Randy Ingermanson's Blog: Advanced Fiction Writing, page 3

What to Do When You’re Overwhelmed

Modern life forces you to make impossible choices. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by all the stuff that needs doing. When you get overwhelmed, your anxiety level rises, you lose traction, you get even more behind, and you feel more and more overwhelmed.

Writers are very susceptible to getting overwhelmed. Besides everything else that Normal People do, we take on the gargantuan task of writing a novel, getting it published, and then marketing it. This is a lonely, difficult journey of a thousand miles, even for those lucky few who make lots of money at it. For the other 99%, it’s even harder. 

I learned a simple trick years ago for dealing with overwhelm. I call it the “Overwhelm Exercise” and I use it whenever things seem especially bad. (About two or three times a year.)

The Overwhelm Exercise

Do these steps in order: 

Write down every single thing that’s causing you to feel overwhelmed. You can do this on paper or on your computer, whichever is more convenient. Write everything. Keep going until you’ve said it all. You don’t need to put it in any special order. Just spill your guts. Completely. Keep writing until you’ve cleared it all out. All the mess is on the page. It’s still a big mess, but your head is clear. Mark ONLY those items you could reasonably get done today. Don’t go overboard. Just find those few things that are small enough for today. You can either color-code them or circle them or mark them with an asterisk. Mark ONLY those you could reasonably get done this week, using a different mark. Again, don’t get too ambitious. You’re in a big hole, so set yourself a goal that you can achieve. You can color-code these in a different color, or mark them with a rectangle, or mark them with two asterisks. Give yourself permission to deal with everything else later. Next week or next month. But not today and not even this week. Write this down. “I have permission to ONLY do the marked tasks this week.”Collect all the tasks you marked for today onto a fresh list. It should be small. It should be achievable. Title it, “My Today List.”Collect all the tasks you marked for this week onto a separate list. This will be a bit bigger. Once again, don’t get too aggressive. Don’t bite off more than you can chew. Title this list, “My This-Week List.”For today, do everything on the Today List. You constructed it to be doable in one day, so do it. When you finish the list, reward yourself with a break. You reached your goal for the day! Enjoy that good feeling. Don’t spoil it by moving the goal posts. You are done until tomorrow. Tomorrow, choose out a few tasks from the This Week List and make a new Today List. Again, make sure it’s doable. You’ve been beating yourself up for too long because you’ve got impossible goals. You need a few days of setting possible goals. For the rest of the week, continue making doable Today Lists. Don’t crush your spirit by demanding too much of yourself. That way lies dragons. Where You’ll Be Next Week

By next week, that original horrible list will have a number of small and mid-size tasks crossed off. It will be much less ferocious-looking. It will still be bad, but it’ll be less bad. If you still feel overwhelmed, repeat the same exercise. But you should be less overwhelmed next week. You’ll be getting some traction. You’ll have some victories under your belt. Maybe small victories, but a win is a win.

Remember that modern life is set up to keep throwing more stuff at you until you break. When you catch your breath a little, think about that some. Can you make some decisions on things you can just say no to? 

Life is the art of saying no to most stuff, so you can say yes to the things that matter most. 

Have a good day.

The post What to Do When You’re Overwhelmed appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

How to Promote Your Reader Magnet

In my last blog post, To-Fu For Novelists, I talked about the importance of creating a Reader Magnet, a free piece of your writing that you can give away to your fans and potential fans. 

You give it away free as an inducement to sign up for your e-mail newsletter. Then whenever you release a new book, you’ll run a great launch by notifying your e-mail subscribers. 

That only makes sense if your e-mail list contains people who really love your fiction. If the subscribers to your e-mail list don’t care about your novels, that’s a problem. Your list costs you money. You can’t afford to have a large list with many thousands of non-fans. 

This means that your Reader Magnet needs to align well with your novels. If somebody likes your novels, they should like your Reader Magnet. If they like your Reader Magnet, they should like your novels. 

Getting the Word Out

You have three different groups of people that you want to give your Reader Magnet to:

People who just finished reading one of your novels. People who come to your website. People in your Target Audience who never heard of you. 

Group 1 is the warmest group. They know and love your work, and they are eager to read something else you’ve written. If you offer them your free Reader Magnet, they’ll sign up in droves.

Group 2 is not quite so warm. They know something about you, or they wouldn’t have come to your website. But they may not know much. If you offer them your Reader Magnet, some will take it and most won’t. 

Group 3 is the coldest group. They don’t know anything about you, so you’re going to need to reach lots of them, and only a tiny fraction will sign up. But the good news is that you have hundreds of thousands or millions of people in this group. 

Now let’s talk about how you reach each of these three groups with your Reader Magnet offer.

Reaching True Fans 

It’s easy to promote your Reader Magnet to True Fans (people who just finished reading one of your books and loved it). Just put a note in the back of all your books offering your Reader Magnet as a free welcome gift to anyone who signs up for your e-mail newsletter. Include a link to a “landing page” on your website. 

What’s a “landing page?” It’s a special page that does one thing only—it makes an offer for your Reader Magnet. Ideally, no page on the internet should link to this landing page. Then only readers of your books will know the link, and they’ll be the only ones who ever come to the landing page. That way, you can track how well it works. 

Reaching Website Visitors 

Every page of your website should have an e-mail signup form. There are multiple ways to do this. You can have an actual form visible on the page. For visitors using a desktop machine or laptop, you can display a popup form. For visitors using a phone or tablet, a ribbon form works better—it displays in a thin “ribbon” on the top of a page, and the user can either dismiss it or click it to display a full popup form. 

You have a lot of options for signup forms. If you’re tech-savvy, you can create these signup forms yourself. If you’re not, then have your webmaster do it. But you should write the copy for the form yourself. Your webmaster may not be any good at writing marketing copy. 

If you don’t know how to write the copy for the signup form, a good place to learn is Tammi Labrecque’s two books:

Newsletter NinjaNewsletter Ninja 2

These two books are packed with much more info on newsletters and Reader Magnets than I can put into a blog post. They’re inexpensive and super valuable. I highly recommend them both. 

If you’d like to see how I’ve set things up on my website with my own Reader Magnet, you can visit any page on my personal website that I use for promoting my novels. On my home page, I have an embedded signup form that promotes my Reader Magnet. All other pages of my site have popup forms (for desktop machines) or ribbon forms (for mobile and tablet devices). So you can easily find examples of how I do it. 

I expect that only a small fraction of readers of this blog care about the kind of fiction I write. Please don’t sign up for my e-mail fiction newsletter unless you happen to be in my Target Audience. 

