Where to invest your time and money when building an audience for your writing

This article deals both with organic and inorganic audience growth, along with how to quickly grow your audience without breaking the bank. Two topics that are near and dear to my heart, and at the core of how I’ve helped other authors grow their businesses over the years. If you are a paid subscriber, then you can search the archives for my post on networking and growing your Substack both of which complement this article nicely.

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There are thousands, maybe tens of thousands of ways out there to "build your writing career". You could spend a fortune and years of your life trying them all if you wanted. I know, because that's exactly what I did for many years. There are funnels, tunnels, and maybe even gunnels. I don't know because the names change all the time. What used to be called tripwire offers are now called pocket courses, but it’s the same thing reskinned for a new generation of entrepreneurs.

Every day there are new "experts" with new "secrets", and each comes with a hefty price tag. Frankly, I study this stuff for a living and almost everything people tell me leads to utter nonsense. Mostly, it's marketing people who use fear to drive product sales. They make you feel stupid and worthless because you haven't figured it out, and promise to fix everything for you...

...except it almost never works, because they've done nothing but create a shiny new ball for you to play with that doesn't deal with the underlying issues people have in their business.

More than that, it wears you out, because you're always chasing the next thing, too tired to think critically when the next shiny ball rolls past. It's constantly chasing, and very little improvement.

Before I share where I think you should invest your time and money, I need to introduce you to the philosophy that undergirds my whole business. It's called The Good Human Strategy, and it is the basis for everything I do.

It's worked for me pretty well, but I will admit it takes much longer to work than the fear-based strategies so prevalent nowadays.

There is nothing more compelling than fear when it comes to selling things. However, I personally don't like selling on fear. It doesn't make me feel good, and while I might leave a lot of money on the table, I have no problem sleeping at night.

So, here is the strategy I use broken down into three steps.

1. Put good into the world with no expectation of return.

2. Do good work that is objectively of high quality, even if it is subjectively not somebody’s cup of tea.

3. Show your work to as many people as possible and collect the people who resonate with it like a dragon hoarding riches.

It sounds simple, but it’s taken me surprisingly far. There are tips, tricks, and hacks I will share to get the most out of this strategy, but this is the core of it all.

One of the most important things I ever learned while building my career was called The Attractive Character. It is the idea that if you become the kind of person your audience can't resist, then you will magnetize the right people to your message while repelling the wrong people.

This single concept changed a lot for me. In fact, it turned my marketing around completely. Instead of pushing my message out to everybody endlessly, I planted my flag into the ground and pulled the right people to me.

This idea is the basis for The Good Human Strategy.

In it, you start by putting good into the world and acting like a good human. Hopefully, you are already a good human, but even if you only act as a good human, you will find that you eventually become that kind of human. It is very important that you are at the very least helpful and kind because those are two qualities people respond to, especially if you are helpful and kind to them.

These qualities do not work as well as fear when it comes to building loyalty quickly, but it does create a better class of fan, who is loyal because they want to be loyal, instead of loyal because they fear not being near you.

The most important part of this whole process is that you put good into the world without expecting anything in return. What you do is your karma and the only thing you can control. What other people do is their karma, and that’s on them to handle. The world will beat you down in every way possible, but if you can find a way to still put good into the world even when everything is going against you, then you win in the end.

Once you are a good human, who puts out good into the world, for the right reasons, you must also make sure to do good work. This is the type of work that people respond to and like. If you just make garbage, then people won't like it, and this strategy falls apart. Everybody doesn't have to like your work, but your work needs to resonate deeply with at least some people.

After you make good work and do good things, then you plant yourself in as many places as possible where your ideal audience hangs out, like a magnet, and allow them to find you. Once you implement the first two parts of this strategy, the rest of your life becomes about planting yourself in as many places of the right places as possible, spreading your message to the right people, and waiting for them to find you.

Planting is a bit like playing music on a busy street corner. Most people walking past won't pay you any mind, but some of them will stop. If you're good enough, they'll turn around, and engage with you. If you are magnetic enough, you'll start to gather a nice little crowd for yourself before too long. Does everybody who plays on the street gather a crowd? No, because most people aren't good enough or magnetic enough to sway an audience.

