In this week’s episode, Crys and JP talk about the different platforms they use to build their audience. From Facebook groups to newsletter campaigns, they discuss the pros and cons of each and what works for them.
Show Notes:
Substack: https://writeaway.substack.com/subscribe
Transcript:
JP: Hello, friends. This is episode number 27 of the Write Away Podcast, and it is January 21st as we are recording. I’m JP Rindfleisch with my cohost…
Crys: Crys Cain.
JP: Hello. How has your writing week been?
Crys: Writing is happening… writing is happening… and that is true. I have a book going live today and one thing our listeners might notice is that the date that you just said is much earlier than normal. We have implemented some changes with Write Away!
JP: You have to go up, otherwise if you go down, it sounds like bad news.
Crys: Write Away Podcast, now with 100% more goof!
The main changes we’ve made are, we’ve changed our recording schedule. We are now recording one week before release. Part of this is simply to give us more time to get things done with less running around rushy feelings. And part of it is that we have started a subscription on Substack, and the link will be in the notes below.
We’re still developing what all we’re going to do with Substack, but JP and I have been having a lot of fun with this. People who subscribe to Substack will get access to episodes two days before they release. They will also get our less focused-on-craft/business/success episodes. We’re not even really sure what all of our fun, extra episodes are going to be, but we have started a series that will go all year, and that is a Year of Tarot. Should I make that first episode free so people can access it and taste test it?
By the time you listen to this, it will be free. You can find it in the link below.
What we’re doing, in short, is we each pulled a year’s a spread–a card for each month and a card for the year. Every month, we’re going to talk about what our cards for the month are in review and going forward, what we think about them. We had a blast recording the first two episodes, and I’m really impatient to get to the next one, but I have to wait a whole month.
JP: Agreed. It was really fun talking about it because I think we also were talking about potential steps that we might take. It’s just helpful information, even just for fun, if you don’t believe in that stuff, but it’s still like actions we can take.
Crys: I work really well when I have some sort of external framework to force me into both reflection and forward-thinking, and it really is going to help me having this accountability with you, that we’re doing this episode every month. To be thinking on those things and to be reflecting on whatever thoughts the cards bring up, things that are in my life and I’m already thinking about, regardless of the cards. I think we’re going to just have a lot of fun with that.
We’re trying to keep those episodes really short so that they don’t take a lot of time out of your day. That’s difficult, because we like to talk a lot, but we’ve hovered around the 10-minute mark on both of those so far. So far so good.
JP: For Substack for our listeners, what does it mean when you subscribe? Do they have to pay…?
Crys: So those are the paid subscription benefits: early access and extra episodes, but everyone should go subscribe to us on Substack in my personal opinion, because we will also be sending out a weekly email, which will remind you that there’s a new episode of Podcast. If you do subscribe, we will be sharing what we’re currently reading or watching, just whatever we’re inputting and how it is applying to our business and our creativity.
We’ll also have all of the things that we think of the moment we stop the recording on the podcast, we will have those in the email. Additional bonus notes and thoughts of the things we wish we had said in the podcast.
The third thing will be more of a weekly update of what we’re doing in our business and how we’re moving forward. So far. This is subject to change. But that’s what we’ve come up with for our starter pack.
JP: Yes, indeed. I think it’ll be a fun little experiment. By doing this episode a week in advance, it gives us that time to build that newsletter and make some valuable content for our listeners. So I’m excited to see where it goes.
Crys: And that subscription with the newsletter is a hundred percent free.
How was your writing week, JP?
JP: Man. So it is 21st of January. This week has been distraction-zone central, but I have been able to get a few things done, which has been pleasant, so more or less just moving along, nothing major, crazy and exciting. Just moving along.
Crys: Excellent. Okay. The question that we have for each other this week is: how do I build an audience?
JP: Which is mostly my question to you, because I don’t know, but I am playing around with stuff and trying to figure that out.
Crys: Where are you at right now with everything as far as audience building?
JP: Nowhere, let’s just say nowhere. That’s probably the safest bet. If we want to go with the coauthor, trying to build between Abe and myself, he is more focused on like external audience. So people that are explicitly interested in dark urban fantasy, and I’ve just been really focused on building author relationships and author community. That’s where I’ve been focusing on.
I can’t say that I have a huge list because I don’t, but I do feel like I have a lot of that network connection that we can use potentially in the future.
Crys: Have you started your email service provider subscription at least?
JP: I have a MailChimp. Didn’t do anything with it… which I don’t feel terrible about, because I know a lot of other people are in the same boat. I would love to get something moving along, but it’s just not.
Crys: To be fair, I’m in the same place with my Crys Cain stuff, because I haven’t published anything under that name. So we will probably be on similar tracks on building up your name or your co-write name.
