Growth, or something like it...
The article is a bit of a mish-mosh. Over the past six months I’ve talked a lot about audience growth, and this post is a collection of ideas that didn’t fit neatly into one box, but I think they have value. I consider myself a business memoirist, and this is a collection of my thoughts on growth. If you haven’t read my free 45,000-word guide about Substack growth, I recommend reading that in tandem with this one.
I also 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.
There is a darkness that comes with growth.
It's as if you are consumed inside an abyss because there is no light to guide you.
This is because you have not set a beacon yet. Once you have figured out the path to get what you want, your mind places a little light there. Every time you return, the light gets a little brighter, until it is as bright as the sun.
However, in those moments of growth, when you haven't reached your destination, you are in the dark. Your little flashlight can not see more than a foot in front of you.
It's scary, and even if you have a guide that doesn't make it much better. There is no way to stop the darkness from encroaching on you. All you can do is prepare for it.
You still have to go into the darkness. Others can tell you the path, but you have to walk it. You still have to set your own beacon.
Once you do, it will become easier and easier to go there again.
And then you will be off into the darkness again, to set a new beacon.
Most people can not deal with the darkness of growth. They stay by their existing beacons and never venture forward into the darkness.
They have heard stories of the darkness being unforgiving and all-consuming, and it is, but once you come to know the darkness, there is a comfort to it as well.
The darkness is what leads to growth, and though it is cold and foreboding, you also know it is necessary to get where you are going.
You are brave for venturing into the darkness. Most people never do. You are an explorer. You are trying, and that is more than most people will ever do. Then, when you reach the other side, you can light a beacon for others.
That beacon you place is the brand that allows people to find you.
Unfortunately, they still have to walk the path, too, and no matter how much you help, it’s scary to step foot into the darkness and forge your own path.
*** 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 6,000-word article, then go to this website.***
Lots of people ask me why I’m so concerned with people monetizing their work. While I appreciate lots of people just want to write, what I have seen again and again is that, eventually, if you don't make money on something, you will burn out at it.
Heck, you might burn out if you do make money on something, but you are sure to do so if you don't.
This is because passions are often hard and expensive, and laying in bed surrounded by books is easy. It's much easier to zone out and play video games than to do the hard work of this blog, or my podcast, or even writing books.
My podcast, The Complete Creative, ran for 200 episodes and made me a total of $100. I loved that podcast, but eventually, it became impossible to put in the resources required to make it better, because it wasn't making any money.
I couldn’t pay for advertising, I couldn’t pay for a better editor. I couldn’t do anything to make it better.
Since I couldn't improve on it, the show stagnated and became boring.
I've met so many people who had to abandon their dreams because they couldn't grow it effectively. Either they didn't have the money or audience to make it worthwhile.
So, they gave up. Maybe they didn't abandon their dream entirely, but it became a hobby they only did sporadically when they had time, and no longer shared it widely with the world.
Yes, some people took it up as a hobby and then got a job, but most people just abandoned the thing they loved because it became too hard to push that boulder up a hill with no reward.
There are only so many hours in a day, and it's hard to spend the few free hours people have on something that costs a lot of money and doesn't grow at all.
However, when you see growth in something it becomes very easy to invest more time and money into it because all your hard work is paying off.
This is why I think it's so important to learn the marketing side of things; because then you will see growth in your business, and invest more into it. Then, there will be more cool things in the world, and I can buy them all.
Even if you make no money, you will at least find more people to appreciate your work. Many creators say they don’t care about the money. I have never met one who didn’t want to find more people that resonated with their message.
Somebody asked me on a podcast recently what the difference was between marketing and sales.
I have always had a hard time explaining it quickly, but this time I had an answer I didn't want to forget.
Sales generate immediate revenue, whether that's Kickstarter, book sales, or launching a course through a sales page. Sales initiatives drive direct sales and are all about immediate ROI.
Marketing is brand awareness that drives down the cost of acquiring future sales. This might be guest blogging, hopping on a podcast, doing a strategic partnership, or even certain ad buys that don't lead to a sales page. Sales from marketing come indirectly.
The more people know, like, and trust your brand, the less you will have to convince them to buy your next product, and you can convert them to sales much more quickly and cheaply.
Russell Brunson once talked about how producing a single marketing video reduced his cost per registration from $150 to $50.
Even though that video wasn't selling anything specific, it was so ubiquitous and did such a good job explaining the company that it cut the cost of ads by 66%.
