How to get 5,000-20,000 new readers for your Substack publication every month

This is an updated reprint of an article I wrote for Nick Stephenson’s Your First 10,000 Readers. It’s several years old by this point, but there is no doubt that viral builders like the ones I talk about in this article have been largely responsible for the massive growth of my author platform. If you are a paid member, I recommend my articles Where to invest your time and money when building an audience for your writing, How to find more readers for your books and get stacked with subs on Substack, and How to fall in love with book marketing as good complements to this one.

If you are not a paid member, you can read everything with a 7-day free trial, or give us a one-time tip.

​In my career as an author, one thing has been responsible for more of my audience growth success than anything else, and that is the ability to work together with other authors on big promotions (which, of course, helps me grow my audience and sell books). I have run anthologies, been part of author book bundles, and tabled with authors at shows to minimize costs and maximize exposure for us all.

However, all those other promotions pale in comparison to what I’ve gained by working with other authors on group builders to build up my mailing list. I participated in over 50 of these promotions before starting to run them myself, and those promotions brought in over 100,000 leads.

For years, I ran somewhere between 1-4 group giveaways for authors every month, with each one netting between 3,000-8,000 new readers in just a couple of weeks’ time. If you add that all up, I pulled in between 5,000-20,000 new potential readers each and every month when I was running them consistently.

That’s a ton of potential readers. It’s mind-boggling really, to think that I’ve found a way to bring unlimited readers into my ecosystem and share my work with them.

I have been a proponent of building a mailing list for years, but I could never scale very large, nor very quickly, in the early years of my career.

In my first 2 years trying to grow my audience, I was only able to add 3,000 people to my mailing list, combined. That’s less than I can get during one group builder, which still blows my mind.

After I learned about group builders, I was able to explode my mailing list, and my fanbase in the process.

There’s no better way to build a mailing list quickly than using group giveaways, and it’s simpler than you think to create an effective one that can add thousands of new leads to your list.

Today, I’m going to give away all my secrets so you can start having some of your own incredible audience growth using this strategy and explode your Substack publication.

Admittedly, this is a pretty controversial audience growth tactic in the author community. Some people swear by it and others hate it. It might turn a lot of you off, and that’s okay. Hopefully, you can at least learn something from the strategy that you can carry forward into your own publication.

*** Please note that if you are reading this via email, Substack only sent out a partial version and the article will eventually stop without notice. If you want to read the whole 6,500-word article, then go to this website.***

Step 1: Choose a Giveaway Platform

Many people choose to run giveaways through their social media accounts, but if you are going to get serious about doing giveaways, I recommend choosing a platform that specializes in managing them, so you can cut down on the headache of keeping track of entries and choosing a winner. The right platform will do that all for you and provide a handy spreadsheet that you can disburse to the other authors working with you once the giveaway is done.

There are three main platforms for running giveaways: Rafflecopter, KingSumo, and Gleam. Some people also use Upviral, but it’s very expensive, and I have not found it any more useful than the more modestly priced options.

Honestly, I feel the same way about Gleam, which is less expensive than Upviral, but more expensive than the other options. I pretty much exclusively use King Sumo, but there are also reasons to choose one of the other platforms as well.

I like King Sumo more than any other platform because it offers a lifetime payment option, which allows you can buy the service once and use it forever without ever paying a second time. King Sumo used to be much more expensive, but they currently have a lifetime deal for $49. 

Step 2: Choose a Fandom

One of the biggest problems people face when they start hosting giveaways is overcoming their desire to give away their own books.

This is folly because the hardest part is getting people to care about your books – and people can’t do that if they have no idea you exist.

That’s why you’re running a giveaway in the first place, after all. So that you can get more fans for your books. If everybody loved your books, you would have tons of raving fans already, and giveaways would be unnecessary.

The two biggest factors in a good giveaway are the enthusiasm people have to enter it in the first place and the virality of the giveaway after somebody enters to share it with their friends. People have to be really excited about your giveaway or they won’t enter, and even if they do enter, they won’t share it afterward, which means you won’t get new entries.

Since you’re a less well-known author, people just aren’t that excited about your work. That’s okay. People honestly aren’t that excited about my work, either, except for those already in my own little fandom.

That is why I’m running these giveaways in the first place. Given that the general public doesn’t care much about our work, it behooves us to pick a fandom people DO care about very deeply.