JP: So I guess my question to you is, where did you start when you wanted to build your audience?
Crys: I started very badly. And not as badly as some people we know who didn’t have a newsletter for the first year or two of publishing.
But when I published my first book, I didn’t expect it to do anything. So I just kinda threw it out there, and it sold really well in the first couple of days. No marketing, it just had the right metadata and the right genre at the right time. And so I very quickly got a MailChimp, put the sign up in the back. What I didn’t do in that book, that I did almost every book after that, was promise an extra scene if you signed up for my newsletter.
This is really effective in romance. I don’t know how effective it is for other genres to only offer an extra scene. I think some other genres would expect more of a full story. Like, they want more value to hand over their email address.
I’m trying really hard not to make a slutty romance joke here… not just handing out their email addresses to anybody. But…
Some people call it a cookie. Some people call it a bonus. Whatever you call it, that is probably the number one thing you can do to build an engaged newsletter.
Now, your newsletter is not necessarily your entire audience. It is one of the most invested ways to have an audience.
Having an audience is basically having people who listen to you. That can be anywhere. We harp on emails so much because it is the one way of accessing subscribers that we can control. With any of the social media networks, there is algorithm choices, most of them are moving towards ad-driven delivery, and it’s really difficult to actually reach the people who are interested in what you have to say, whereas email goes directly from you to them.
JP: I’ve taken the social media approach out of ease to build an audience, especially with the Write Away Podcast. More recently, I made an Instagram account, mostly for my author self, but I’m promoting the episodes as they come out. I’m focusing on popular hashtags with writers.
I’ve also noticed this doing merchandising with Red Bubble, focusing on the hashtags to promote that concept, as long as you hit the right hashtags it always upticks, which is a fantastic thing to see, especially when you’re trying to sell stuff.
One thing that I always keep in mind when doing any sort of social media is– if you’re not handing stuff out for free, so like our episodes that we post weekly, but if you’re constantly posting things that people have to pay for, they hate it so much. And I think that can be the same resonation that you would have with newsletters is, if your newsletters are constantly like, “buy this!” and you’re not feeding them these cookies or these little bits of information about your life, they don’t have that same grasp towards you as a person.
Crys: Yeah. And so there’s two separate questions that we could dig into.
One is how do you engage your existing audience? And one is how do you build your audience?
Building your audience is all about visibility. And I think a lot of us creatives in general, writers specifically, we do tend on the introvert side of things, and so we’re not particular fans of being visible.
This is a really hard thing to engage with us, but if you want to sell your books, you do have to be visible and you have to figure out in what ways you are willing to be visible. Not necessarily comfortable. Sometimes you have to do things that you’re uncomfortable with to grow.
Which of those do we want to delve into?
JP: Yeah, so, from what I gathered, what would be some good resources for people that are just starting out? Let’s start there.
Crys: Just starting out, building your audience. I think one of the first things that you can and should do is make friends with other authors.
One, that gives you access to a knowledge base. Two, that gives you access to opportunities once you do have books out. What we’re looking at here is not for using people, but for creating friends, true friends who want you to succeed. And so when your books are out, they will promote you, and you will return the favor in the future when you befriend new authors who you can promote. This is not a using scheme. This is just how people work and make friends. So be yourself and make friends, I think that would be step one. Making friends can be hard, but you gotta do it. It’s healthy anyways.
JP: I think I totally resonate with that because before mid-2019, when I went to my first writer event where I met other writers who were in the business, I had spent like five years alone, not really working with actual writers, not really talking with writers.
And I didn’t know what I was doing. I was just throwing stuff at the wall and hoping that something kind of worked and I can just attribute the last year and a half to this massive acceleration explicitly because I made friends with other writers and I figured out what they were doing.
I gave any advice that I could give just to contribute to that two way communication, but it was just the fact that I’ve built this community around me, just kind of expanded everything for me.
Crys: Absolutely. I think one of the things you need to keep in mind, especially as you make friends with people who are successful, is that however their way is, it’s not necessarily going to be your way. My co-writer is fabulous on social media. She loves engaging with the readers. They love engaging with her. And when I do it, I feel it’s very performative. I feel like I am trying to serve them what they want, but I don’t know what they want. A lot of the time, I feel like when I’m just putting my goofy stuff out there, which is the stuff I want to put out there that has nothing to do with my writing most of the time, then that doesn’t have the engagement. I’m also not consistent on social media. So there’s a problem. I do think social media is a skill that you can learn. I do think you should probably pick one form of social media, if it doesn’t drain your soul, and really learn how to make it work for you.
