Revamp Your Author Platform
By: Dale E. Lehman
Tags: Marketing, 202done, Promotion, Writing, Email Marketing Tips

202Done

Revamp Your Author Platform

Photo by Dariusz Sankowski on Unsplash

When 2020 began, I set for myself the goal of revamping my languishing author platform. I had several problems. My email list was stuck at about 120 subscribers, most of whom never opened a newsletter. Worse, I hardly ever sent a newsletter. My website featured a stale blog, and my social media accounts fared little better. In many ways, I may as well not have had these tools.

Not being a marketing genius, I signed up for a free email marketing course. I then formulated a simple plan based on what I learned and, early in January, began to execute it. Along the way, I took some liberties and made adjustments. I even discovered a powerful tool that wasn’t covered in the course. I’ll share that with you in a moment. But first, let’s walk step-by-step through my revamp.

Create a reader magnet

A reader magnet is a freebie, a giveaway offered to potential readers in exchange for a valuable commodity: their email address. Your magnet can be a book, a short story, a report, or merchandise such as a set of bookmarks. Many authors bundle several items into their magnets.

Value is key to a reader magnet. Nobody will give you their email address just because you ask nicely. Between marketing messages, notifications, and the ever-present spam, everyone receives far more email than they like. But offer something of value for zero cost to the right audience, and people will gladly sign up. Some authors give away as many as five books in their reader magnets. That kind of offer can be hard to resist!

Included in a reader magnet is the reason you want that email address: your newsletter. Books, stories, and merchandise are one-time inducements, but your newsletter is your ongoing connection with your readers. Through it you offer them books, courses, and merchandise, but you must do more than sell. You must deliver value issue after issue. If your newsletter is nothing but hard sell, subscribers will ignore it and eventually unsubscribe.

Redesign your newsletter

Before 2020, my newsletter was pretty pathetic. The numbers proved that. I had only 140 subscribers, over half of them disengaged. They seldom opened an issue, and when they did, they clicked nothing. Worse, I hadn’t gained any new subscribers during the past year.

What was wrong? For one thing, I wasn’t sending newsletters regularly. Sometimes months would pass without my readers hearing from me. For another, I mostly talked about myself: what I was writing, how I approach writing, where to buy my books. Yawn.

I needed a total makeover, including a regular schedule, a solid design, and content with value. Addressing the first of these, I committed to weekly delivery on a set day at a set time. This is easy, since bulk email providers such as MailChimp allow you to schedule email delivery. To ensure I’m ready, I also schedule time for writing newsletters. Each week, I create my content two days prior to the delivery date.

As for the content itself, I’m a fiction writer. I tell stories. I decided to make stories the focus of my newsletter: short stories, true stories, book reviews, and the stories behind my stories. Accordingly, I renamed the newsletter Dale E. Lehman’s Story Corner. Not flashy, but direct. It tells you what value you will receive as a subscriber: Dale will tell you stories!

Next, I needed a newsletter template. I actually had one already, so I just tweaked it, but if you’re just starting out you’ll want to build one. Bulk email providers give you templates to choose from, or you can design your own using their tools. Either way, using a template ensures a consistent look and feel week after week and simplifies email creation, since all you need do is plug in the content.

To facilitate storytelling, I designed a simple template reminiscent of a letter. It consists of a header, a greeting that includes the subscriber’s first name, space for the body of the newsletter, a closing, and a P.S. Why a P.S.? Because after a glance at an email’s opening, many people scroll to the bottom for a quick look, then hit delete. A P.S. offers a chance to catch their attention before it’s too late.

As for the content itself, my research taught me to avoid the hard sell. If you’re shouting, “Buy! Buy! Buy!” week after week, readers will get sick of it and ignore you in droves. Rather, employ this sequence:

Give. Give. Give. Ask.

Give your readers something of value three times before you ask them to buy or sign up for something. That’s three newsletters full of good stuff, no purchase necessary, before pitching your wares. Whether introducing a short story or letting readers know of a great price on my books, I adopt a conversational style. No pressure and no hard sell. I’m just talking to my friends, telling them stuff I think will interest them.

One last thing. Bulk email services provide welcome emails for your new subscribers. This is where you deliver the goods for your reader magnet. Create a signup form through your provider, then host it on your website and social media accounts. When somebody signs up, the welcome email is triggered, and they receive the links to download their freebies. It’s fairly simple to set up a welcome email, but your website will need a facelift.

Redesign your website

Originally, my author website was part promotion, part communication. It offered information on my books and short stories, linked to my accounts on Medium, Facebook, and Twitter, and featured a blog about my life, my writing, and whatever else came to mind.

In theory, anyway. Unfortunately, I rarely posted to my blog. It quickly grew stale and became an embarrassment instead of an asset. I worried over this because I’d heard the same advice as you: authors must have a blog and must keep it fresh. But then I learned something startling. An author website is not about blogging. It’s not even about selling books. It’s about getting email signups. It’s about your reader magnet.