Think about a franchise like Once Upon a Time or Game of Thrones. People from all walks of life would love to win a big prize pack from those fandoms, right?

And if you write YA fantasy or epic fantasy, then there’s a good chance that a lot of those fans who are in that fandom will like that work, right?

This is what we’re doing with giveaways. We’re trying to choose a fandom that is LIKE our books, but much more popular than our books, so we can introduce those fans to our work, and have confidence that some percentage of them will become fans of our work.

You probably already have a few fandoms in mind who would be perfect fits to bring more fans to your work, but if not, then you can ask people who already enjoy your work, or you can go to the Ads Manager, in the Business Manager and do some research.

Set up a test ad and then play with the detailed targeting options in the ad set to find a great target for your giveaway. Even if you aren’t going to use ads, this is a good strategy to see what fandoms people are talking about right now. Ideally, you’re looking for a fandom with at least 1,000,000 people in it. The more people it has, generally, the more rabid the fandom.

If you don’t want to do all this work, an easy first giveaway choice is to offer an Amazon gift card. Everybody needs an Amazon gift card, right? Some people need baby formula, and others need books, while others might want to buy a movie.

And therein lies the problem with Amazon gift cards. Everyone needs an Amazon gift card, including people who are not in your target readership.

Amazon gift cards are a great no-hassle giveaway option, because Amazon already has a rabid fanbase and built-in virality, but they sell so many things that you will likely get a lot of people who are outside your target market.

Still, for dipping your toes into giveaways, Amazon gift cards are a great beginners’ choice. The first giveaways I ever ran were for gift cards. I don’t recommend you stick with gift cards, though, once you learn the ropes of running giveaways. Another good one is an Amazon Kindle, which is more targeted than a gift card, but it doesn’t really hone in on any specific genre.

Step 3: Choose a Budget

The next step to running a giveaway is choosing the budget. Getting a group of authors to agree on anything is a nightmare, but if you go to them with a fully formed cost, then they can choose to join or not very easily.

The budget will also inform the number of authors you need to join your giveaway to make it a success. There are two main pieces that go into the budget, but the most important part is the prize pack.

Your prize pack is the group of gifts you are offering to the winner of your giveaway. Here is an example of a prize pack. I used this recently for a giveaway to great effect.

You need an enticing prize pack to excite people into entering your giveaway and share it once they do, so you need to make it really good.

I have found the best budget for a prize pack is between $200-$300. This allows you to offer between 8-12 amazing prizes while keeping the budget manageable, especially at the beginning.

Don’t make this part hard on yourself. Just go to Amazon and type in the name of your fandom. Then, watch what comes up as the best sellers with the most reviews. Those are going to be the most enticing things that people are the most excited about and should make for excellent prizes. Plus, using Amazon allows you to ship from one place, instead of dozens, and cut down on a lot of headaches.

People often ask “Can I really promote another company? Is that legal?” I am not a lawyer. However, it seems to me that you are not actually promoting the target of your builder. You are promoting a prize pack, which you will buy. Under the doctrine of first sale, you are allowed to then sell or give away products that you own.

You absolutely cannot, and I do not endorse anyone who would, engage in false advertising. I don’t even want to come close to that line. In all your marketing, you must disclose you are giving away a prize pack, and on the giveaway page you must disclose what you are giving away and whose list you will distribute the list to in legible print. I put all that at the top so there is no doubt what will happen to their information. I am absolutely fanatical about data privacy.

This kind of marketing is something companies do all the time. They are constantly promoting other products to get people onto their email list.

If you don’t want to run ads, then you can end your budget here. However, the second part of your giveaway budget is advertising. Advertising is a great way to create more virality for your giveaway, but advertising requires a bigger budget. I recommend a budget of $50-$100/day in advertising over the course of a 9-12 day giveaway, which is the length of my average giveaways.

Once you have your budget, you need to decide how many authors you want in your giveaway so you can know how much to charge them all. If you have a budget of $1,000, and you want ten people in total, then you’ll each need to pay $100 to break up the budget evenly.

For your first couple of giveaways, I recommend having a budget of $250-$500, and expecting 9 other people to join, so you can each pay $25-$50 each.

The Amazon gift card is even more effective here, because you can then charge $25-$50 to each person, and depending on how many people join can determine the size of the prize pack. If 20 people join, you could have a $500 prize pack, assuming you are not running advertising.