This is going to be trying things that you’re not comfortable with. It does mean, as you mentioned earlier, not just being like, Hey, I have things for sale. That’s not the kind of visibility we’re talking about. You’re a storyteller. When you are putting yourself out there online, you’re not telling a story about your characters necessarily, you’re telling a story about yourself. Everyone has a level at which they are comfortable presenting themselves. And you may be someone who is like, I don’t want to tell a story about myself at all. I want my work to stand on your own. That’s valid. You are going to have a little harder time selling your books, most likely. There are outlier, you’re just probably not one of them.
JP: I’ve noticed that too on Instagram, because I’m trying to build my own Instagram audience. So I’m looking at what the other authors are doing. And I noticed a couple of things, it was ways that certain authors reach out to their audience.
So for example, Lindsay Broker, is just this dragon person. Everyone kind of sends her dragon things. I think the most recent post I saw of her was an oven mitt with dragons on it. And that’s just how she reaches out to her audiences. Look at this funny thing that is my topic.
Mark Leslie Lefebvre the terrible dad joke, man. He just posts those all the time and they’re hilarious. But these people found their voice, something that they can share on a daily basis that keeps them relevant to their community, but doesn’t necessarily sell everything. Then every once in a while, they’re just kind of like, Hey, I have this new book, check it out.
Crys: I think Lindsay is actually an excellent example for this because she is very vocal on her podcast about not knowing how to do social media and not knowing how to reach her readers. The dragon thing is the thing that she points out. She knows they like dragons. She likes dragons. And so she leans on that.
She may not always be like super duper excited about whatever dragon thing she’s sharing, but she’s like, Hey, I do like this. I know my audience will like this, so I’m going to share it.
I think that a lot of us can resonate with how she presents herself or her struggles, her stated struggles. I think that’s the lesson we can pull from her example, if we’re really uncomfortable with being ourselves online, is to pick one thing that we like that ties into our books and kind of lean on that, make that the thing we always talk about when we’re not talking about our books. It could be you write Prepper, Post-Apoc, and you are building an off grid shipping container house in Costa Rica, just for example. No specific dreams here. And that’s the thing that you constantly talk about. You talk about your project, you talk about the things you’re doing, and these are things you’re probably going to talk about anyway. So find the thing that you’re going to talk about anyway that links between you and your audience. And you don’t have to find all the things, which I think is the key here, especially when you’re starting out.
If socializing with strangers is hard, it’s hard for me. Writers are some of the very few creatures that I can connect with the first time I meet them. The level of weirdness, the energy. I don’t know what it is. It’s just like we’re jigsaw, and we don’t necessarily fit, but we look good together when you just throw a bunch of writers in a room, a bunch of awkward puzzle pieces from five puzzles and somehow it works. Really strange analogy.
JP: Are there any tools you use that you automate with, or how do you schedule?
Crys: There are things I attempt. For Romance, for my newsletter, I actually don’t write it. Once I got to a point where I could afford it, I hired my VA to write it, and she is someone I know in real life. So my pattern for my newsletter, since I’m not really interested in being like, “Oh my gosh, here’s a picture of a hot guy, isn’t he dreamy?” That doesn’t do it for me. I have no desire to go looking for hot guy pictures on the internet. And I would just end up picking someone I think people would think he’s hot and then I’d share that. And I wouldn’t actually have a clue whether it was useful or not.
I mean, honestly it would just end up Jason Mamoa all the time, because objectively I know most people like this man, so that’s not useful. But Romance readers also love stories about kids, particularly my romance readers. And so she will share a story about Smalls that she has heard from either me or my nanny and share whatever else book world news I have, because interacting with strangers is hard for me. You and I have started using Pinterest for this podcast, and Canva is a lifesaver. Canva lets us create the images and schedule them all in one go. It has all the templates. It’s just magic.
I held off on Canva for so long because I bought a lifetime subscription to this app called Stensul from AppSumo. And I was like, well, I don’t have to pay monthly for this, but the scheduling bit on Canva, that’s what made me go for Canva Pro. I haven’t explored it’s scheduling outside of Pinterest, but that is something I do plan on exploring.
I did TikTok solidly for about two weeks, and I really do want to get into a better schedule with TikTok, but what I was doing was I was spending for the two weeks I did it Monday afternoons I would record. And then I’d push it. I think that I probably just need to get better about using it informally and just be like, Oh, I’m going to do this quick thing right here. Be less fancy about it. Be super simple.
It really does come down to story and honing your story. And just like when you’re writing books, you have to accept that you’re gonna suck at it when you first start. You just have to start.