Reaching People Who Never Heard of You

The great majority of your Target Audience has never heard of you. (By definition, a Target Audience is the set of all people who would love your novels, if only they knew you existed.)

How do you reach these people? You can’t expect them to wander onto your website by chance. If you’re going to find them, you have to get proactive. 

You have several options:

Occasionally promote your books on the “deal sites,” such as BookBub, E-Reader News Today, etc. The way these work is that you lower your price for a few days to free or to 99 cents and pay these deal sites to promote your deal to their subscribers. This can bring in dozens or hundreds of new readers. The ones who like your book will eventually sign up for your e-mail newsletter. Run paid ads on Facebook to promote your Reader Magnet. Facebook ads take time to learn how to run correctly, but if you do this well, you can reach thousands of people who never heard of you. A good ad will make an enticing offer for your Reader Magnet. Just remember that Facebook ads can be expensive. I’ve heard this works well, but I haven’t tried it myself. Yet. Use the social media platform of your choice and post offers there for your Reader Magnet. This can be extremely effective or extremely ineffective, depending on how well you use your social media platform. Nobody is good at all social media platforms. My advice is to choose one and learn it well and see how it works out for you. Social media is “free,” but it can cost you enormous amounts of time. So think carefully before you commit. But if you commit, then give it your best shot. How Long Will This Take?

Putting together a good Reader Magnet and promoting it well will take you months. So why should you create a Reader Magnet, as opposed to doing nothing? Two reasons:

A Reader Magnet is one of the very best ways to promote your books. “Doing nothing” will also take you months. Time keeps on ticking, whether you use it productively or not. Months and years and decades are going to pass you by, and you can’t stop them. You might as well spend your time on something that works. “Doing nothing” doesn’t work. 

If you work hard, in three months, you could be done. It’ll pay off when you launch your next book. 

The post How to Promote Your Reader Magnet appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

ToFu For Novelists

“ToFu” is marketing slang for “top of funnel.” 

And what is a “funnel?” That’s a standard marketing term that refers to your system for attracting potential new readers, engaging with them, and ultimately converting them to paying customers. 

It’s called a funnel because it’s wider at the top and narrower at the bottom—you attract more people than you engage, and you engage more people than you convert. 

Every novelist needs some way to bring people into the top of their funnel. A very common way to do that is by giving away a sample of your wares. If people read your free stuff and like it, then there’s a decent chance they’ll buy your not-free stuff. 

Your Reader Magnet

Authors call that free sample of their writing a “Reader Magnet.” Reader Magnets vary widely. Some examples that authors use are:

A full-length novel. A novella. A collection of short stories. A single short story. Scene outtakes from your novel. An extra scene “after the end of your novel.” Backstory on your characters. Backstory on your story world. Maps for your story world. 

That’s not a complete list, but it gives you some idea of possible Reader Magnets you could create. 

My thinking is that a good Reader Magnet is closely aligned with what you’re selling. So if you write cozy science fiction mysteries, don’t give away a steamy werewolf romance as your Reader Magnet. Nothing wrong with werewolves or romance or steam, but your Reader Magnet is a promise of what your novels will deliver. 

Delivering Your Reader Magnet

Generally, authors use a Reader Magnet as an incentive for potential fans to sign up for their email newsletter. Then the Reader Magnet promotes books you’ve already written, and your email newsletter promotes all the books you’ll write in the future.

So the Reader Magnet is very much a quid pro quo, and your email signup form should make that clear—you’re giving away a free gift to people who sign up for your email newsletter. But you should also make clear that it’s not a forever contract—they can unsubscribe from your newsletter at any time.

Virtually all email software makes it easy to deliver a Reader Magnet automatically to anyone who subscribes to your email list. See my page, Marketing Tools for Writers, for much more info on email software. 

In case you’re delivering an actual e-book as your Reader Magnet, there is a technical problem to solve. A lot of people who read e-books don’t know how to load an e-book onto their e-reader device, because they usually buy from a retailer (like Amazon) that automates that process for them. 

The solution is to use a service that helps your fans through the techie problems of loading your Reader Magnet into their e-reader. The service I use is called BookFunnel, and again, the details are on my page, Marketing Tools for Writers. 

Producing Your Reader Magnet

Do you already have a Reader Magnet? Is it working well for you?

If not, here’s a short checklist of questions for deciding what Reader Magnet you could create: 

Which book or series of books are you most interested in marketing? If it’s a single book, could you give away another book like it? If it’s a series, could you give away the first book in the series? (Many authors do this, and it can work very well, if it sells all the other books in the series.)Can you write a novella or short story or collection of short stories using the same characters from your book or series? Is there any other material you could write that would align well with the book or series that you want to promote?

It might take you weeks to create your Reader Magnet. Is it really worth spending all that time making something you’re just going to give away for free? 

Most successful authors will tell you yes, it is. Most successful authors are successful precisely because they took that time to create something their potential readers would love. 

You might be wondering how you use your Reader Magnet. How do you put it in the hands of lots of potential readers? That’s a big subject, worthy of its own blog post. My plan is to cover that subject in my next blog post, so stay tuned. 

For the moment, get rolling on your Reader Magnet. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Just make the best Reader Magnet you can with the skills you have now. Next year, when you’re earned some money and developed your craft, you’ll be able to make a better one. Every time you create a new one, you’ll get better. Each one is the necessary step on the road to the next one. 

 

The post ToFu For Novelists appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

Trust the Magic

Every writer has felt the magic. 

You sit down to write, but the words don’t come. Not instantly, anyway. 

You press on a bit, and the words gurgle out like rusty water from an old faucet. 

You keep pressing on, and the words start to flow a little more, but they’re still not right. 

And then, at some magical moment, the words begin to flow, clear and strong and sharp as lightning. 

The emotions rise up inside you. 

You become your characters, all of them—the good ones, the mean ones, the smart and the stupid. 

The scene flies out of your fingers onto the page. Not perfect in grammar and syntax, but foaming with life. 

The magic has begun, and you let it roll over you until it’s done. 

And then when it’s done, it’s gone, and you can’t make it come back. 

The next time you sit down to write, you assume the magic will start again. 

Maybe it does, and maybe it doesn’t. If you does, you feel infallible. If it doesn’t, you feel like you’ll never write another decent word.

It’s just a fact, the magic doesn’t always happen. 

That’s why we call it magic. Because you can’t make it happen. 