Honestly, the winners of all my giveaways have the option to choose an Amazon gift card if they would prefer. About half of them choose the gift card, but I’ve still got that highly targeted list, which is the point.

Step 4: Find the other writers

Once you have the fandom and your budget, it should be relatively easy to find other writers you know to join in with you. Likely, you are friends with writers who are looking to grow their publications as well, and they probably write in similar genres to you.

Go to them first and try to get them to join you. Once you have a couple who are interested, then you can post onto writer forums to try to get others. However, please be careful because many groups do not allow self-promotion and since you are offering a service, moderators will often delete your post or ban you.

If you have problems finding writers in your genre, then I recommend expanding out to all writers and offering an Amazon gift card as a prize. It’s a broad approach, but you can whittle down your list to the responsive people afterward. It is also a good idea to try an Amazon gift card your first time out so you can prove yourself.

Using an Amazon gift card means you can open your pool of participants from a single genre to every genre imaginable. Be warned, though. If you do not have a tight genre and aren’t paying attention to who’s engaging with you, then you risk your list being pollinated with people who don’t read your genre.

In the beginning, this might be less of a concern for you though, as building your confidence in running giveaways and having a “seed list”, a list of people on your list at the beginning to build on in the future, may be more important than having a tight list full of genre-specific readers.

Once you have built a bigger publication, it will attract better-known writers with bigger lists for cross-promotion, which creates a positive feedback loop. This is when filling your builders becomes much easier. The bigger the list, the more power it brings with it.

This works very well with authors, but it would work equally well with a Substack publication, especially since most of what you are offering is free content to subscribers and offering a low-cost monthly cost on top of it.

Step 5: Running the Giveaway

Set up a Google Form to get the information you need on your builder, and during the signup process get everybody to join a Facebook group for the giveaway.

You’ll want to set up a group text for your giveaway, so you can manage the giveaway appropriately and make sure people are sharing the giveaway with their audience. The authors you work with, especially at the beginning, likely all have very small lists and audiences, so it’s important that you’re all sharing with your lists and on social media to maximize the giveaway.

Once you have the giveaway set up, send the link to all the participants and make sure that post to verify they are doing the work. If they don’t do the work, don’t give them the list. Make this clear at the beginning.

For many of my giveaways, getting the list at the end is contingent on sharing every day and sending two emails to their list on two separate weeks. The participants have to post that they have accomplished these tasks each day with photographic proof, and those that don’t are deleted from the group. I have not had to delete a participant in a very long time, because my expectations of them are set up in advance.

This is one of the most important aspects of running the giveaway. Set expectations early and make sure everyone is on the same page. Remember, you are the leader and people’s attitudes are contingent on your attitude.

Once the giveaway is over, I use a service called BriteVerify to make sure all of the emails are valid, and then upload the list to the group for everyone, and tag them on it.

Step 6: Trimming your list

I am generally in the camp of trimming your list less often, or not at all. I’ve seen people sit on my list for years and then suddenly spend $500 on my books, so I am wary of culling buyers from my list. I make an exception for this kind of growth. It’s not the only exception I make, but I don’t trim often.

Because these readers don’t know who you are when they sign up, you need to have a longer email automation follow-up sequence to warm them up.

I recommend sending an email like this to subscribers right when you finish your giveaway before you distribute your list.

Once you send this email, I would send at least 3-5 follow-up emails to this list to introduce yourself, your publication, and what you do before adding them to your publication.

Yes, this means having a secondary email service like Mailblast, Flodesk, or Beehiiv since Substack does not allow this, but if you’re going all-in on this strategy, it’s worth it. I use Flodesk because of its unlimited contacts and emails. Once people are warmed up, I then bring them to Substack. I would not use Mailchimp or Mailerlite for this as their spam thresholds are too low.

It should be noted that if you import a huge number of emails to a platform, they will likely reach out and ask how you acquired these emails, so you should make sure to have an answer prepared with citations to prove you attained these emails through proper channels and the entrants knew they were signing up for your email list when they entered it.

Additionally, I would only add subscribers who opened those emails to your publication.

If you’re used to a 40-50% open rate in your emails, then seeing a 15-20% open rate might be shocking, but remember these people don’t know who you are and you’re introducing yourself to them for the first time.