That's good marketing.
Interestingly, sales campaigns like Kickstarter have marketing and brand awareness built into them. You get marketing while you're doing sales, but you do not necessarily get sales by doing marketing.
The question for sales campaigns is "Will this give me an immediate ROI?"
However, for marketing campaigns, the question might be best summarized as "Will enough of my ideal customers engage with this effort and lower the acquisition costs for my next launch enough to make it worth it for me to participate?"
Both are important, but they serve different functions.
So many people I know say they want bigger followers, more readers, more sales, etc. However, I never see them do anything to attract new fans, except posting to their own social media walls. They do no marketing. They do no advertising. They do very few shows or promotions of any kind.
I have no idea how I would get more people to read my work without constant marketing and advertising.
I drive an average of 1,000 new subscribers a month to my mailing list, and still barely feel like I'm getting ahead most days. Before I did that, I was doing 30-40 shows a year. Before that...well, before that I had a very small audience that didn't grow ever.
How does somebody who doesn't do any of that stuff expect to build a following and sustain themselves?
Word of mouth?
Magic?
I am very curious about this because I am constantly trying new things, working new angles, and working to increase my marketing. Every time I think that my business needs a shot in the arm, I do some sort of promotion to drive in new fans.
I don't know how I would survive without doing those things and making sure new people are always finding my work. I know I would never have been able to grow so fast. I would likely still be where I was four years ago, without any fans, barely able to survive.
The minute I figured out marketing, even a little bit, was the day everything else unlocked for me. There is nothing wrong with speaking to a small audience, but if you want to grow fast then you need a marketing plan, too.
The #1 question I get asked about marketing is “how can I do more with less”. There are some amazing ways to extend your marketing calendar, cross-promote with other people, and expand your reach, without overextending yourself.
Repurposing previously written articles - You can either do a "season of reruns" or a "season of updates" where you take your old posts and either beef them up with new information, or you comment on them with how things have changed in some way.
does this with . Between seasons he will rereleases episodes from his archive, which I think is really smart.Repurposing things you said on social media -
blew my mind when she tagged me on a “Things I Said in Substack Notes This Week and Have More To Say About” post. This is an ingenious way to repurpose work you have already done.Voicemails - Either record voicemails for your subscribers or get voicemails from them and do a roundup of them.
does this on her Homeculture publication.Best of lists - This can be compiled by somebody else, like a VA or even AI, if you give them the format. You can also just pull a bunch of quotes about a subject and line them up together, as well. Resilience, Courage, Love, whatever you want. This is also a great way to build SEO with your target audience.
Q and A - If you do take voicemails, you can use them as a Q and A segment where the audience is making most of the content except for your answer.
does this weekly on her Substack.Hire a "monthly intern" or "guest editor" -
from has a monthly intern they bring in to write articles.Asynchronous interviews - Lots of people do asynchronous interviews, where you send a series of similar questions to people and then post their responses.
does them. does them. does them. does them.Cross-posting - One of the easiest things you can do is to cross-post interesting articles to your audience from other Substacks. This takes almost no time, and is criminally underused. It’s a great way to beef up your publication while also promoting other people. I will usually only cross-post work that I've written, but I have been cross-posted before and it's great.
Guest posting - This takes longer if you’re the one writing it, but it’s an amazing way to get more content, especially if you have a publication with some traction.
Some of the above strategies can be implemented by yourself, but most are only powerful when you work with other people. I am very high on Connectedness on the CliftonStrengths, so I love working with other people.
That said, it does require putting yourself out there, and sometimes dealing with rejection, so I want to offer a caveat. It’s okay, and even good, to support other people, even if they are doing a similar thing as you…
…but it’s not required, and nobody has the right to expect your support if you don’t want to give it.
As good as it feels to support things you care about, it feels equally gross to be guilted into supporting something you don’t enthusiastically support.
“Support” is a really convenient cudgel of manipulative people. It makes you feel like the jerk, but really they are the jerk.
They know decorum and societal norms will push against you until you give in so you don’t come across as a squeaky wheel.
It’s subtle, but it’s still manipulation, and those kinds of people can screw all the off.
There is nothing wrong in the asking, but there is something very wrong in the guilting.
You can always tell what kind of human you’re dealing with after you politely decline to promote their work.
Good people are gracious. Bad people become vicious.
If their response to your decline is anything short of “No worries. Thanks for taking the time to think about it” you should be very skeptical of every word out of their mouth.