It's the opposite of standing on that same street corner and running around begging people to listen to your cd. This happens a lot in Los Angeles. Every time you walk up a busy street, you see one singer or another stopping people at random and begging them to give them a minute of their time.

In that scenario, you are doing the chasing. You are tiring yourself out, engaging with the wrong people, and wasting a lot of time. On top of that, you're pissing a lot of people off who just want to go about their day.

It's the same crowd you're engaging with during both scenarios, but you're engaging in a much different way. In one scenario, you run around chasing them. In the other, they come to you. Same crowd, but with much different results. The problem becomes that when you plant, you better have something worthy of attention.

Another great way to plant is to say "Here is my Substack!" and let the right people find you. Unfortunately, it is hard to plant without an audience already, at least with your own group, because nobody knows you...yet. This is why you need to plant in other places first, but you can direct them back to where you are growing your own audience, like your Substack.

Sometimes, you have to plant several times in the same place, but you can never stop planting. This is the opposite of chasing after people. It is the opposite of hustle. You are choosing where to plant, and you know what resonates with your audience. Once you have that, the right people will magnetize to you instead of the other way around.

There are all sorts of marketing and sales strategies you need to understand in order to know where to plant, how to message yourself, and how to turn a casual observer into a lifelong fan, but The Good Human Strategy is simple and effective. Instead of chasing after people, become the person they need you to be, and then they will come to you.

*** 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 5,000-word article, then go to this website.***

What is an audience?

Before we get into the best tactics to use with audience building, it’s important to define what an audience is for a moment.

For the purposes of this article, an audience is the total number of people you can reach through your mailing list, social media networks, and other channels. Imagine a concert venue, and your audience is the people filled inside it. When we start building an audience, we can’t even fill a dive bar to hear our message. However, the more we work at building our fanbase the bigger our audience grows until we can fill arenas all over the world.

It’s important to note here that just because somebody is in your audience doesn’t mean they are buying your work, but it does mean they can hear your message when you speak. If a person can hear your message, they are part of your audience. Think about your Facebook friends. While you might be friends with hundreds of people, only a small fraction of them will buy your products when you launch them. Your entire Facebook page is your audience. Those who buy from you are your buying audience. That second number is way less than the first, and your job once you have an audience is to convert them into buyers, but that is an article for another day.

What is audience building?

Now that we have defined an audience, it should be easy to explain what building that audience looks like. Audience building is the process of filling those venue seats with more and more people, so your message is heard by more and more people.

Audience building does not mean we are increasing our buying audience. That is a function of audience building, but it is not the function we are talking about today. Today, we are specifically talking about amplifying your message so that more people hear it and doing so in a rapid way that will bring tons of new people into your audience. Simply by having a bigger audience, you will find more buyers. However, that is not what we are dealing with now.

Where can you grow an audience?

You can build out an audience anywhere, but it’s best to focus on growth where there are already buyers for your products. As an author, that means building out my mailing list, Amazon, Bookbub, Kickstarter, and Substack. I’ve studied my numbers and these are the only places that generate sales for me. However, these crucial areas might look very different for you than they do for me.

If you are an artist, you might need to grow your Instagram and Twitch channels. If you are a graphic designer, Pinterest might be essential to your business.

You will need to take the strategies I discuss below and tailor them to work for you. I’m going to focus specifically on mailing list growth since that is a crucial element for all creative professionals, but you can use these tactics to grow our social media channels as well. Just know, that when you grow on other platforms, you do not own the data and they can take it away at any time. 

There is no doubt in my mind that mailing list growth is the most important key to success in your writing career. No matter the industry, almost every figure of note says the same thing: "The money is in the mailing list".

I talk about it ad nauseam to people when they ask about the secrets of my success. Even people who are successful without a mailing list would be more successful with one.

There are two main types of mailing list growth; organic and inorganic. From their names, one seems better than the other, but they are just two sides of the same coin. In order to be successful, you will probably need to practice both.