That said, I just checked several of my initial emails and I was getting 40-50% open rates on my first email. They dropped considerably after that, though. It’s important to remember that these people signed up for a freebie, so they will likely be enticed by something free, like comping them a month to your Substack as a bonus.

Make sure to upload these to Substack on their own day, and then after three months check to see if they are still engaging. If they aren’t still opening, I would delete them.

You can check this in DASHBOARD>SETTINGS>SUBSCRIBERS and then filtering by:

• SUBSCRIPTION TYPE is COMP/FREE (depending on if you comp them and for how long)

• SUBSCRIPTION SOURCE (FREE) is IMPORT

• EMAIL OPENS (ALL-TIME) is less than or equal to 1

• LINK CLICKS is less than or equal to 1

• COMMENTS is less than or equal to 1

• ACTIVITY is ZERO STARS

• SUBSCRIPTION DATE is [DATE YOUR IMPORTED]

If you plan to do several of these, I would consider batching and including several together so you don’t have to do this multiple times a month. If you want to give subscribers an additional chance to stay on your list, I recommend sending an email like this with a heading something like “Do you want to keep getting emails from me?”

These emails will likely have the lowest open rate of anything you send ever, but that’s why you are even considering trimming your list.

You can also run this all through Substack, but you’ll have to adjust the settings. Since I have multiple other email services, I run them through those. You can set it up to filter instead by opens instead of clicks, too, if you are just trying to clean out people who drag down your open rate.

How could this work for Substack publications?

Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Russell, you are a mad marketing genius, but how could this work for Substack publications in practice?”

Let’s assume your group of writers all have Substacks targeted at helping authors. Years ago, I ran a solo Masterclass giveaway for my podcast (the most relevant episodes of which have been archived here) where I gave away a year subscription to Masterclass for one lucky entrant.

It didn’t do as well as my fiction ones, but I was able to still get 959 entries to it for myself. If I had a group of writers working with me it would have done way better than running it solo, too.

I would imagine a similar type of prize for a Substack-centric giveaway, or maybe something like a gift card to CreativeLive or Udemy. You could also put together some sort of prize pack including gift memberships to other Substacks and/or relevant industry blogs. The problem would be that Substack is still rather niche for targeting purposes, so you would have to find something that is relevant to the broader audience of authors to build virality.

I would additionally offer a lifetime subscription to every writer’s Substack to the winner, and a comped membership of 14-30 days to everyone who joins even if they didn’t win. If you do that then everyone wins something, and I think that would be very enticing for readers to enter. It would also keep people engaged after the giveaway ends, too, since they are getting something valuable from you for free.

Then, you can each simply promote it to your existing Substacks or you can run Facebook ads targeted at authors to supercharge entries.

(P.S. - I would absolutely join something like this if anyone out there is intrigued enough to set one up. If you would be interested, too, then comment below. Who knows? If there’s enough interest maybe I’ll even set one up.)

You could also do something similar for food Substacks or fiction Substacks or any Substack interest.

If you want to learn more, I have a course called How to run a 5000+ email group viral builder which you get as part of our Author Ecosystem membership. If you upgrade to the $1,000 bundle, you receive it and all our current course offerings, including our Kickstarter and Direct Sales Accelerators.

Are these Builders GDPR Compliant?

I am not a lawyer, so I can’t answer this question with any degree of certainty. However, I make sure my giveaways are NOT targeted at the EU. In fact, my giveaways specifically say that EU residents are prohibited from entering. All of my advertising is focused on the US market, and in the text of the giveaway, it twice explains that the people are signing up for ALL of the email lists from the sponsors.

I also make sure to list all the sponsors clearly at the top of the giveaway so entrants know who will be getting the emails once the giveaway is over. I still sometimes get people complaining because of getting multiple emails, but I can always drive them back to the giveaway page to show them why they received the email, and it prevents people from signing up at the beginning who are not willing to get multiple emails from authors.

The Main Reason to do Group Giveaways

Marketing is very expensive, and pooling money allows you to offer bigger and better prizes to your audiences than you could do alone. Since books are generally priced between $2.99-$5.99, the profit margins are very small, so anything you can do to cut down the cost of getting new readers is beneficial.

Additionally, sponsoring giveaways makes you look awesome to your existing audience since you are offering cool prizes all the time.

If you only have a little money for marketing, your marketing dollars go further when you work together.