Promotion is a gift, not a requirement.
You don’t have the right to it. You don’t automatically get it with every project. Even if you’ve gotten it before doesn’t mean you will get it next time.
If something isn’t given freely, then it shouldn’t be taken by force, and guilt is a type of force.
Relationships are not transactional. They are cooperative, and cooperation is symbiotic. If one person is manipulating the other, then that is parasitic.
We don’t nurture parasites. We kill them with fire.
Stop trying to use “supporting each other” to guilt people into promoting you.
It’s gross, and we all see you. A perfectly acceptable response to somebody asking you to do something is:
"I can't do that"
Do not let people tell you otherwise. They will heap things on you until you break. No, past the time you break, while you are crawling along the floor battered and unable to move.
They won't even notice your misery.
They will take. Always. Do not let them. If you can't do something, or even if you just don't want to do something, you have to understand it's okay to say no.
They will play every card to get you to do it anyway, but you have every right to say no.
I was at a party recently, and I could not have been more uncomfortable. The party was loud, and I didn't know many people. It was the kind of place 21-year-old Russell would have gone to, but 36-year-old Russell felt out of place.
There was absolutely nothing wrong with the place I was at either. The other people that were there seemed to be having a perfectly pleasant time. It was the right place for them, but I could not have been more awkward and ill at ease, because it wasn't the right place for me.
I maybe said 100 words the whole night, which, if you know me, is not normal.
However, it made me realize that often there is nothing wrong with us when we're trying to connect with our audience. We are just in the wrong place, talking to the wrong people, surrounded by the wrong music, dancing to the wrong beat.
In another setting, I'm perfectly pleasant.
In the right setting, you would have to pay me to shut up. In fact, just a few weeks ago I was with many of the same people and had a perfectly lovely time chatting up a storm. However, when I'm in the wrong setting, I just don't have the energy. It's the same for us in our creative lives.
Often, it's not that there's anything wrong with us. It's just that we're out of place. When we find the right place, we'll shine. All of this stuff we’re doing is just to find our people.
It's math!
1,000 "true fans" willing to give you $100/yr
2% of fans are "true fans"
50% of buyers become fans
1% of readers who know your work will buy you book
50% of people are readers
8 touches to convince somebody to buy
=160,000,000
That means you need to get yourself in front of 20 million humans at least 8 times to make this math work, or 160 million touches.
By drilling down on messaging and finding the right people, we can drop this number significantly, but it's still a lot of people who need to see your work before you expect to be successful doing this.
Be honest, are you anywhere close to even 1/160th of those touches? Cuz if not, I reject that fact that nobody likes your writing. I reject that fact that your stuff is too niche. I reject basically anything you say to bring yourself down unless you have done enough work to find the people who will love your work.
If you haven't gotten in front of a metric fuckton of people, you should have no expectation of success.
Have I ever seen it take 160,000,000 touches?
No, I've never seen it take that long, but it could, and until it does, I think the answer to most problems is to get your work in front of more people.
The easiest way to find the right buyers is to search for buyers who are already performing the action you want them to take.
If you want more people to buy from you at conventions, go to conventions and find buyers there. If you want people to buy on Kickstarter, find buyers who already use Kickstarter. If you want people to buy on Amazon...well, you get the idea.
So many people I meet are trying to convince their existing fans to buy things in a completely different way.
And while that might work, generally, people have buying patterns that are baked into them from years of habitual use.
I have people who will buy anything I put on a table at a show, but they will NEVER buy a Kickstarter. I have people who will back a Kickstarter, but won't buy a book on Amazon.
And so on.
We all have our habits, and it's hard to break them. You will never get me to start a pull list in a store or buy floppy comics in general.
I generally buy my books on Kickstarter, at shows, or I buy ebooks on Amazon.
Now, if you put your books there, you have the best shot to earn my business quickly.
Will I go and buy your book another way? Maybe, in time, but it certainly won't be fast, because I'm already attuned to the way those systems work.
So, instead of finding people and trying to convert them into the kind of buyers you want them to be...
...what if you just went out and found new buyers that acted the way you already wanted, and convinced them your book was cool, too?
If somebody already buys lots of fantasy novels on Nook, and you want people to buy your fantasy novel on Nook, all you have to do is convince them your book is cool, instead of convincing them to change their buying habits.
The only time I change buying habits is when I shift businesses. The minute I started writing ebooks in earnest, I started buying tons of books on Amazon and other platforms.
