Newsletter Ninja 2: If You Give a Reader a Cookie: Supercharge Your Author Mailing List With the Perfect Reader Magnet by Labrecque Tammi L

Author:Labrecque, Tammi L.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Newsletter Ninja
Published: 2022-02-09T00:00:00+00:00

6 - DOS AND DON'TS

Ugh, my least favorite — chapters that are bossy.

So much of what we do in this space really comes down to doing what’s right for you specifically, meaning a lot of times there isn’t any “right way.” Mostly I choose to impart information and make suggestions (stuff like “Consider this,” and “if A, then it would seem to follow that B,” and “a lot of authors do Y, but it’s also possible to do Z”).

But here, I’m just gonna give you a list of Dos and Don’ts. Please know that I’m pretty firm on them, or I would have sprinkled them in amongst the other chapters, with all kinds of softening language about how I’m not the boss of you.

In this chapter, the role of The Boss of You will be played by me. I’ve come to these conclusions over a lot of testing and data collecting, so don’t just blow them off.

DO

Make your cookie exclusive. If your cookie is available anywhere else on the internet, even if it costs money there and it’s free on your mailing list, your signups will go down. I think there are a few reasons, and not all of them are reluctance to turn over an email address (for example, I think the convenience of knowing you’ll have it in your Amazon library is a factor for some people), but whatever the reasons, your signups will go down.

Remember that cookies don’t have to be long. My pen names’ cookies range from 5k to 12K, and no one has ever complained about any of them.

But do write different lengths and types of cookies. Write short cookies and long cookies. Write one magnet that can serve all three books in a trilogy, and write one magnet for every book in your other trilogy. Experiment and test and record the data, so you know what works best for the list you’re trying to build.

Instead of writing a story, consider creating things that are adjacent or supplemental to the story. There is a small, genre-dependent demand for book-adjacent items like maps (fantasy readers love a good map), family trees (royal stories and family sagas), and recipes (a bakery cozy). Again, these are only going to really appeal to existing readers, but they make great cookies for the back of the corresponding book and for your current subscribers. As time permits, see if you can come up with some stuff like that.

Think about audio. This one’s a bit outside the box, because not a lot of people are doing it — but that’s one of the things that can make a cookie enticing! As an example, one of the cookies linked in the Appendix to this book is an audio version of a prequel story; it’s around 12K words and runs just over an hour, which made it pretty inexpensive to produce. As a bonus, everyone who downloads it gets tagged in the author’s EMS as an audio listener, which helps with targeting when audio releases for the series books are released.

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