But when it does, that’s bliss, and you don’t care if you get paid, because you would pay for the joy of making the magic. 

If the magic doesn’t happen, that’s OK. Press on anyway. The magic always starts out muggley. It only becomes magic when you press on. 

If you haven’t felt the magic in awhile, you may think you’ve lost it forever. 

You have if you believe you’ve lost it. 

But if you believe the magic will come again, it will. 

You can’t control the magic. You can’t decide when. 

All you control is your choice to press on when there’s no magic. 

So press on, every day. Write the words when they’re not magic. 

The magic will come again. You know in your heart it will. 

Maybe today; maybe tomorrow. 

The only thing certain is that there will be no magic unless you press on. 

So press on. Trust the magic. Wait for it. Delight in it when it comes. 

Don’t tell yourself the lie that you can make the magic happen. You can’t.

Don’t torment yourself if the magic doesn’t come today. As Scarlett said, tomorrow is another day.

Wait for the magic.

Believe in the magic.

Trust the magic.

The post Trust the Magic appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

What Your Reader Desperately Wants

This blog post is reprinted by permission of the publisher from Chapter 1 of my book, How to Write a Dynamite Scene Using the Snowflake Method. 

What Your Reader Most Desperately Wants

Your reader desperately wants one thing. 

You have it in your power to give your reader that one thing.

And what is that one thing?

I could tell you what that one thing is, and you would nod and agree that yes, that one thing is clearly something all readers want. 

But telling you that one thing wouldn’t make it stick in your mind forever.

I want it to stick. 

I’d rather show you that one thing. Once you’ve seen it, once you’ve lived it, you’ll never forget it. That one thing will be inside you, fueling everything you write. 

So let me tell you a quick story about one of our ancestors who lived many thousands of years ago in a small village on this planet we call home. 

When I say he’s our ancestor, I mean it literally—he’s your ancestor and he’s my ancestor and he’s every human’s ancestor. 

That ancestor of ours was once a thirteen-year-old boy, the newest man in the village, and the smallest.

Imagine you’re that boy on the day when word comes to the village that there’s a killer tiger ravaging the village’s herd of goats.

The Tale of the Tiger

You’re furious. A drought has been burning the land for many months. That herd of goats is all that keeps your village from starvation. 

You’re also terrified. There’s only one way to get rid of a killer tiger. The village has to organize a hunt, find the tiger, and kill it. But that won’t be easy, because there’s nothing more dangerous in your world than a killer tiger.

The village headman sends word around to the whole village. All men meet in the village square, and bring your spear.

When the messenger comes to your hut, he shakes his head and frowns. He thinks you’re too young to go.

In your heart, you’re afraid he’s right. You only just became a man in the last month. You’re small. You’re skinny. You’re weak.

But in your head, you know he’s wrong. 

If the village doesn’t kill the tiger, it’s going to steal every last goat, and the village is going to die.

To save your people, you and every man in the village have to work together to kill the tiger.

You know very well you might not come back. A thousand times in the village square, you’ve heard the village story-woman tell the Tale of the Tiger. You know that when a tiger is surrounded by men with spears, it always looks for the weakest man—and attacks that man.

Sometimes the man kills the tiger. 

Sometimes the tiger kills the man.

You’re terrified, but you know you have to go.

You grab your spear and run to the village square.  

When you get there, the village headman smiles at you and shouts courage on you. 

All the villagers smile at you and shout courage on you.

And then the men of the village set out to find the tiger.

You don’t have to go far. You can hear the screams of a baby goat being dragged into the jungle. You can hear the roar of the tiger.

Every man of the village knows what he has to do. The Tale of the Tiger is in your blood. 

You all fan out, forming a giant circle around the place where you heard the tiger.

The headman shouts the command to move, and you all advance ten paces. 

He shouts again, and you advance ten paces.

Over and over and over again.

As you get closer to the tiger, the tightness in your chest squeezes your heart until the pain is unbearable. 

The headman shouts, and you advance ten paces.

Sweat rains down your face. 

The headman shouts, and you advance ten paces.

Your knees are shaking so hard, you think you’re going to fall over.

The headman shouts, and you advance ten paces.

Finally, a war-shout goes up from all the men.

A hundred fingers point at a streak of orange and black, high up.

The tiger is in a tree, watching you with yellow eyes of rage. 

He’s trapped, fifty paces from where you stand. You can see him looking all around the circle, measuring his enemies. It’s exactly like you imagined from every time you’ve ever heard the Tale of the Tiger. Exactly like it—only worse.

The headman shouts, and you advance ten paces.

The tiger roars—so loud you can feel the sound shaking your belly.

He’s forty paces away. And he’s looking directly at you. 

The weakest and smallest man in the village.

Just like in the Tale of the Tiger.

The fate of the village is on your thin shoulders.

The headman shouts, and you advance ten paces.

The tiger screams with a terrible scream.

He leaps out of the tree.

He races straight at you.

Like you knew he would.

Time almost stops. In the last few instants before the tiger reaches you, you relive the thoughts of the hero of the Tale of the Tiger. 

Always face the tiger. If you turn to run, you will die and so will the village. Face the tiger and kill or be killed. But face the tiger. Wait till the last possible moment before you throw. Then kill the tiger, even if the tiger also kills you. Face the tiger.

You want to run, but you face the tiger. You draw back your arm, clutching your spear in a sweaty grip.

The tiger lunges forward, straight at you, faster and faster, roaring in his fury.

Your body desperately wants to turn and run. 

You face the tiger and wait for the perfect moment.

The tiger leaps in the air, and his roar is like thunder. 

He reaches the peak of his flight.

He’s coming down.

Straight at you.

You wait till the last possible moment.

You throw.

The tiger crashes into you, knocking you senseless.

Your very last thought before darkness falls is I have done this before. I have done this a thousand times before. 

When you come back awake, your head throbs and your whole body aches and all you can hear is the sound of drumming and dancing and feasting and shouting.

You’re back in the village.

It’s late at night.

The village is having a party.

The tiger is dead.

And you saved the village.

The whole village sees you’re awake.

The village headman calls for silence.

All the village gathers around.

The village story-woman tells the Tale of the Tiger.

And you’re the hero. 

As the village story-woman tells the tale, you feel like you’re living it all again. The great circle. The steady advances. The rush of the tiger. The blinding fear. The final leap. The desperate throw. The rage of the dying tiger.

And you’re right. You are living it again.

But this is not the second time you’re living the Tale of the Tiger.

It’s the thousandth time you’re living the Tale of the Tiger.

