focusing your offer to readers around the most enticing possible reader magnet, and really selling it to them (and the idea of signing up to your mailing list).

And then if you have one or two more freebies you want to give them anyway... you can still do that! Dole them out later in your welcome sequence, where they become pleasant surprises, rather than something potentially diluting your primary, killer offer.

What do readers really want?

Books! Readers love books. You don't need to give readers a full-length book necessarily, but as long as it is some kind of complete story, that should do the job. A short story is fine. A novella is great. A full book is really great. But any of those will do.

You don't need to spend big on a custom cover for your reader magnet - this is one place where it can be wise to cut some corners... to some extent; it still needs to look good. But you can get quality pre-mades at places like GoOnWrite.com for as little as $15, and there are plenty more such sites too. Present the book as well as you can within your means.

A story connected to your main hero, world, or series often works best. A story which is completely unconnected to any of your other books or characters or series is often less effective. And something that is off-genre, or written in a very different style, or otherwise not a good example of your oeuvre probably shouldn't be used for a reader magnet at all.

To put it another way, if it's not giving readers a taste of other things you have on sale, what's the point? You're just hooking them on the wrong snuff.

You might need to write something fresh to really tick those boxes, but remember it can be short! Just make sure it's also complete. Sample chapters or previews or something like that can annoy more readers than they excite; it really does feel like a bait-and-switch to some.

To get your head around what you need to do, put yourself in the shoes of your Ideal Reader again. Think about the different ways she could potentially encounter your reader magnet.

For example, some readers might encounter your mailing list sign-up request - and your hot new reader magnet - at the back of your books, having just finished your story, having fallen head over heels for your winsome heroine or your salty prose.

However also remember that other readers might see your reader magnet before finishing one of your stories - before even starting one of them in some cases.

Cleverly designing your reader magnet so that it equally appeals to fans and new readers can be hugely beneficial.

Now, this might mean nixing some ideas you have which will only appeal to existing fans. Don't necessarily toss those away, though; you might have use for them later. More experienced authors will sometimes have more than one reader magnet, and can change what they are pushing to whom depending on where readers are in their journey.

In other words, Bestselling Brenda might have one magnet on her website for totally new readers, and this might be what she also pushes in Facebook Ads. But then she will have another reader magnet which is totally fan-service, and that's what she pushes at the back of her books.

Both pathways lead to the same mailing list, they just dangle a different freebie to entice readers.

Non-fiction authors can use all these tactics too, by the way, and can really go to town with different magnets for different audiences, and non-book magnets as well.

But what about non-book magnets for fiction authors? FBI case files and starship schematics and wedding invitations and all that stuff are cool, and reader-me adores them, honestly. But I think those appeal more to existing fans, and have a lot less appeal for new-to-you readers.

Have you ever watched the extras on DVD before watching the movie? Probably not.

Again, these aren't wasted if you already have them, or dearly want to make them. That can be a lot of fun! And any "spare" reader magnets like that can also be given out later in the welcome sequence also, or held back for re-engaging readers later on - but we'll talk about that in a future email.

Dave

P.S. Writing music this week is XTC with Making Plans For Nigel.