But I only started doing that because it was easy and beneficial to me.
If it wasn't, I would just keep buying books on Kickstarter and shows, like I always have before.
If it's working for you, great, but if you are having trouble finding buyers to act the way you want them to act, go find buyers who already act the way you want them to act, and try to make them know, like, and trust you.
Once you know how people buy, and what they like, all you have to do is convince them to like you are well. If you can convince other people to like you, you can convince those new people to like your work, too. It just takes effort.
Everybody is a fan of something already. Your goal is to take somebody from being a fan of something else into a fan of your work. One of the most common methods to make this happen is something I call "The Switch", and it's remarkably effective if you do it the right way.
The idea is simple.
If somebody likes X and your work is like X, then a person has a very good chance of also liking your work, which we'll call Y. However, they've had years to build up their love for X, and they have no idea who you are or why they should care about you.
The problem is creators often find people who like X and assume they are ready to like their Y, so they immediately whack them over the head with their Y, without giving people who like X a reason why they should care about Y first.
Giving them a reason why is critical for The Switch to work.
The Switch is all about taking fans from X to Y, but by way of U, or, more accurately, by way of liking you first. The secret ingredient in The Switch is that potential fans start to like you before they like your work. If you can take somebody from liking X, to liking you, then they will be highly likely to try your Y.
Why is that?
Because you are giving them a reason why they should like your work which is deeper than just "You like X, so logically, you will like Y." Instead, you are saying. "Hey, you like me, and you like X, you should try Y, because I think you will like it due to Z reasons.”
When people like you, they are way more likely to try anything you offer them. This is because they've built empathy with you, like they would with a friend. Since you know they like X, once they try your work they will likely love it, too.
The Switch is all about wedging yourself between somebody else's work and your own work and creating empathy between them and you.
Almost everybody misses that middle point and forgets that the easiest way to get people to like your work is to get them to like you. Once you have refined this process, you can start plugging in new people from different existing fandoms and watch your own fanbase soar.
It's unfair to expect somebody to buy from you the first time they see your work, isn't it?
I mean, here you are a perfect stranger, talking to another perfect stranger, and trying to convince them you are a good use of their finite resources in just a couple of minutes.
That's a bonkers expectation, right? I mean most people won't do that.
Sometimes I do it, and sometimes people do it to me, but usually, people need to know me a while before they buy from me, and that seems normal for me as well. This is a work where a lot of people are trying to trick you out of your money, and our money is finite. It takes a lot to pry it out of my hands.
Are there ways to convince the right people to buy right away? Sure, and you should learn them. It often works for me to have people buy all at once, but when it doesn't, I don't feel bad about it., because that's normal. People generally need to know you a while before they are going to feel comfortable spending money on your work.
There are so many ways to spend money nowadays that it's becoming even harder for people to part with their money on the first interaction. Usually, it will take 7-14 interactions, or touchpoints, before somebody gets comfortable with you.
The more expensive it is, the more they will need to know you, and the more touchpoints you will need to get them to trust you. Don't treat this as a failure. Treat it as an opportunity. If you can just make them understand that you are amazing, then they'll buy from you later.
Your business is not a short-term play. Yes, we need money right now, but we also need money in a year, and two years, and ten years from now, and the more people you can bring into your ecosystem and show that you are awesome, the more who will get comfortable enough to buy from you in the future, and future you will appreciate it when they do.
I am willing to give almost anything away for free because then people come into my mailing list, where I then try to sell them other things.
Once you have that mechanic, the more people you hook the better the sales funnel gets.
The problem is this...you can't do it a little bit, really, at least what I'm doing. I'm trying to be everywhere all at once. I need to be seen everywhere, b/c once everyone is talking about me, word of mouth spreads quickly and my notoriety goes up. I was very, very strategic about this when I came to substack hard in May. I wanted to be everywhere and be connected to everyone of note in my ideal audience's life.
With fiction, well, take the One Damned Good Thing Kickstarter. I cross-promoted with 5 other campaigns in the same universe, and then did promotional swaps with 20 more creators during my campaign, b/c I need them to see my campaign a bunch of times and associate me with quality.
Once they associate me with quality, and associate me with a creator they already know and like, then they buy eventually.
But I have a system that works. I know exactly how people become buyers of my work, and I know the actions I have to take to make that happen.
You don't have that stuff, though, it seems like, which makes it harder.
