This month, Alicia and Valerie join Crys and JP for another book club, this time reading Newsletter Ninja 2 by Tammi Labrecque. They discuss hot takes, useful advice, and how they will incorporate this book’s lessons into their writing craft.
Question of the week: Have you written a reader magnet or a cookie? And what has been your experience? Share your answer here.
Show Notes
Newsletter Ninja 2 by Tammi Labrecque
Transcript
Crys: Hello friends, and welcome to the Write Away Podcast. It is Tuesday, August 9th, 2022, as we’re recording. And this is our book club episode. We read Newsletter Ninja 2 by Tammi Labrecque this month.
And before we get into talking about this book, I wanted to let you all know that this is gonna be our last book club episode for a little bit. JP and I are doing some rearranging as we’re getting to the end of our Major Arcana with the tarot episodes and figuring out what comes next. And part of that is taking your break from book club. One of the things that has come up is that reading a book a month is a little intense for a lot of us with all of our other responsibilities. So we’re gonna be figuring out how is best to approach it moving forward.
But with us today, I of course have my lovely cohost…
JP: JP Rindfleisch.
Crys: And…
Alicia: Alicia McCalla.
Valerie: And Valerie Ihsan.
Crys: This book, it is not necessary– I think we said this when we’ve talked about this before– it’s not necessary to have read Newsletter Ninja 1, because Tammi is diving deep into a very specific topic of reader magnets. And anything that needed back up from the first book she did cover, I think, in this book pretty thoroughly.
Here’s the blurb, here’s the blurb. So reader magnets are things that you write to get people onto your newsletter list. I will say that Tammi uses slightly different terminology than I use. She uses the words reader magnet and cookie interchangeably to refer to anything you use to get people on your mailer list. I use the word reader magnet specifically to refer to people who’ve never read you before, like that you’re hitting a cold list with, and it’s something that just covers that. And cookie, as the thing you give people who read to the end of your book and then want an extra scene. I use them slightly differently. She does talk about those too, but I just wanted to set that out there in front as we get started in this conversation, cuz I will use them slightly differently than how she used them as we talk.
So first things first, have y’all written reader magnets or cookies before for your writing, for your books?
Valerie: Yes. Although after reading this book, I realize it won’t work for what I want it to do. Damn it.
Crys: Talk more about that.
Valerie: I got this idea from going to the 20 books to 50 K conference back in 2019, and it was talking about using a second epilogue at the end of the book. Yay, you like this book, so if you wanna hear more then sign up on the mailing list. So I was thinking that, so I wrote one of those. So I was thinking that I could still use that as just the generic, you know, you land on my website, ‘oh, I’ve never heard of you before, let me try this.’
It’s kind of a standalone, but it’s not really cuz there’s spoilers in it. That was the thing, I had neglected to recognize that there was a fairly significant spoiler. I’m the author, so I figured like everyone’s gonna know this anyway when they pick up the book, but probably not. So I’m gonna have to write another one. I’ll still use that as one of them, but the one like on the face of the front page of my website, I’m gonna have to write something different. And I don’t know what that’s gonna be, and I’m really mad.
Crys: Yeah. Just to clarify if anyone was a little confused with what Valerie’s referencing there, is that Tammi goes into detail about what makes a good reader magnet for different audiences. And the two audiences are those people who may have never read your book before or read anything by you, and those who have just finished your book and want something extra.
So that epilogue, super great for people who have just finished your book, not super great to give to people who’ve never read you before.
Alicia: Yeah, I found like when I read Tammi’s book, first of all, I love Tammi. She’s always one of my favorite people. She’s so cool. But second, I found that I got a huge download of information from reader magnet, and I feel like I had taken one of Tammi’s classes.
And I think I told her before, Tammi, I would love for you to write something about reader magnets, because really there’s not much comprehensive out there to explain like the different types of reader magnets that you can have, or really what a reader magnet is. So I like what Crys, what you were saying, when you have one side is the cookie for somebody who’s never come, like that epilogue, and the other side is kind of like, um, maybe you won’t call it a loss leader.
But I feel like reader magnets in general are one marketing tactic, but underneath that marketing tactic, you could have 10 different ways to get to it. So you can have it for your onboard, or for social media sharing, or for the back of a book, or ads, or swapping. I think what Tammi did was open it up so that you could see all these different ways that you can use what you call a reader magnet. And it doesn’t always have to be story. It could be a map, it could be a character profile. So I think she made it fairly broad so that you could see the total range of how you could get people into your ecosystem. But you do have to think about where they’re coming from.