Organic mailing list growth comes from people signing up to hear about your own creative work. Perhaps they read to the end of your novels, and they say a way to sign up for your mailing list and followed the link. Or perhaps they met you at a convention and signed up for your mailing list at your table. The point is that they signed up to hear from you because they were interested in your work.

The advantage of organic growth is that people actually want to hear from you, so your open rates should be relatively high, and if you can build a bond with people you can have a high conversion rate between people on your mailing list and sales. The downside to organic growth is that it's painfully slow, especially at the beginning of your career.

Inorganic mailing list growth comes from people who sign up for your mailing list because of their interest in a different product or brand. The most reliable way this happens is through offering giveaways to people. Companies have done this since the dawn of time. Have you ever been inside a mall and seen them raffling off a car or some other product? That was a company leveraging another brand to gain mailing list subscribers.

The advantage of inorganic growth is that you are leveraging another brand, which means that you can get a lot of mailing list subscribers fast. The downside is that because they didn't sign up to hear about your products, you will have much lower conversions than organic subs, and it will take much longer to warm them up.

Neither of these ways is bad, but the initial interest of each kind of subscriber is different depending on whether or not they already know about you or your work. I don't believe there is a "best" way to grow a mailing list. I think you have to look at a lot of different factors, and every type of mailing list growth has pluses and minuses.

The main way writers think about mailing list growth is to capture readers who have already enjoyed their work, whether through back matter or calls to action in articles. They are the most engaged because they are already buyers. All of the work is done trying to convert them into fans. These are people who sought you out online, went to your webpage, and signed up for your mailing list or Substack because they actively love what you do.

When you expand beyond people who have already read your work, the next thing to focus on is creating a lead magnet to attract potential fans. A lead magnet is a free piece of content you offer in exchange for their email address. It might be free wallpaper for their computer, a free short story, or even a full novel, but the differentiating factor is that they are signing up to receive a free thing from you because they enjoy your work, but they haven't bought your work yet.

However, they are interested in your work, so as long as you have a good onboarding sequence, and are very good at making people like and trust your work, you should be able to turn these people into buyers without much effort.

You can also join group promotions on Bookfunnel, Story Origin, or Prolific Works to help build your mailing list organically.

You can also use giveaways of your own books to help build your list, but because very few people know your work, they won’t be very effective, which is where inorganic growth becomes a powerful fuel for mailing list growth.

Almost no writer advances beyond organic growth into the world of inorganic subscriber growth, which is what we’ll explore next. Remember, inorganic growth happens when somebody signs up for your list, but only because they are interested in another brand. If you do choose to engage in inorganic mailing list growth, there is one cardinal rule; DO NOT BUY LISTS, EVER.

Mailing list growth is usually quite expensive, which is why I have joined and also run so many group mailing list builders. This is a group of 20-30 similar authors who all sponsor a giveaway of items for a brand more popular than theirs.

By doing that, we can gather a ton of emails in one week and then add them to our lists and make them fans of ours as well. In 2018, I was part of over 50 of these campaigns, including 18 that I ran, which led to more than 80,000 new contacts and 30,000 engaged fans.

That is the power of viral giveaways.

What is a viral giveaway? Viral giveaways are sweepstakes that rely on virality for rapid growth. Virality, according to dictionary.com, means “the tendency of an image, video, or piece of information to be circulated rapidly and widely from one Internet user to another". The goal of a viral giveaway is to construct an enticing giveaway that has a high probability of being shared and entered a lot. You might be offering books, or movies, or gift cards. The more enticing your giveaway, the more likely people are to enter them and share it with the world.

Here is an example of a viral giveaway that I ran in the past. This is an example of inorganic mailing list growth.

As you can see, I used Lovecraft as the theme for this giveaway because Lovecraft is a hugely popular and influential author in the horror community. I also happen to have a Lovecraft-themed anthology called Cthulhu is Hard to Spell. I used this giveaway (which got 5400 entries) as the base for my marketing efforts around that book.