There is a reason I write 5,000+ posts every week. It's because almost nobody else can do it as well or as long as me. Others might start, but I've been doing it for years at this point, and I know that I'll keep doing it. I also know they can’t keep up. It’s too hard a bar to summit continuously.
It's an action that sets me apart from other people. If you want that kind of thing, you have to come to me, because nobody does it better.
Then, I also speak at conferences, host live streams, and guest on podcasts to get people into my universe b/c I know a fractional share will convert.
The problem is for most people the fractional share they get is almost non-existent once their potential readers finish moving through their funnel. For me, it's not. For me, it's quite a bit, and I have the mechanic to turn those eyeballs into sales.
So, yeah. I'll give it almost all away, b/c I know I have so much more for people to find and pay for.
I used to think I didn’t want to email my list too much because it would bother them.
Then, I started to hear from people whose lists I was on that they didn’t want to email too much and I almost reached through the internet and shook them in frustration.
When I sign up for a list, I want to hear from people when they have cool things to share.
As long as you are sharing cool things with me, then you can email 5x a day for all I care (but probably 1 a day is a good upper limit).
It’s only if you don’t have cool things to share that I don’t want to hear from you, and if you don’t think it’s cool, why are you writing it in the first place?
The only time I’ll unsubscribe from you is if you stop sharing things that resonate with me, and I’ll do that whether you email me once a month or once a day.
It makes me so angry not even as an author growth specialist, but as a fan. I don’t read every email, but I still want to see you in my inbox if you have something cool to share.
If you want to give readers a choice, then add sections with a weekly digest and/or monthly digest they can subscribe to if they want less email, but stop dictating how often I can hear from you based on a small minority of your readers. It’s insulting and infuriating.
It is a small minority, too, in my experience.
I ask every person who enters my publishing company’s email list how often they want to hear from me.
Out of 31,438 people that I’ve asked, only 268 have opted to hear from me weekly and 365 have chosen monthly.
Combined, that’s 2% of my list! That’s not nothing, but you shouldn’t dictate your business based on what 2% of your readers want. That’s bonkers.
Even if I’m in the minority and only 2% want to hear from you as much as possible, why does the “Don’t email me too much” 2% get to dictate your business and not my 2%? Why is their opinion more important than mine?
People always say “I don’t want to get too many emails”, but what they really mean is “I don’t want to get too many garbage emails”.
If you don’t think what you’re writing is garbage, then it’s not a garbage email so send it.
If you think it’s garbage, don’t write it.
How can you tell? If you can’t think of a unique purpose that your email serves, it’s probably garbage. If it doesn’t shed new light on something in any way, then it’s probably garbage. If readers learn nothing new from it, it’s probably garbage.
If you are providing new information to people who have signed up to hear that information, whether it’s about a book launch or a new article, it’s probably not garbage.
A not insignificant part of my business is doing book marketing for authors. The vast majority of this work comes in the form of giveaways that I run through Booksweeps.
These giveaways are heavily targeted to specific fandoms, like Supernatural, Buffy, Harry Potter, etc.
I am exceedingly good at this form of marketing, but this is a story of a pretty big mistake I made a few years ago.
Because I have run so many of these giveaways, I usually start the ad process by cloning a previously successful campaign and then tweaking the targeting. For instance, in 2017 I ran a campaign for Harry Potter, which collected over 7,000 new emails in the course of 10 days.
When I eventually ran a giveaway targeted to Supernatural fans, I duplicated that ad campaign, and tweaked the targeting from Harry Potter fans to Supernatural fans, along with tweaking the ad copy and images.
It's very important to do all three of those things, because otherwise, you will be targeting the wrong fans with the wrong imagery, thus increasing your cost per click, and throwing off your whole campaign.
The above is important to understand, for reasons I will now explain.
Once upon a time, I was running a giveaway for Legend of Zelda. As I always do, I cloned a previously successful campaign, this time Supernatural, in order to do my targeting.
I checked the images and ad copy, and then I started the ad set.
Before any giveaway officially starts I always take some time to run tests. This is to make sure everything is working well with a fairly small portion of the overall ad budget before I increase the spend to its normal level.
Thank god I do it, too, because this time during testing I started to notice that many people who signed up for the Legend of Zelda giveaway had previously signed up on my mailing list.
This is not common. Usually, I have 90-95% new subscribers to my giveaways, but in this case, I was only getting 35% new subscribers. I knew something was wrong, so I went digging. The advantage of experience is when something goes wrong you can almost always suss it out and fix it quickly.