You lived it many times before, in story.

You lived it once today, in real life.

You’re living it again now, in story.

And there’s only a small difference between the story of the hunt and the real hunt. The real-life Tale of the Tiger was scarier, but not much scarier.

You were prepared for the real-life hunt by the thousand times you heard the Tale of the Tiger.

When the village story-woman finishes the Tale of the Tiger, a great shout goes up from all the village.

The village headman brings out the skin of the tiger you killed. 

He carries it to you.

He drapes it around your shoulders.

And all the people of the village take turns lifting you high in the air and shouting their thanks to you for killing the tiger.

And you realize that this is not the first skin you’ve worn today.

Every time you ever heard the Tale of the Tiger, you walked inside the skin of the hero of the Tale. You felt his fears. You faced his tiger. You killed his kill. 

And today when you faced the tiger, you walked in that hero’s skin again.

Yes, you killed the tiger.

But you had help.

The hero of the Tale of the Tiger also killed the tiger.

The village story-woman killed the tiger.

The Tale of the Tiger killed the tiger.

Why Story Matters

Our ancestors told stories about the things they feared most. Why? Because Story changes you. Story makes you strong. Story makes you brave. Story gives you hope. Story keeps you alive through the darkest night.

When you hear the Tale of the Tiger, it’s almost as if you live in the hero’s skin and face down his fears and kill the tiger. 

Story builds emotional muscle memory. 

When a real-life tiger comes your way, you have the emotional reserves to draw on. 

Story teaches the tribe how to survive.

Story teaches the tribe how to thrive.

Story has been doing that for many thousand years. 

Every human alive desperately needs Story.

Every human alive desperately wants Story.

Story is not a luxury item.

Story is not optional.

Story keeps the tribe alive.

What Story Is

Story is what happens when you walk through great danger in somebody else’s skin. 

And don’t think that “great danger” always means a tiger.

There are other kinds of dangers, and other kinds of stories. 

Romance is the best-selling category of story in modern fiction. 

What is a romance novel? It’s a story about a relationship going through great danger.

Danger so great, the relationship may very well be killed.

A romance novel builds in you the emotional muscle memory to keep your relationships alive.

Every kind of story builds a different kind of emotional muscle memory.

Story teaches the tribe how to survive, how to thrive.  

Every kind of fiction you write will put your reader in the skin of some person going through great danger.

A Powerful Emotional Experience

Facing danger is fun. There’s probably some deep neurological reason why. 

Certainly, facing danger makes you strong. Facing danger makes you bold. 

But let’s be honest here. Facing danger in real life is dangerous. You only get to make one mistake on a tiger hunt, ever.

Story is a safe way to face danger. Story teaches you how to face your fears, how to persist, how to hope when there is no hope. When you’ve got nothing else, Story will get you through. Story teaches you how to live.

And Story does all that by going deep into your neurons. Story teaches you how to live by letting you live someone else’s life. You see what they see. You feel what they feel. You do what they do.

The reason Story goes deep is because it gives you a powerful emotional experience. 

That powerful emotional experience is what creates in you the emotional muscle memory you need to survive and to thrive. In the heat of the hunt, when the tiger is racing at you, you’ll forget everything you were ever told.

But you won’t forget the things you already lived.

Story is like chocolate broccoli. It tastes incredibly great and it’s amazingly good for you. 

That’s why you desperately need Story. 

That’s why your reader desperately needs Story.

That’s why your main goal as a fiction writer is to give your reader the one thing she most desperately needs. 

Story.

What This Book Is About

The Advanced Fiction Writing series of books is all about how to write stories that give your reader a powerful emotional experience. 

This book teaches you one important tool for doing that—writing a dynamite scene. Every scene in your story needs to move your reader’s emotions. You can’t afford to have any scenes that don’t.

But before we focus on scenes, we have to ask a very important question.

How does Story create a powerful emotional experience? How exactly does it work?

The answer is simple. Story has two essential parts. Only two.

Turn the page to find out what they are.

Excerpted from Chapter 1 of How to Write a Dynamite Scene Using the Snowflake Method. 

The post What Your Reader Desperately Wants appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

5 Secrets of Great Marketing Copy

Most novelists hate marketing, and that’s OK. Why do we hate marketing? Because we don’t want to feel like a weasel. We all hate those oily marketing dweebs who write slick copy to separate people from their money by selling them things they don’t need. 

It’s good to have a conscience. It’s good to not want to be a weasel. How can you be different from those awful marketing slicks? How can you market your work effectively and not feel icky about it?

Secret #1: How Can You Help People?

You wrote a good novel, right? A novel that certain people will love, because it gives them a powerful emotional experience. An experience they need right now to get through another day. 

What is that powerful emotional experience? Did you feel it yourself while writing your novel? What kind of reader will feel it while reading your novel?

And very importantly, what kind of reader will NOT be helped by your novel?

You need to be very clear about this in your own mind. Your novel will absolutely help some people. And it will leave some other people cold. What’s the difference between these two groups? 

The set of people who will be helped by your novel is called your Target Audience. It’s a small fraction of all the people in the world. These are the only people you want to sell to. 

Until you’re clear on your Target Audience, don’t even bother trying to write marketing copy, because you’ve got nothing to work with. 

Secret #2: How Can You Get the Attention of Your Kind of Reader?

You typically get people’s attention with a headline of some sort. Or possibly an amazing graphic. Something out of the ordinary that your Target Audience will notice. 

Bear in mind that you have something great that will help your Target Audience. So you don’t need to feel shy about doing something a little out of the ordinary. You know that they’d love your work, if only they knew it existed. But they may not even know YOU exist, much less your novel. So figure out some thing that will resonate with your Target Audience. 

A headline tuned specially to the kind of people who like your kind of writing. Or a graphic. Or a video. Or whatever. Something that will catch their attention in the first half-second before their eyes move on to the next thing in the endless stream of life.

Secret #3: How Can You Scare Away the Wrong Kind of Reader?

At this stage, you’ve got the attention of your Target Audience, and that’s good.

The problem is that you’ve also accidentally grabbed the attention of people outside your Target Audience. These are people who won’t like your kind of writing. You have an ethical responsibility to let them know fast, so they’ll stop reading your marketing copy and move on.

Why would you do that? Why push away potential customers? Well, for one thing, it’s the honest thing to do. But for another, when you scare away people outside your Target Audience, you also pull in closer those people INSIDE your Target Audience. You’ve given them an identity, and you’ve shown you’re one of them. 