That is why this is inorganic growth. The giveaway has nothing to do with my work. It has everything to do with the work of somebody else—in this case, Lovecraft—whose audience has a high probability of loving my work as well, even though they know nothing about my work at the time of entry. This strategy works because somebody who signs up for a Lovecraft giveaway would likely also be interested in a Lovecraft anthology. Since I produced a Lovecraft anthology, the chances are high that they will also buy that book from me. Therefore, if I can get them to like and trust me, I can turn that prospect into a buyer. This kind of cold traffic work requires a great automation sequence to warm up leads and, ideally, a self-liquidating offer that will pay for the cost of the promotion.

While viral giveaways can be a group promotion, there are many different types of group promotions that do not involve giveaways. For instance, a great group promotion for authors is to be involved in an anthology. Ten to twenty authors—or more if you’d like—contribute a short story or full novel into a single anthology product, and you all promote it together.

You want to make sure all the stories are thematically similar and hit the same audience, so you can all benefit from the group promotion.

This might mean promoting the anthology as a free mailing list download, or it could mean selling it. Either way, you are promoting the book together, which means that you are getting the benefit of all your audiences building on each other. You and your friends might all have very small audiences, but if you work together on a single promotion you are pooling those fans together.

If you don’t have books, you can still find a group of friends or colleagues who make similar products and offer a “gift bag” combining many of your products together into a cohesive theme. Group promotion opportunities are everywhere if you keep your eyes open for them, as you should always be on the lookout for them.

The goal of a good group promotion is to combine many smaller audiences into one massive audience so that everybody wins, thus introducing you to other audiences who might like your work and introducing the other participants to yours. This allows all the audience to co-pollinate and grow.

You might be protective of your audience and not want to share them with other people, but I promise you that fans appreciate it when you introduce them to new, interesting products. In fact, they tend to like you more when you share cool things with them and strengthen their bond with you.

Group promotions made my career. Viral giveaways built my audience, but group promotions have allowed me to make writing my full-time career. So many people have “vouched” for me with their audience that I grew my fandom exponentially in a short amount of time. Just make sure when you promote with somebody that they can deliver the goods.

If you want a more personal touch than a group giveaway, you can look for creators to do newsletter swaps with who have similar audiences to yours. The effectiveness of these swaps has decreased over time, but mostly because writers are not careful to curate the people they share with their audience.

If you don’t have a big audience, you probably can’t lock down a swap with somebody who has an enormous audience right off the bat—unless you are willing to pay for it—but you can work your way up to bigger lists over time as your audience grows. Even doing a swap with somebody that has a couple of hundred people on their list will help build your brand little by little and increase the power of your own list. In general, people need to see you several times in short order before they take notice.

If you implement the other strategies mentioned above along with seeking out newsletter swaps, you can start arranging bigger and more powerful swaps with more influential lists as your audience grows. Additionally, there are things you can do to make newsletter swaps more appealing to bigger and more influential lists.

For instance, a creator is more likely to share a giveaway or a free offer than they are a paid offer, b/c they are always looking for ways to provide value for their audience, and sharing free things is a powerful way to show your audience that you are looking out for them.

If you don’t care about newsletters, you can also use this strategy to grow a social media profile. You can reach out to creators who have similar or bigger audiences than you on any platform and it will operate in a similar way. Just know, that most creators you reach out to will ignore you, but a few will say yes.

Whether it's through an anthology, newsletter swaps, or group promotions, working with other creators on projects has helped leverage all of our successes and taken me to the next level.

Anthologies made me a USA Today bestseller, and broke my career open twice, once with the Monsters and Other Scary Shit campaign and again with the Cthulhu is Hard to Spell campaign.

On top of that, group builders and newsletter swaps have introduced me to tens of thousands of potential fans, and book bundles from Instafreebie and Bookfunnel helped get thousands of new readers onto my mailing list when I started growing my mailing list quickly in 2017. Before using group promotions, I had 2,000 people on my list. After a couple of months of using them, I had 8,000.

Additionally, by working with other brands during my Kickstarter launches, I was able to attract hundreds of new backers and thousands of dollars in additional funding for my projects.

As you grow your list and your brand, you will be able to work with larger brands as well, bringing even more potential eyes to your projects. Building a killer network is really important to a career, and something you should focus substantial time on outside of your audience-building time. I wrote a very long article on networking which you can find in the archives, but this is my favorite section.

