How to Make a Sticky Connection With Your Biggest Fans
By: Shaunta Grimes
Tags: Creativity, Writing, Fiction, Productivity, Marketing

We don’t know where our first impressions come from or precisely what they mean, so we don’t always appreciate their fragility.

— Malcolm Gladwell

First impressions matter, of course. That’s why you’ll find all kinds of advice about how to put your best foot forward as a writer. How to make your work look its best. How to properly format it for whoever you’re sending it to, and for your readers.

But what comes next? First impressions, like Malcolm Gladwell said, might be fragile. But I think it’s worse than that. I think they’re often either transparent or slick.

Either readers don’t remember their first impression of us or they’re drawn in by something, but the surface of the impression is too slippery to stick to them if it’s challenged later.

The best we can hope for on first impression is that they’ll come back. Read a little more. Or maybe just think about us again, when a friend needs a book to read. Remember us when they see our name again.

It’s the second impression — the chance we get when someone comes back for a second look — that matters most. It’s our opportunity to make a sticky connection with them. One that will make them remember us.

How we manage those followers who actually become fans is so important.

I had this experience once.

There’s an author I really admire. I read his newsletter. I own all of his books.

I’ve bought every single thing he’s ever tried to sell me. And I’ve hand sold his stuff all over creation. My first impression of him was lovely. Shiny and slick.

I was going to be in his city a couple of years ago and we’re colleagues enough that I decided to email and introduced myself. I told him I’d love to buy him coffee.

He wrote back, several days later and said that he was sorry, but he’d have to decline.

Okay. He was under no obligation to meet me. His reply was polite. First impression intact.

One day, several months later, I checked my Amazon affiliate links and realized that I’d hand sold more than 100 copies of his books that month. I wrote him again and told him that awesome news, showed him proof, and said that since my audience obviously loves him, I’d love to interview him.

Could I send him a few questions via email that he could answer at his leisure?

He wrote back, several days later and said that he was sorry, but he’d have to decline.

The exact same email. Still polite, but now obviously a cut and paste, since I had two of them.

Now, intellectually, I don’t expect everyone (or anyone) to do what I want or I’m going to hate them forever. He’s a busy, famous dude. He gets to say no, period.

But I’m human and I can’t help that the tarnish is off the shine of that first impression. That’s just the breaks.

I started out feeling like this man’s work was mine, in a small way, because I loved it so much. I had a connection to it that made me excited to spread the news about it. I shared it with people who trust me to send them to cool stuff, because it was sort of like sharing something of mine.

I still appreciate his work, but it doesn’t feel like it’s mine at all anymore. I was a kind of cosmic-level fan. Pat Flynn calls that a superfan.

My second impression of this author wasn’t very sticky. I fact, my first impression was stickier. These days I’m more of a regular fan.

Here’s another experience.

I signed up for a program that I was excited about starting. It was an innovative kind of mastermind community that I’d never really heard of before. I’d been to a conference put on by the guys running the program and I was jazzed to be part of it.

My first impression, again, was pretty. Nice and shiny and slick.

The first couple of days were rocky. The program’s owner had a thing about Facebook. He didn’t like it. At all. But in the lead up the program starting, he’d started a temporary Facebook group for people to start to get to know each other and it was really active and exciting.

But then he pulled the plug on it — deleted it completely — and moved to a forum on his own site. The forum was far less interactive and more slow paced. It was a complete dud. So, first impression was spotty at best.

But then I got an email from one of the guys who was running the program. In it was a one-minute welcome video where the man addressed me by name, talked specifically about why he was happy that I’d joined his program and what he thought I’d get out of it and how much he was looking forward to what I could bring to it.

One little video and suddenly I felt connected to the program again. I was willing to wait through the growing pains with the forum, at least for a little while.

That forum, btw, was the program’s ultimate undoing I think. The momentum that started on Facebook never reignited. At least it didn’t for me. But, because the person who’d developed the program took the time to make a good second impression on me, when he had something else to offer years later, I was excited to take a look.

My second impression here was sticky. Even though the first thing I did with them didn’t work out, they’d made a fan.

It’s the same for all kinds of marketing. Even for writers.

We have the chance to make a first impression, of course. We put our work out there. People read it and they enjoy it or they don’t. They share it or they don’t. They tell their friends about it or they don’t.

We put our best foot forward and aim for those good, shiny first impressions.

But it’s the second impression that matters even more. The second impression is what’s really at the heart of marketing for writers. Those readers who are intrigued enough to come back or to reach out for a little more — they want to be inspired. They want a sticky experience.

If you give them a chance, they’ll become your fan.

Most of your readers won’t give you the chance to have a sticky second-impression interaction with them. That’s okay. It’s the way the game is played. Most will read and move on, and you’ll never really know they were there beyond some statistic maybe.

If you think of your readers arranged in a pyramid, casual readers who only read something if they happen to come across it are at the bottom. A nice, sturdy base.

But some will seek you out on social media. Or they’ll join your email list. Or they’ll look for your next book. They’ll talk to a friend about what they read. They’ll ask a question.

There’s this advice about social media that says that you shouldn’t follow as many people as follow you. That you need, I suppose, to give the impression that you’re popular.

But I always remember that when my older daughter was in middle school and Twitter was a bright new thing, her favorite author followed her. Meg Cabot (or probably her assistant) followed my kid and she was over the moon.

And you know what? She still loves Meg Cabot. And you know what else? I still love Meg Cabot. She made my daughter a reader on a whole other level. That one little follow garnered her two deeper connections with readers than she would have otherwise had.

That was long before I had any published books, but I realized then that I wanted to make people feel the way Meg Cabot made my daughter feel that day.

So, what does it all mean?

I think it means, for writers, that you can read all the advice and strategy guides and tip listicles there are — and none if it will really matter if you’re not making a connection.

You don’t necessarily need to make a personal, one-on-one connection with every reader. I mean, you’re only one person. But you can remember that your readers are people who have chosen to spend their free time with you.

You can throw away the adages about how many people you should follow.

You can pay attention to your readers, so that your work becomes a conversation with them, instead of you pontificating and getting upset when no one listens.

When I think about sticky novelists, I think about Meg Cabot following my kid on Twitter. And Chuck Palahniuk teaching me about thought verbs. And Stephen King’s letters to his Constant Readers. I think about Ellen Hopkins traveling all year long to schools to meet her young readers.

I also think about Ray Bradbury and Octavia Butler and Judy Blume and a hundred other authors who told stories that invited me in. And that’s harder to do, of course. Way harder than following someone on Twitter. But it’s what I meant about being in conversation with your reader.

It wasn’t the first impression that mattered to me the most for any of those writers. I don’t remember which Judy Blume book I read first. Freckle Juice, maybe. But I will never forget reading Tiger Eyes when it was brand new in 1981. It was the first time I ever read anything that made me think — oh, my god, this author knows me. I was ten years old.

I’ve bought all of Blume’s books for my children. I’ve shared them with young friends my entire adult life. My daughters and I stood in line for hours to meet her at a book event and it was worth every minute. She made a sticky impression on me in the sixth grade.