You have one or two paragraphs to spell out who your marketing copy is for. To make clear that you’ve got something good for the right audience. But it’s not good for anyone else. 

At the end of that one or two paragraphs, your Target Audience will have committed to reading all your marketing copy. And everyone else will be scared off. 

That’s good, ethical marketing. The kind that doesn’t make you feel icky. 

Secret #4: Make Your Case

At this point, anyone still reading your marketing copy is very likely to be in your Target Audience. Visualize one person in that Target Audience. Make your case to them why they will love this thing you’ve got that’s perfect for them. 

This can take a long time or a short time. Don’t cut it short, if you need a lot of words. Give them all the info they need. 

Bear in mind that some people in your Target Audience will be skimming down the page, so put the key points at the start of every main section and at the start of every paragraph. 

And also bear in mind that some people read all the copy before they make a decision. So answer all their questions. 

Remember that your goal is not merely to make a sale. Your goal is to help people in your Target Audience. So make sure that your marketing copy helps people all by itself, even if they buy nothing from you. 

That’s right. Give away some of your gold right inside your marketing copy. This costs you nothing, and it helps your Target Audience. Do it and make the world a better place. You’ll sleep well tonight and wake up happy in the morning. 

Write as much copy as you need, and then…

Secret #5: Ask For the Sale

At a certain point, your Target Audience is convinced. They want to buy what you have for sale. Tell them how to get it. Ask for the sale. If you’re writing a sales page, ask them to click the Buy button. If you’re trying to get them to sign up for your blog or email newsletter, ask them to sign up. 

Marketing people call this step the “Call to Action.” It’s not complicated. Ask them to do what you want them to do. Don’t make them wonder. And don’t tell them to think about it and come back later. If this thing you’re selling is good for them, then they need it now, not manana.

Give them one Call to Action, not many. Don’t put a link to all your novels. Put one link. So your Target Audience only has to make one decision—to click or not click. Too many choices just makes things confusing.

Homework: 

I eat my own dog food. I teach things that I do myself. So here’s some simple homework for you, and it’s a very meta assignment. Take a look at this blog post and see if it follows its own advice:

What kind of person would be helped by this article? What kind would not?Does my headline attract the attention of people likely to be helped by this blog post?Do my first couple of paragraphs explain who my Target Audience is, and who it isn’t?What gold do I give away at no cost in this article? What is my Call to Action? Want to Know More?

Want to know more about marketing your novel? Take a look at my page, Marketing Tools for Writers, where I talk about the “Three Rings of Power” in marketing, and I list some of my favorite tools that I use for my own marketing. You might find something useful there, and if so, that’s a win, right?

The post 5 Secrets of Great Marketing Copy appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

How to Make Your Annual Plan

It’s an old tradition to make New Year’s Resolutions every year. It’s an equally old tradition to completely forget them by the second week of January. 

Savvy authors don’t make New Year’s Resolutions. They make an Annual Plan. But what is an Annual Plan? Why is it better than New Year’s Resolutions? How do you make one? And how do you stick with it? 

What is an Annual Plan?

An Annual Plan is just a list of achievements you hope for in the coming year. I can think of three main types of achievements that have gone into my own Annual Plans over the years:

Things you want to get. Things you want to do. Things you want to learn. 

Maybe you want to buy a house. Or a new car. Or a bike. Or whatever. These are things you want to get. 

Maybe you want to hike the Grand Canyon. Or swim the English Channel. Or take a vacation in Italy. These are things you want to do.

Maybe you want to learn how to build websites. Or how to speak French. Or how to fix your car. These are skills you want to learn.

Note that some of these have endpoints and some of them don’t. If you buy a house or a car or a bike, then you either own them or you don’t. If you take a hike or a swim or a vacation, you either did it or you didn’t. But if you learn a new skill, then there are levels of skill, and you may never really be done. So in the case of a skill, it’s always good to specify what level of skill you’re talking about. 

Why is an Annual Plan Better than New Year’s Resolutions?

If you ever made a New Year’s Resolution, think for a moment what went wrong. You almost certainly didn’t follow through on it. Hardly anyone ever does. But why not?

There are several problems with New Year’s Resolutions:

They are often not well-defined. They are often about things beyond your control. They usually just state the endpoint, without any clear path to get there. 

A common resolution is “I want to lose weight this year.” That’s not well-defined. How much weight? What control do you have over your body to make it lose weight? What actions can you take to lose weight, if any, and how much of them do you have to do?

Another common resolution is “I want to get fit this year.” You can see this has the same problems. What do you mean by “fit?” Stronger? More endurance? Higher oxygen uptake? Better-looking? Those are not the same thing, and they may be working at cross-purposes. 

An Annual Plan doesn’t just say what you want to achieve. It maps out a path to get there. And part of the path is to make a periodic review of your Annual Plan to keep you on track. That means scheduling a weekly review into your life.

How Do You Make Your Annual Plan?

Your Annual Plan will not live in isolation, as if it is the only thing you want to achieve in life. Your Annual Plan needs to be part of something bigger. Something that will motivate you to actually follow through on it. And to keep it up to date and make changes to it as your life evolves.

Because your life is going to evolve in unexpected ways. Remember what you intended to do two years ago, at the very beginning of 2020? You had a bunch of things you wanted. And then covid hit. You had to evolve very rapidly to respond to covid. We all did. Because bad stuff happened. Bad stuff happens every year, and good stuff. You have to evolve to respond to both. 

So your Annual Plan is only a part of your life, and it all comes from your Massively Transformative Purpose. If that term isn’t familiar to you, then read my blog post, Your Massively Transformative Purpose. 

Once you know your Massively Transformative Purpose, (your MTP), you need to spell out what Steven Kotler calls your “High Hard Goals.” These are concrete achievements that may take several years. Like graduating from law school. Or launching a new business that achieves $1M in gross sales. Or creating a nonprofit. Or whatever’s in line with your MTP. 

Your High Hard Goals don’t have to be earthshaking. They just need to matter to you, and be difficult enough to challenge you for years and years. 

Once you’ve got your High Hard Goals, you can set up an Annual Plan with a few achievements that you can reasonably make in the coming year that will move you closer to your High Hard Goals. 

Your Annual Plan should include the following:

Achievements for this year. Achievements for the next quarter in this year. Achievements for the next month in this year. Achievements for the next week in this year. A specific time every week when you will review the whole thing and make changes to it as your life evolves.How Do You Stick With Your Annual Plan?