For me, there is no contest on the most effective strategy for building my own readership. If I have to make a choice on where to spend my marketing dollars, I will choose group giveaways every time, because they allow me to expose myself to new potential fans consistently, and the more often you can find new fans, the quicker you will gain a groundswell of new readers. There really is no better way to build an audience quickly and cost-effectively.

That said, once you’ve finished your giveaway, you’ll now have a list of cold leads.

The biggest mistake people make with giveaways is that they add them to their mailing list and expect them to behave like somebody who already knows, likes, and trusts their brand. Cold leads need to be warmed up significantly through an autoresponder sequence and generally exist in your ecosystem for a long time before they fall in love with your work. Over time, some of them will become warm leads.

Since these new subscribers are cold leads, they will also open your email at a significantly lower rate than your existing subscribers and will unsubscribe at a higher rate. You might then ask, why is it even worth it to go after these subscribers?

Because there is a finite supply of warm leads, and in order to create a bigger audience, you eventually need to expand beyond warm leads and find new traffic sources to help grow your business.

Warm leads really aren’t the end goal, though, because what we really want are hot leads ready to buy from us and become evangelists for our brand.

The way you build a bigger pool of hot leads who will support your publication financially is to build a sales funnel with a lot of people at the top of it (cold leads) and a process to bring them deeper into your brand to become warm leads and then hot leads ready to buy from you.

The cold leads you gather at the awareness stage then funnel down into the warm leads of the interest stage, who eventually reach the decision stage as hot leads, and then take action. has a great graphic and explanation of how to build out the top, middle, and bottom of your funnel through content marketing. I’m in love with this graphic she used.

The problem for most authors is they don’t cast a wide enough net at the awareness stage, so they never build critical mass at the action stage to create a sustainable business.

By increasing the number of people who know about your brand, and having a process to bring them through your funnel into the action stage, you can create a critical mass of excited fans who love your work enough to financially support it.

It’s really important to understand, though, that you can’t just plop these people into your publication and expect them to become raving fans. You have to give them a reason why they should care and craft an environment for them to thrive.

This might mean investing in an outside service like Flodesk, Email Octopus, Beehiiv, or Mailchimp that can help develop an email sequence to bring people into your publication in a deeper way. It could also mean crafting your articles such that they reach out to new readers as often as they do to long-time fans.

In order to give you some maths, over my time running giveaways, I collected a total of 175,000 leads for my business. Of those, 21,000 are still active today, which means over 150,000 leads either never engaged with my brand, engaged for a short time, and then fell off, or unsubscribed.

It’s important to note that 150,000 didn’t unsubscribe from my newsletter over the years. That would have been a nightmare situation for me. I took most of them off my email list myself because they weren’t engaged. Lots of people talk about how they will never cull their list, but if you use this strategy, then you absolutely should do it, at least for these subscribers. Otherwise, your open rates and deliverability will suffer. Plus, nobody likes seeing a 5% open rate. It’s depressing.

You might say that a 12% retention rate is horrible, and it’s definitely not ideal, but at scale, that 12% became 21,000 people engaged with my brand.

Of those 21,000 warm leads, I make about 1,000-3,000 sales a year, which financially supports my ability to continue doing this work.

Roughly 1% of those 175,000 people became buyers of my work. A 1-2% conversion rate might not sound like a lot, but it’s pretty standard for this kind of work. I don’t think it’s great by any stretch, but it’s definitely attainable.

The probability is that if you only have 1,750 leads, then with the same scale you’ll have 10-20 sales, which is not enough to run a business.

Even if you use Substack’s metric and assume that 10% of your subscribers will become paid members, at the high end you’ll make $10,500 from those 1,750 subscribers if you charge $5/mo and never offer a discount. That’s a great start, but eventually, you might want to scale up beyond that if you want to make a full-time living, and that requires cold leads like the kind you find with viral builders.

If you are sick of hopping to every social media app and relying on slow, organic growth that seems to take forever, you can throw some gas on the fire by augmenting your current strategies with this kind of audience building, not instead of what you’re doing, but as a supplement to your existing strategies to help you grow even faster.

If you liked this article, I hope you will consider becoming a paid member. If you are already a paid member, I recommend my articles Where to invest your time and money when building an audience for your writing, How to find more readers for your books and get stacked with subs on Substack, and How to fall in love with book marketing as good complements to this one.

If you are not a paid member, you can read everything with a 7-day free trial, or give us a one-time tip.