Many successful authors put their reader magnets front and center. Yes, they tell you about their books, articles, short stories, and activities. Yes, many do still blog. But reader magnets get pride of place. When you go to an author website, a magnet is often the first thing you see. It’s in your face. Why? Because while a website lets readers discover you, your newsletter is your connection with your “tribe,” those people you directly talk to week after week and who are most willing to buy your wares.

Accordingly, I redesigned my website (using the Hestia theme for Wordpress, if you’re curious). My reader magnet is the first thing you see. I replaced my stale blog with a welcome message to readers, followed by kudos from a handful of book reviewers. I redesigned my book pages to look better and added a store where readers can buy my print books. The latter is so I can send discount coupons to Story Corner readers, a perk only available to my subscribers.

Initial Results

It took about two months to complete these changes. At the same time, I posted frequently to Instagram, using tags such as #bookstagram. Following the give, give, give, ask formula, I talked books three times for every one time I mentioned my reader magnet. Signups were slow in coming, but they did come. Meanwhile, a more important change took place among my existing readership: engagement levels shifted in my favor.

There are three broad categories of engagement. Some people almost never open your emails, much less click on links. Others sometimes open newsletters and sometimes click on links, but not very often. And some people open most of your newsletters and click on links with some frequency. After implementing my changes, I found fewer people in the first and second categories, and more in the third. This happened for two reasons.

First, people who didn’t care about my newsletter suddenly had an incentive to unsubscribe! They were hearing from me weekly instead of on rare occasions, so they dumped me. Though it may seem odd, this is good thing. Big-time email marketers recommend periodically cleansing your list. If you’re paying to send emails, you don’t want a ton of recipients who never open them. More importantly for us small-time emailers, fewer disinterested subscribers means stronger engagement. Plus, the loss of a few disinterested subscribers will be more than offset if you continuously gain new interested subscribers.

Second, my improved newsletter content converted some of those moderately engaged subscribers into frequently engaged ones. Even if my audience wasn’t growing by leaps and bounds, it displayed greater interest in what I was sending.

This was a good start, but I wanted to grow my list faster. That’s when I stumbled onto something no email marketing course could have taught me: a powerful tool for authors looking to build their mailing lists. It’s called StoryOrigin.

StoryOrigin

I signed up for StoryOrigin months before embarking on my revamp, but I hadn’t much used it. It’s the creation of independent software developer Evan Gow. Gow began accepting users in April, 2018 with the idea of building a one-stop shop for book marketing tools. Since then, over 14,000 authors have signed up, with 1,000 currently participating in group promotions and newsletter swaps every week.

StoryOrigin provides a number of tools, but at its heart lies a simple concept: authors use their mailing lists and social media to promote each other’s work. In a swap, I mention your book in my newsletter, and you mention mine in yours. In a group promotion, a group of authors list books on a page hosted by StoryOrigin, and everyone shares that promotion with their audiences via newsletters and social media. Net result? You aren’t just talking to your mailing list. You’re talking to two, five, twenty, or more mailing lists, some of them of substantial size.

You can promote your book through reader magnets, sale pricing, or free books for potential reviewers. Your books on StoryOrigin are linked with bookseller sites such as Amazon. You can integrate with your bulk email service, plan and track email campaigns, set up reader magnets and review copies, request or accept swaps, create or join group promotions, and even track your progress on your latest writing project. StoryOrigin provides statistics so you can monitor your results. You can also review an author’s or reader’s record before you accept a swap or review request.

That’s an impressive tool set. I asked Gow what he thought the most important feature was. “It depends on where you are in your journey,” he said. “StoryOrigin can help you build your mailing list, increase sales, find reviewers, and manage your marketing and production schedule. For new authors, the email list building features are usually the most important. For seasoned authors, the most important thing is having one place to manage all of their newsletter swaps and group promotions, and the metrics and transparency StoryOrigin provides.”

For me, group promotions have proven the most fruitful. Focused on revamping my platform, I didn’t start using StoryOrigin regularly until midway through 2020. Once I did, my mailing list grew substantially. By the end of 2020, it had doubled over the start of the year, with most of that growth taking place in just the last four months thanks to group promos and swaps.

Right now, StoryOrigin is free, but it won’t be that way forever. When paid subscriptions become available, Gow plans to keep the cost low enough to make upgrading an easy decision. In addition, those who sign up now will receive a few extra months free after it becomes a paid service. But for the moment, he says, “I’m entirely focused on making StoryOrigin best-in-class across all of the essential book marketing tools.”

By the by, I have no connection with Evan Gow or StoryOrigin other than being a user of the platform. I recommend it solely based upon the results it’s given me.

Recap

The steps I took in 2020 to revitalize my writing platform are only first steps, but they have had a significant impact on the size of my mailing list and subscriber engagement. If your platform needs a boost, consider taking these steps yourself. Do some research on email marketing. Create a valuable reader magnet and integrate it with your newsletter and website. Set a newsletter schedule and stick to it. Deliver value to your readers in every issue. Apply the “give, give, give, ask” technique, and take StoryOrigin for a test drive. Monitor your progress, and before long you’ll see the effects of these changes.