Crys: Mm-hmm
JP: Yeah. With Abe and my series, when we were writing book one, we wanted a character who was Impacted by an event that happened prior to the events of the book. And we don’t really touch on the subject, but it’s something that gravely impacts his character and his personality. And we decided that we wanted to write the short story of what happened prior to those events, and we turned that into the reader magnet.
Both function, where one could read book one and then go and read this short story, or they can read the short story and it leads up into book one. But they’re like their two separate bits of story. And we used that reader magnet in book funnel, and we ended up getting a good handful of people that would subscribe, and then we had them on our mailing list and we were able to promote book one which led to a pretty good launch, in my opinion.
It’s really nice for what we are doing because we are creating so many little pieces that we can expand on, from entire standalone trilogies and other series to these little short stories that we can kinda give along the way to readers that will bring them in.
Crys: Yeah, I’ve almost exclusively written cookies. Specifically meaning like the extended epilogues or short stories for people who’ve already read my books. And it’s definitely been one of the best ways to grow my mailing list. It was really useful when I got started. And often in my romances it would be like an extra sex scene, but if not always, sometimes it was just playing off of a teasing bit that the characters had in the story or a promise that didn’t get fulfilled in the book. Like something that wasn’t important to the story, but that I was able to bring out in a short story.
But I’ve just signed up to write a novella next year that needs to be exclusive to the promotion for three months. And so that needs to be like 15 to 40 K. And so I will probably write something that can be considered that loss leader, that reader magnet. And also, I don’t know if I’ll tie it into any existing series. That would be smart. I’ll have to dig and see if I can find a story that fits with that, but it will definitely work just to get people on my mailing list who have not encountered me before and keeps in tone with the work I’ve already written.
Valerie: So I’ve got a question. Tammi said that you had to use a magnet that was indicative of your work. That sounds pretty common sense and that’s pretty obvious. For the novel that I wrote, which evidently i s on my website right now to download as the loss leader, I just put my novel up there. But I don’t like that, I wanna do something else.
So in the novel or in my mailing list, I polled my readers and said what other story, if I’m gonna pull something out and do a little short story or something, who do you wanna hear about? And they chose an ancestor that visits the main character in dreams that is like not of this century. So that doesn’t sound like a very good loss leader to me because it would be historical fiction, which I don’t currently write. I’m not opposed to doing that the future, but that’s not my repertoire right now.
So even though it’s something my readers have asked for, I feel like not doing it because it doesn’t sound like it would be a good loss leader or representative of my work. What do you think about that?
Alicia: Sounds like you have two different audiences because those people have already read and so they’re looking for more backstory. I think that’s what Tammi’s points were really about.
Valerie: Yeah, I see what you’re saying. This would be more of a cookie thing. So hey, I don’t write historical fiction, but since you asked for it, I like you, I’ll write it for you.
Alicia: That might be a good thing to turn into those super fans, cuz I feel like she mentioned some things about how do you create your super fans. But it might, it very well may not be something for a person who’s, like what Crys was saying, is a cold lead. That might need to be something different. She did mention a list of things like a villain prequel might be something, side quests of a character, other kinds of prequels.
Valerie: I like her list.
Alicia: Yeah.
Valerie: I’ll pour over that. I think I’ll probably do one of those side quests, like it was just passing mentioned in the novel, so I’ll take that and write that scene. Maybe that’s an idea.
Alicia: Yeah.
JP: I like too, when you’re talking about the list that she provided, she mentioned that there are some things that are genre specific. So when you talk about like epic fantasy, usually at the end of an epic fantasy, everything is done. Like the quest is over and the person’s a king or whatever, the world is all good. And so is there really room for an epilogue as a cookie, as opposed to something that may happen earlier, like a villain backstory?
And then I think she also had 14 things that romance could have. I really like that. And I really like the idea of using her ideas and then diving into, for me, it would be urban fantasy and really picking out like, what are those ideal stories for an urban fantasy reader?
Alicia: Yeah. I was excited about that too, JP, because I felt like, so I literally separate out her list from those things and then I put the romance things. Some of her romance things are actually fairly interesting since I’m considering writing romance right now. But I do feel like there’s a big difference because do you really need a villain prequel for a romance? Probably not. But she’s, you know, the wedding or the commitment ceremony might be cool. There’s all kinds of things that she gave for romance reader magnet ideas that were exciting to me.
JP: Definitely.
Crys: Yeah, it’s always easy to take a side character in romance and either give them an entire novel or a short story. One of the things that I found writing a long running series is you had to be extremely careful introducing any intriguing characters in a romance because if they are single, their readers will want their story.
So you either have to make them very happily partnered up or like somehow take them off the table romantically somehow, if you don’t wanna write their story. Otherwise you have a million stories you can, and readers want you to, write.