The secret is in that #5 above. You need to review the whole thing every week, and make adjustments. This is a bit like driving through the fog at night. You keep a sharp eye on the road and make adjustments every few seconds as needed. Because you can’t see very much of the road. 

This is why you don’t need to map out your achievements for more than one quarter at a time. The achievements you define for the next quarter should be things that you expect will take you closer to the achievements you defined for the full year. Not the whole way. Just part of the way. Because stuff will happen this quarter, and your life will evolve in ways you can’t predict, and your plan will change.

And likewise, you don’t have to spell out all three months in the next quarter of the year. Just the first month. Because stuff will happen this month, and your life will evolve, and your plan will change.

And likewise, you don’t have to spell out all four weeks in the next month. Just the first week. You know the drill. Stuff will happen this week, and your life will evolve, and your plan will change. 

Evolving Your Annual Plan

Every week, review the whole plan. You can do this very quickly, because the plan is not complete. It only targets the next quarter, and the next month, and the next week. If you made your weekly goals for the past week, congratulate yourself. You did well. 

If you didn’t make your weekly goals, don’t jump on yourself. Ask why and adjust your plan. 

Did you make too many goals for the last week? Lighten up your schedule for next week. Did something bad happen that blocked you? Make a decision on how to deal with that going forward, and push back last week’s goals to next week, or throw them out and make new ones. Did something good happen that got you moving in a new direction? Great! Run with that, if it fits in with your Massively Transformative Purpose. Adjust your Annual Plan all the way up the chain, starting with this coming week, then the current month, then the current quarter, and finally the current year. 

In a word, adapt. Every week. Your Annual Plan is not set in stone. Your Annual Plan is short and easy to adapt. 

And if you keep reviewing it and adapting it every week, it’ll take you somewhere wonderful. You can’t possibly predict exactly where it’ll take you, because you can’t predict what future stuff will come at you. All you can do is play the cards that life deals you. And keep moving forward toward your Massively Transformative Purpose. 

Your Annual Plan is your roadmap to do that efficiently. 

The post How to Make Your Annual Plan appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

Your Massively Transformative Purpose

Writing fiction is hard work for low pay. If you’re going to succeed, you need to know why you’re doing it. A reason to keep going when things are going badly.

A couple of months ago, I read a book by Steven Kotler that helped me see what it is that keeps a writer going. The book is titled The Art of Impossible, and it’s one of the best books I read this year.

The Art of Impossible is about tackling big projects, things that seem impossible. And achieving them. Let’s not fool ourselves that this is easy. It’s hard. But it can be done, if you take a long-term strategy. 

Part 1 of the book covers Motivation, the thing that keeps you going. Kotler breaks Motivation down into several elements, and I can’t possibly cover them all here. But one of the elements seems to be the key. Kotler calls it the Massively Transformative Purpose. MTP for short.

What is a Massively Transformative Purpose?

An MTP is that impossible thing that you want to achieve that will make the world a better place. It’s not merely something that will make you rich. Or famous. Or attractive. Those are all fine things, but they’re all self-centered and they won’t take you very far. Your MTP needs to be something that transcends yourself. It’s bigger than you, and it’ll carry you farther than some selfish desire. That’s just the way you’re wired, neurologically.

A good MTP is always a bit vague. Miss America contestants are famous for all wanting to achieve “world peace.” Plenty of jokes have been made about that. But “world peace” is actually not a bad MTP. Because it’s vague and amorphous. What does “world peace” look like? You have to think about what it means to you, and then set some clear, precise goals that will take you towards world peace. Kotler calls those “high hard goals.” 

High hard goals are things you can measure. You’ll know when you achieve them. And that’s good. None of them will get you all the way to your MTP, whatever it may be. “World peace” may never arrive. But those high hard goals CAN arrive. 

How Much is Too Much?

You might think that you are only allowed to have one MTP in your life, and you have to be focused completely on that until you die. Which sounds like a grind.

But Kotler says you can have more than one MTP. He recommends that you have no more than three Massively Transformative Purposes in your life. He has three. After I read the book and thought about it some, I realized I have three also, and mine are all related to each other. 

What Do You Do With Your MTP?

It takes a fair bit of work to figure out your Massively Transformative Purpose in life. Much of Chapter 2 of Kotler’s book is about how to figure out yours. 

So why go to all this work? There are two clear benefits of working out your MTPs:

MTPs tell you when to say no. It’s all too easy to say yes to opportunities that come along. Until your life is so packed, you feel like you’re drowning. But your MTPs give you a way to know when to say no. If that amazing opportunity doesn’t take you closer to your MTP, then say no. Period. I wish I’d known this forty years ago. MTPs keep you going when the night is dark. If you’ve never known a dark night, you won’t get this. If you have, you will. Keep living long enough, and you’ll have plenty of dark nights. And you’ll be very glad you have an MTP to light the way forward.How to Find Your Massively Transformative Purpose

Read the first two chapters of Steven Kotler’s book, The Art of Impossible. Chapter 1 is groundwork. Chapter 2 will walk you through the process of finding your MTP. 

I won’t try to summarize the steps here. You need the groundwork before you can understand the steps. Get the book and read the first couple of chapters and make a note of every actionable task you find. 

Then do those actionable tasks, and at the end of the game, you’ll have your Massively Transformative Purpose. 

And your life will suddenly have a very clear direction. Good luck!

The post Your Massively Transformative Purpose appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

Search Engine Optimization for Novelists

What is “Search Engine Optimization” and why would any novelist need it?

Here’s the short answer: If you have a website to promote your books, then you’d like people to visit it, right? And you’d rather not pay to get people to come to your site, right? And the reason search engines like Google exist is to help people find things on the web they’re looking for, right? So Search Engine Optimization is the process of making sure they find you.

By the way, Search Engine Optimization is normally abbreviated as “SEO,” so that’s what I’ll call it for the rest of this article. 

Why Authors Need SEO

A novelist can live their whole life never thinking about SEO. After all, it’s a techie thing, and authors are creative, so why bother? The answer is simple. If you don’t bother with SEO, then your site will not work as hard for you as it should. But if you take a little time to learn SEO, your site can do amazing things for you.

What Goes Wrong When an Author has Poor SEO

And here’s the problem: Search engines don’t always get it right, if you don’t help them out a little. Twenty years ago, an author friend emailed me to ask, “why does Google hate me?” She had noticed that when she searched for her name on Google, the description Google showed in the search results was some very strange paragraph. It didn’t really explain who she was or what she wrote, and she thought that meant Google didn’t like her.