JP: I really like, and I want to reiterate the whole Canva thing because I started to use it shortly after you. And it is fantastic. It’s so easy. So I’ve been doing it to kind of make little promos for the show on Instagram, and then I’m sharing it elsewhere. And you can just copy the templates that you made and pop it over to another one and just populate images. The entire template process is just super fast, super easy.
And so it takes away from that dread of having to create this thing that you’re trying to promote, so that you can instead focus on the post in between, where you sell yourself. I’m still playing with that piece of it, but it was really nice to have Canva as that base pillar to start off on.
Crys: Yeah, and Pinterest is its own beast and it works in such a different way, and it’s not really social media. It’s a search engine. And I think that’s easier for me to engage with, because I’m not thinking about people who are following me looking at it. I’m thinking about who is looking for answers and how can I give them answers. Which maybe ought to be a similar way to how I approach other social media.
Realization light bulb. I don’t know, still working on that.
JP: Right. So we just talked about a ton of different things to do, and I can say for myself, it sounds extremely overwhelming. Especially when we talk about how writing is one of the more important things to do when you’re just starting out.
How much time would you recommend someone actually allocates to this kind of audience building? Either percentage or time.
Crys: It depends on your personality. If it is something that is extremely draining for you or a time suck in a non-productive way, then limit yourself. Whether it is Pomodoros, whether it’s 10 minutes a day, whether it’s once a week, figure out what your comfort level is.
If you’re a schedule person, plug it into your schedule. But if you’re somebody for who it’s an energy generative thing, as long as it’s not interrupting your creation time, the world is your oyster. I think the thing you really need to think of, we’ve danced between newsletter is your audience, and social media is your audience, and with social media particularly, the thing you need to seek out, is there a way to do this that I get really excited about?
And it may not be social media. It may be a Podcast. You may want to do a Podcast instead of a direct email newsletter, because you much prefer talking to people. Or it might be TikTok or YouTube because you prefer doing video where people can see your face. Find the way that you get excited about sharing things with people.
I know it’s a lot. This podcast got a lot easier when I invited you onto it because then I could have a conversation. And I love having conversations, as everyone who has me on WhatsApp knows. I talk a lot.
JP: I think for me, since I get very distracted by things, shiny objects. I have to schedule this. I have to time block it. I’m still trying to figure that piece out, but I think that if I were to give it a percentage for myself, it would probably be like, I should be spending 20% or less on this specific audience building.
So that’s, I think, the path that I’m going to move forward once I figure out time blocking.
Crys: Yeah. And I would say for people who like me, who find audience building really difficult, what you need to focus on, number one, is the newsletter. I mean, that is why we harp on that. That is the thing you control and it gives you direct access. It gives you the most bang for your buck. The way to do that is by creating content, AKA books for most of our listeners, and not just books, but related material that you link to in the back of your books.
There are a lot of things you can do, and we’ve talked about several different ways that you can maximize that. I don’t know if we talked much about book promos or group promos, where you have sales or freebies, and a lot of people will argue that those don’t convert. Well, I’d say it depends entirely on your genre. It converts pretty well for romance. But try everything, absolutely, at some point, not all at once.
JP: I think I would like maybe another episode on this, maybe in the future, to just say what has happened since this discussion because I have some ideas on what I can do moving forward and I’m really interested in what results I might get out of it. So I think it would be fun to talk back on this later on and say what we implemented, or what I implemented, and then go from there.
Crys: Yeah, this isn’t going to feel useful to a lot of people, but just be interesting. Number one, most of us are interesting to other people because we’re writing a book. And yes, most of us will get flack from people before we actually write a book, saying, “Oh, you think you’re special? You think you can write a book?” because they think it’s some magical thing.
It is. Creation is always magical, but it’s also extremely feasible to do this thing. And if you have the guts and the determination and you do it, you’re all of a sudden, at least to me, 10 times more interesting than most of humanity.
Of course writing a book, isn’t the only interesting thing about you, and that’s where we talked about finding that crossover between what you are interested in and what your audience is interested in and leaning on that. And start small. Don’t get overwhelmed. Yeah, I think we definitely need to have a mid to higher level conversation on this at some point. I’m really interested to see what I do differently as I build up other audiences that are not my romance audience, because building a romance audience in my particular, very small niche felt like easy mode. I do think it’s easy mode. Yes, I worked my ass off to have success in this genre, but I also think that compared to other genres, it was easy mode.
I think I still have a lot to learn because I haven’t tried it on a harder mode. Gaming analogies everywhere.
JP: I just need to bunker down and do it and not just talk about it.
Crys: What should be our question for our listeners?
JP: I think it should be, how have you built your audience? Or if you haven’t built an audience yet, how do you plan on building your audience?
Crys: Excellent. I’ll see you next week.
JP: See ya.
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