Alicia: One of the things that I was fascinated, I’m looking at my notes through the book, and I put a big note by she said, “don’t build your list with reader magnets that have broad appeal, build your list with reader magnets that appeal to readers who like the sort of thing that you write.”
And I feel like we all joined those cross promotions for the big things, and it feels like Tammi was advocating don’t just join the urban fantasy, that’s cool, but maybe get even more specific with what it is. Maybe it’s an urban fantasy with a female lead or something that would bring, like using your reader magnet to bring in the right kind of person that’s exactly right for you. And try not to murk up your waters with being a part of these huge cross promotions where you just may not see a cross section of what you exactly need for your list.
JP: I actually see that in two directions. One being what you’re saying, where you don’t wanna go too broad. So for example, what we wrote was a very dark urban fantasy, and we use like the Kabbala as a magic system. In our world, there are other magic systems, but would we wanna reflect those or would we wanna keep it as close as we could to the main story? Which we did.
And with it being a dark story, then it’s do you want to reach a broad audience who might just grab it up and join your newsletter and basically cloud your email list, but they’re not gonna actually pick up the full story because it’s something they’re not interested in.
So it’s those two aspects of that broad audience, but also where are you focusing in your story so that you can hit almost like a micro version of the beats of your main story so that people understand your flow and the tone of your book.
Crys: But I will say that I do agree with her with that when you start out, you may have to join broader promotions to make the connections with the other authors who are going to be the ones creating the more niche promotions and inviting you to it. You have to get your work known to other writers like you. And a lot of the way you do that is through joining promotions until you build your reputation in your author groups.
JP: Definitely agree.
Valerie: Did you wanna share what Lon said? Cuz he read the book too. He just couldn’t be here today. Did you see his?
Crys: I missed it.
Valerie: He said he loved the book, it was great advice. And he is retooling what he gives out as a cookie, as a result of reading the book.
Crys: Excellent.
JP: As Lon usually is the curmudgeon of our club, that was high praise.
Crys: And it’s gonna require the slightest hint of plotting in that you have to have a goal for this story. hopefully he doesn’t listen to this and then gets a block about the plotting aspect.
JP: At least he doesn’t have to talk about theme. We’re good there.
Crys: As a present, we should read through all of his books and then tell him what the theme is on every book, make it into a pretty poster.
Alicia: I’m sure he would appreciate that.
Crys: Oh, he’d be so joyful. He’d probably burn it in effigy.
Valerie: I really like Alicia’s idea of printing out the list and then going through and figure out how is this gonna relate to my genre? And JP said the same thing about urban fantasy. I write women’s fiction and memoir, so it’s a little harder, but maybe not. I don’t know. I’ll just go through the list again and pull out the ones that make sense.
Crys: I think memoirs actually quite easy because literally any article that you could write–
Valerie: That’s true.
Crys: To a publication is a loss leader. Cuz some memoirs are essays gathered up together in some kind of connected format. And you could just write another one, that’s the loss leader. So memoir seems to be like one of the ones most to that.
Valerie: An essay would too. Yeah. But how, but then you have to come up with, if you write two different genres and you have got one website, like you’ll have to put both of them up.
Crys: This takes us on a side trail that covers some of the stuff that was in Newsletter Ninja 1a bit more. And that is that different mailing service providers, newsletter providers, give you different tools. And so I personally, I intend when I start my new newsletter up, plunking down the money for active campaign, because it’s one of the ones that allows you extremely niche targeting. You can tag your users, anytime they click a link you can add a tag to them.
So if you have a mailing list and you just send out general announcements to the whole list and say, Hey I just wanted to let you all know, I have a new book out, it’s memoir. And then you go into your thing. Anyone who clicks on any of the links in there, you can tag as a memoir reader. And then the next time you go to launch a memoir, you could send it only to the memoir readers first to get the Amazon algorithm machine working for you. And then you could send it to the entire list as a whole and scoop up any of the remainder memoir readers and tag them with memoir.
So you can maintain one list, but you’d still be writing two different reader magnets, for sure. Because you’re drawing people to two different lists or two different genres. But as far as like the technical, like organization of that, I don’t think it’s that hard if you can use a tool that allows you to niche like that. A lot of people don’t have the money or don’t want to put the money down on using a more expensive tool that allows you to do that. And that’s fair. Some people make up with that and they run two separate lists. That’s a lot, I think, personally.
Valerie: I use convert kit and you can segment your list and in convert kit or add those tags to it when they click on the links, just like you said. So that’s what I use, and that’s 30 bucks a month, I think.