I did about three minutes of research and told her what the problem was. Whoever made her website hadn’t done anything to help Google figure out what to display in the search results. So Google’s engine came up with … something, but it wasn’t a very good something. I told her how to fix it, and ten minutes later, it was fixed. For good. (For techies: she had no meta description on any of her pages. So Google used the description it found on Alexa, and it was a very generic description.)

That’s part of what Search Engine Optimization is about—helping Google help you.

What Goes Right When an Author has Good SEO

When your website has good SEO, you get traffic to your site. Traffic to your site means more True Fans sign up for your e-mail newsletter. More True Fans on your newsletter means that the launch of your next novel goes better. This is part of the Virtuous Cycle of Marketing that I blogged about earlier this year.

As an example, when I first started this website, I put a bit of thought into how to make life easy for the search engines to find my articles. And over the years, this site has pulled in more than 10,000,000 page views. Most of those came from the search engines. That’s free traffic, coming in 24/7/365, whether I was working or at the beach or sleeping.

WordPress and the Yoast SEO Plugin

Now let’s be clear that the web has evolved a lot in twenty years. Very few people write their own code for their website anymore. Most authors use a free tool called WordPress to create their site. WordPress is great (I use it for both my websites), so in this article, I’ll focus on how to do your SEO for a WordPress site.

And the search engines have evolved a lot also. Google and Bing and all the others are vastly smarter than they used to be. I can remember all kinds of tricks people used to play to “fool” Google into sending traffic to their sites. Those tricks don’t work anymore. 

Sound SEO

Only two “tricks” actually work long-term for good sound SEO, and neither of them is a trick:

Write clear, useful, informative content on your website. Give Google and the other search engines the basic info they need to understand your site. 

A very popular tool for helping you do both of those things is a WordPress plugin called Yoast SEO. If you have a WordPress site and don’t know what a “WordPress plugin” is, then you didn’t create your website; you paid someone to do it, and they will know what a plugin is. In fact, they probably already installed the free Yoast SEO plugin on your site, because it’s good and you can’t beat the price of free.

How Yoast SEO Helps

If you have a WordPress website, you should at least know how to add new pages to your site (and also new blog posts, if your site includes a blog). And the point of the Yoast SEO plugin is that it looks over each page or post you write while you’re writing it, and it gives you helpful suggestions on those two things I mentioned above. So Yoast does these two things: 

Yoast SEO helps you write clear, useful, informative contentYoast SEO helps you give Google the info it needs about your page or post

SEO has gotten very complicated over the years. Yoast handles a lot of those complications for you, by making suggestions. But you need some basic understanding of SEO to understand what Yoast is telling you. And where will you get that basic understanding?

Your One-Stop Source for Learning SEO: Yoast Academy

The best place to learn about the Yoast SEO plugin is a section of Yoast’s website called Yoast Academy. Part of Yoast Academy is free and part of it is not free. Let me explain why.

What’s in Yoast Academy

I said above that the Yoast SEO plugin is free. So how can they afford to make an amazingly great and powerful tool and give it away free to millions of website owners? They afford it by making a second plugin called Yoast SEO Premium that is not free and has even more features than Yoast SEO. (I like Yoast SEO Premium and I pay for it on both my websites, because it’s excellent.)

Yoast Academy is a set of very good online video courses that cover most of what you need to know in SEO. They have 8 excellent free courses, and 9 even more intensive paid courses. If you own Yoast SEO Premium, then you get free access to the paid courses—they’re part of the premium package. I recommend that you start with the free courses, and only take the paid ones if you need them. 

Where to Find Yoast Academy

You can find Yoast Academy here on the Yoast website, but you’ll need to create a free account first before you can log in to the Academy. 

Once you log in, you’ll be overwhelmed with choices. Yoast Academy has 17 courses! They’re all good, but which should you take first? 

I’ll answer that question in the rest of this article. For most novelists, you can learn the basics of SEO by taking just a couple of courses in Yoast Academy. Then as you get more advanced, you might decide to take more specialized courses that explain the fine points in more detail. Or you might decide that you know enough to do your job and never take another course again.

But First: How Well Do You Know WordPress?

Nobody is an expert in everything. It’s quite possible you don’t feel like you’re really up to speed on using WordPress yet. 

That’s OK. If you don’t feel comfortable yet writing your own pages or posts on WordPress, then Yoast Academy has a free course that will teach you the basics quickly. It’s called WordPress for Beginners and it will get you rolling fast. 

If you need it, start there. Don’t try to cut corners by trying to run before you can walk. You’ll be surprised how fast you learn the essentials. And after that, you’ll be off to the races.

Using the Free Yoast Plugin Effectively

I recommend that authors start by using the free Yoast SEO plugin. If that’s all you ever need, then you won’t ever pay anything, and you’ll get pretty good Search Engine Optimization on your site, and that’s a deal.

Core Courses for Yoast SEO Users

In this case, the very first course you should take in Yoast Academy is the free course SEO for Beginners. It’s quite short, but it’s packed with all the most essential info to get you using the Yoast SEO plugin quickly and well. 

Once you understand how SEO works, then choose from one of these two free courses that will teach you how to use the Yoast SEO plugin effectively:

Yoast SEO Plugin for WordPress (block editor) Yoast SEO Plugin for WordPress (classic editor)

How do you decide which of these to take? That depends which WordPress editor you’re using to create your pages and posts. There are two standard editors available: 1) the new “block editor”, or 2) the older “classic editor”. I’d recommend that you use the new block editor, since the word on the street is that soon the classic editor will no longer be supported in WordPress. So you might as well start using the block editor, which is the future of WordPress. Once you decide which WordPress editor you’re using, that tells you which of the two courses above you should take.

More Advanced Courses for Yoast SEO Users

That may be all the courses you ever need. If so, that’s wonderful. However, you may also decide that you want to go deeper on some topic or another. In that case, here are a couple of other free courses you might want to take, in the most likely order that you’d want to take them:

Structured Data for Beginners (this teaches you how to give Google the special information it needs in order to qualify your pages for those “rich results” you often see at the top of a Google search results page.   Block Editor Training (this teaches you all the ins and outs of the WordPress block editor.

There are a couple of other free offerings in Yoast Academy, and you can check them out when you’ve taken all the courses above. And if these free courses are all you ever take, you’ll be ahead of the vast majority of other novelists. 

But you might choose to go farther, in case you decide to pay for the Yoast SEO Premium plugin….

