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:

1. People who just finished reading one of your novels. 
2. People who come to your website. 
3. 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 Ninja
• Newsletter 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. 

“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. 

 

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:

1. What kind of person would be helped by this article? What kind would not?
2. Does my headline attract the attention of people likely to be helped by this blog post?
3. Do my first couple of paragraphs explain who my Target Audience is, and who it isn’t?
4. What gold do I give away at no cost in this article? 
5. 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?

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 content
• Yoast 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:

1. 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.  
2. 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):

1. Keyword Research (which teaches you how to decide what keywords to target in each page or post
2. SEO Copywriting (which teaches you how to write clear, useful, informative content for your website, the kind Google likes to send people to)
3. 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)
4. Technical SEO (which teaches you all about “crawlability”)
5. 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.