Crys: Yeah. Active campaign is I think quite similar to convert kit and they were my two main competitors. But active campaign I think has the edge when you’re doing direct sales with a website, which is where I’m going long term.
Alicia: Yes. And I’m using Amazon SES. So I pay a whopping 14 cents a month.
Crys: That’s what I’m currently using for my romance.
Alicia: But you can’t do a lot of tagging, right?
Crys: Well, it depends. It depends on what your front-end solution is. So my front-end solution is Sendy. I have it installed on my site and it uses Amazon SES to send the emails. So Sendy was like, I don’t know, 60 or 70 bucks one time purchase.
And then every month I’m spending less than $2 to send out multiple emails to my people.
Valerie: Nice
Crys: Yeah, it’s great. If you’re cheap and you have someone with little technical knowhow or you have little technical knowhow, it’s great. But you do lose a lot of the fancies that are like built in beautiful landing pages for your signups, connection with book funnel.
Like I have to manually bring my people over from book funnel for that list.
Alicia: By the way, my email is back working again. So everything is sending no, no spamming for me, which
Crys: Yeah. And that’s one of the other negatives about using that is if something technically goes wrong you’ve gotta figure it out or hire somebody to figure it out. So that’s been the down. That’s like straying off topic from the reader, magnets, but still in the newsletter topic.
Alicia: so I was trying to get us back on track. yeah, I do have notes from the Newsletter Ninja, if you want me, just what I took away from it. Like some questions that she brought to mind. So when you’re creating your reader magnet, do you consider your strategy and your tactics? What will work for your overall goals? How you will be using this? I like this one. How will you measure the success? Cause I think that’s really important. And that all kinds of tactics can be used, but your tactics need to be reflective of whatever your big strategy is for it.
So we talked about book funnels, story origin, what are you in? Are you doing it for cross promotion? Are you doing it for swapping? And just make sure like whatever you’re choosing to do, that you have a strategy for that, or you have A threshold that you’re trying to reach with that reader magnet.
Crys: Yeah, cuz so let’s talk about what some strategies would be in promoting a reader magnet, cold lists, like doing swaps or group promotions. One of your strategies could be, I am trying to get more people onto my mailing list. And so then your tactic is either using book funnel and the promotion or using story origin promotions there, those are different tactics. And then your successes, how many people did this add to my mailing list?
But your goal could be, I want to connect with other authors who are going to be doing more niche promotions. And then your strategies or your strategies remain the same, whether you’re using book funnel and putting these out there, you’re getting your name into your community. But your goal or your measurement, your success measurement, is completely different. It’s not how many people did I add to my mailing list though? You’re probably measuring that anyway, but how many authors have I pinpointed who I think write pretty similar stuff to me that we could start talking about specific promotions?
Alicia: Yeah, those are some intangible things that I think maybe people don’t think about. As well as your core audience that you’re looking for. Because if you’re really going towards, I wanna connect with other author who have say bigger list, and I know that my stories fit for that particular author’s list, that’s a whole different mindset than say you’re trying to create your super fans by either offering opportunities for them to beta read something that you have, or giving them that exciting epilogue or story that they all wanna know about that fits in.
I think that’s the main thing that I got from looking at what Tammi was saying is that, I feel like there’s this one idea when you say reader magnets and that’s big and monolithic, maybe, but actually, no, it’s this one. It’s really compartmentalized and zeroing in on like, why are you doing it? That’s really key or critical.
Crys: any other further thoughts that anybody wanted to cover before we wrap up?
Valerie: No just that I’m gonna be writing a lot of cookies.
JP: Yeah.
Valerie: and magnets.
JP: I Thought this reminded me a ton of You’re Gonna Need a Bigger Story. Obviously, this is very honed in on reader magnets and cookies, but I think that the two interplay really well together on expanding your story to reach an audience. So I think for those people that have read it and want that, I don’t know what it is, but like kickstart or reminder, this is a good one to read to just let the gears start going again.
Crys: For sure.
Alicia: Yeah, for me, it’s exciting because I immediately went to Monica Leonelle’s books on that cross promotion. And I know Crys, and I always talk about direct sale, so I was really thinking about my man, how do I make that cool product funnel to get people in? And I start looking at different ways as direct sell that I could create a reader magnet.
So for me, that could be like a warrior woman sticker with every merch purchase. It’s broadened my idea of how I could build my platform even more in depth.
Crys: My question for our listeners is: have you written a reader magnet or a cookie? And what has been your experience?
Thank you so much for joining us each and every week. If you would like early access to our episodes and for our special business episodes that JP and I record every week except book club week, you can join us over at patreon.com/writeawaypodcast. Thank you everybody for joining us this week.
Valerie: Bye.
JP: See you later.
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