Using the Yoast SEO Premium Plugin Effectively

As I said above, the reason the Yoast SEO plugin is free is because somebody is paying the bills—the people who pay for Yoast SEO Premium. I pay for this plugin and I think it’s a bargain. In case you decide to upgrade to Yoast SEO Premium, you’ll also get access to several very intensive courses that will teach you even more about SEO than the free courses. 

Core Courses for Yoast SEO Premium Users

I recommend that you start with the course All Around SEO. This will teach you quite a lot about SEO, covering the entire subject in logical order: first keyword research, then SEO copywriting, then site structure, then technical SEO, then off-page SEO, and finally the all-important user experience. This is a really good course, and you might decide it’s all you need to know about SEO. 

Once you’ve taken the above course, you’ll still want to take one of the two free courses on how to use the Yoast SEO plugin. These will teach you all the ins and outs of the plugin you’re using. I mentioned them above, but here they are again: 

Yoast SEO Plugin for WordPress (block editor) Yoast SEO Plugin for WordPress (classic editor) More Advanced Courses for Yoast SEO Premium Users

If you really want to go deep, Yoast Academy has several other courses that go with Yoast SEO Premium plugin. Here is the logical order to take them in (because the later courses depend on the earlier ones):

Keyword Research (which teaches you how to decide what keywords to target in each page or post SEO Copywriting (which teaches you how to write clear, useful, informative content for your website, the kind Google likes to send people to) Site Structure (which teaches you how to organize your site so Google can understand which pages and posts are most important and which are less so) Technical SEO (which teaches you all about “crawlability”) Understanding Structured Data (which teaches you how to make your site really attractive to users, and therefore really attractive to Google)

Yoast Academy also has several other premium courses that are of less interest to novelists, so I’ll skip over those here. But if you’re interested, you can easily find them all on the Yoast Academy main page. 

Ready to Get to Work?

In conclusion, SEO has grown into a big and complicated topic. You could spend years learning it all yourself, but life is short. It’s much quicker to simply install the free Yoast SEO plugin or the payware Yoast SEO Premium plugin and then take a few courses in Yoast Academy. The people at Yoast have already done mountains of work so you won’t have to. Take advantage of their knowledge and hard work to make your website more attractive to people searching for information on the web. 

Want to learn more about marketing your novels? Check out my page on Marketing Tools for Writers where I recommend the best tools I know of for all the many aspects of marketing that an author needs to know.

The post Search Engine Optimization for Novelists appeared first on Advanced Fiction Writing.

A Virtuous Cycle for Marketing Your Books

Marketing books is hard. There are many dozens of things authors are “supposed” to be doing to increase their sales. The problem is that everything takes time, and authors are busy people. 

It’s natural for an author to ask what their core marketing machine should look like. If you reduce things to the bare essentials, what would that be?

Here’s my opinion. The core marketing machine for an author should take the form of a “Virtuous Cycle” with three basic parts:

Your books send your fans to your website. Your website invites your fans to sign up for your e-mail list.Your e-mail list onboarding sequence promotes all your books. 

This is called a “Virtuous Cycle” because each part of it feeds into the next, like this graphic:

But Where’s the Beginning?

You might ask, “which of these is the beginning?” That is, where do your fans get into this Virtuous Cycle?

The answer is that they might join it anywhere:

They might happen onto one of your books in a store and discover that they like your writing. Or they might chance across your website in one of the thousand ways somebody can come to a website. Or they might join your e-mail list in one of many common ways.

But no matter how they enter the Virtuous Cycle, they keep going through until they’ve done it all. They’ve visited your website, they’ve joined your e-mail list, and they’ve read most or all of your books. 

Why This Matters in the Short Term

Once you’ve built your Virtuous Cycle, you can then expand on it in many different ways. Each way will inject new fans into the Virtuous Cycle at some point:

You can advertise your books directly using Amazon ads or Facebook ads or BookBub ads or any of the major deal sites. You can focus on bringing in traffic to your website using search-engine optimization or ads on Facebook or Google or interviews on blogs or podcasts or many other ways. You can focus on building your e-mail list using Facebook ads or joint author giveaways or many other list-building methods.

Each of these extensions to your marketing engine may or may not be cost-effective in the short-term. That is, running paid ads to promote one book may be a money-loser for that one book. But if it brings more readers to your website and then they sign up for your e-mail list and then they buy all your other books, then it’s a win in the long-term. And if the ads don’t work, you can stop them at any time, and your Virtuous Cycle still keeps working. 

But the important thing is that you can now experiment on all those dozens of marketing methods that authors are “supposed” to do. Each of them will theoretically inject new fans into your Virtuous Cycle at some point. Each of them may or may not be cost-effective. Each of them can be turned on or off at any time, and the core marketing machine still just works. 

Why This Matters in the Long Term

In the long term, you will continue to write books on a sustainable schedule. Maybe you can write one book per year. Or three. Or ten. 

It’s up to you to find a schedule that you can keep at for the long haul. 

If you’ve built your core marketing machine as a Virtuous Cycle, then every time you launch a book, here’s what will happen:

You’ll send several e-mails out to your True Fans, who will generate a big spike in sales during your Launch Week. This will drive your book up the bestseller charts in its various categories, bringing it to the attention of readers who never heard of you before. These new readers will now enter your Virtuous Cycle and grow your e-mail newsletter fan base. They’ll discover all your other books, and those will all see a surge in sales. 

So over time, your set of True Fans will grow and grow. And each book launch will do a bit better than the one before. And in between launches, your growing backlist of books will attract new readers, so your fan base will grow faster and faster. 

The mathematical term for what happens when you have a working Virtuous Cycle is “exponential growth.” If that sounds awesome to you, it is. Exponential growth is how all successful products become breakout big winners. 

How to Take Action When You’re Busy

What this means for a busy, overworked author is this. If you feel overwhelmed with all the marketing you’re doing or all the marketing you could be doing, then focus on your core marketing machine. 

Create your Virtuous Cycle first. Build your website and hook it up to your e-mail newsletter signup. Get your onboarding sequence written for your e-mail newsletter, and use it to promote your books. Make sure all your books give your readers an incentive to go to your website to sign up for your e-mail newsletter. 

Once your Virtuous Cycle is in place, you can afford to try other things—various kinds of paid ads or search engine optimization or social media or whatever you want to try. 

Each of those is an experiment—an optional way to inject True Fans into your Virtuous Cycle. If they work, great! If they don’t, abandon them and try something else. 

What you never want to do is abandon your Virtuous Cycle. Like diamonds, your Virtuous Cycle is forever. 

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