Writers usually equate their fandom and network of creators, but they are distinctly different. While some creators will be fans of your work, your network is additionally filled with like-minded writers who you can work with to grow your businesses and promote each other. Treating creators like fans negates the biggest advantage of cultivating them…to get you both to the next level together.

You also want to consider how you can deliver continuous (at least weekly) content to your audience to keep them engaged. I’ve run a newsletter for my work since 2015 and only missed a few weeks since it started. One of the main reasons for my continued success is simply because I never went away. I kept putting things out and sharing with my audience until they were convinced I wouldn’t abandon them. Coincidentally, Substack is a great place to build that consistent habit.

However, turning that content delivery outward is equally important to growing your audience. Being on other podcasts and writing guest blogs helped established my authority as an expert. If you’re not a natural-born self-promoter, then doing this kind of work can become a cornerstone to a more value-first marketing approach that might resonate with you. Just know that this tends to be a low ROI activity at the beginning, but compounds over time.

I tend to focus my podcast appearances and guest blogs around a launch so that I can help generate those multiple touch points to make people take notice.

If you want to throw even more gasoline on the fire of your audience growth, then you can use Facebook ads. Even though their costs have skyrocketed in recent years, I still find them very effective.

There are many failure points in Facebook ads, and for that reason, it is definitely an advanced technique. Most of my Facebook advertising is done through my group builders, but through them, I have been able to get tens of thousands of fans onto my email list, where I can engage with them on a deeper level.

If you want to expand your audience with less financial commitment and better ROI, I recommend thinking about exhibiting at a local convention.

I know conventions, conferences, and book signings can be exhausting. I used to do 30+ of them a year, so I get it. Still, there is no substitute for getting out in front of humans and talking about yourself and your products.

Not only are in-person sales easier than online sales, but you can also see the eyes of your fans when they connect with your work. Advertising is a lot of testing, guessing, and studying data, while conventions provide immediate, visceral reactions to your work and allow you to see what is connecting with readers in real-time.

Conventions are also a great way to meet other creators and realize that you are not alone in the world. I worked with an artist at a couple of shows who told me that it was the first time she didn't feel alone and that there might be a place for her in the world. That is what a convention can do for you, as well. It's a place to celebrate your weirdness with other people and find new fans in the process.

To cut down costs, look for local shops that might be interested in having you come in to do a signing or talk. People love to meet local writers, and many will offer you a free table if you ask for one.

Other cheap options for conventions include flea markets, swap meets, and art walks, where tables might only cost a few dollars or even be free depending on the situation. Even if you decide to invest in a table at a big show, you can still split the fee to keep costs low, especially if you don’t have a lot of products to offer. I still split tables at conventions and I’ve been doing this for many years.

The key to a convention is that you must talk to the customers who pass by your table. You can’t just sit behind your table and smile. You must engage. That is the key to success at conventions, and to building your audience. This type of engagement will not only build your audience rapidly but most of the people you add to your email list will be buyers, which are the most valuable type of people to have on your list.

The final thing I want to mention is that simply launching products consistently is a great way to prove people should pay attention to you. The more projects you complete, the more trust people will have in you.

You have to make something amazing. Not mediocre. Not good. Something that makes people stand up and take notice. This doesn't happen at once, but if you keep working at it you will be able to make something awesome.

Now, that doesn't mean you can't start meeting creators before you create awesome work. In fact, I was building my network while I was still creating Ichabod Jones: Monster Hunter, my first truly great work.

However, while the people I met were part of my network, they didn't start vouching for me until way later. Before then, we were just friends, which is how all relationships should start, as friendships, and they can evolve from there.

I've tried hundreds upon hundreds of ways to build my audience over the past decade and these are the ones that continue to deliver year after year. Will all of these work for you? Probably, actually. I'm not a special snowflake. I would expect a few to work at least, if not all of them. 

Additionally, it is using a combination of these compounding on each other for years which will most likely be responsible for your career taking off. Any one of these is powerful in isolation, but together they make you unstoppable.

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