First, I checked the cost per click (CPC). In this case, the ads were performing manageable but not optimal. However, they were being shown to existing subscribers instead of new fans. It was a big problem I needed to fix.
Facebook lets you exclude existing emails from your ad targeting, so I assumed that I had either forgotten to do that this time, or not updated my existing subscriber information for a long time. So, I downloaded a list of all my subscribers and uploaded it to a new custom audience. In doing so, I decided to check the targeting, also in the ad set level.
That's when I found it.
My ads were still being targeted at Supernatural fans. I had just spent half a day marketing a Legend of Zelda giveaway to Supernatural fans.
Doh!
That was a rookie mistake, and one I only made because it had been over a month since I ran any ads. That is why I test though, to find any issues with my ads, even if those issues are my own idiocy.
After beating myself up for a few minutes, I made the changes and started the ad set again. The next morning, I looked at my ad costs, hoping they went down.
The result? The next day, with the right targeting, had a 50% cost reduction.
The difference of one CPC does not really seem like that much of a difference when you're looking at a single click, but when you expand that out to hundreds or dollars, it's massive.
That's double the amount of traffic, all because I targeted the wrong audience with the wrong information. I know this is very technical, but it demonstrates something many creatives do in their business.
They target the wrong audience with the wrong information. There is nothing wrong with their product. The problem is in the targeting of their product. If they were talking to the right people, they would enthusiastically love what they were doing. However, they aren't, so they are being met with blank stares and dead eyes.
Yes, it's possible that your product is broken, but equally, and often more, likely is that your product is fine, but your marketing is broken. Luckily, this was a cheap lesson for me to learn, but most creatives spend their whole careers talking to the wrong audience about a great product.
I spent most of the summer testing various ad networks to see if any of them were viable for Substack audience growth, and here are my findings:
Refind - Of all the ad platforms, this is the easiest to use. You basically give it a one-sentence description, how much you want to spend, and then it finds you that amount of new subscribers every day. This seems to be most effective for people looking for readers/free subscribers and not members. I spent about $20/day for a couple of months and it definitely worked for me.
Sample.ai - I was excited for another choice outside of Refind, but I had to pay close to $5 per subscriber, and then I was only getting 1 a week. This is not a platform for value or for quick growth. They do have a free option which is worth trying out.
Beehiiv - I’ve been looking into the Beehiiv ad network for months, and in August they had a deal where they would match your budget up to $2,500, so I dropped $2,500 into my account and proceeded to hate my life for the next three weeks. Unless you are working in AI or NFTs, I saw nothing relevant to promote myself with on their platform. Also, while they said you could find subscribers for $2, I didn’t find any success until I spent $4, and that is way too much for me to spend to find a subscriber. I ended up canceling my account and getting a refund. At least I made $131 during my time to pay for the month I used it.
Sparkloop - I’ve not paid for Sparkloop, but I have signed up for their partner network. Unlike Beehiiv, which was almost all AI and NFT publications, Sparkloop actually had creators like Pat Flynn and Bookbub that I would wholeheartedly recommend. Even if you aren’t paying for advertising, it’s probably worth looking at Sparkloop if you’ve ever considered sponsorships before.
Facebook Ads - I’ve been running Facebook ads for years, and have always found them effective. I can find subscribers for $.50-$1, but in recent months the subscribers have been riddled with bots, so I’ve mostly stopped Facebook ads except for clients with good bot filters.
Sponsoring newsletters - We’ve been doing this through Booksweeps and Written Word Media for our Action Fantasy Book Club, and have gotten consistent results. They charge between $1-$1.25 per subscriber, which is about what I get from Facebook after scrubbing, with none of the hassle. Currently, they both only do fiction, but sites like Who Sponsors Stuff, Reletter, and Paved have options for most niches. Haven’t used those three, though.
The best quality of subscribers comes from the Substack Network and Recommendations, but if you want to explode your growth, maybe you can find something you like above without having ads overtake your life.
Overall, I think most of these efforts have been a bust, but they have led to engaged subscribers, even if they don’t upgrade. I’ve been able to scale up from 16,000 to 19,000 while maintaining my open rates, which is nice.
The best thing I learned came from Beehiiv, who told me they target spending $4/lead for their high-end advertising client, which is just bonkers to me. I still think for most people using viral builders is a great way to scale at a low cost, as long as you have a good onboarding sequence and are willing to cull unopens liberally. I gave a full breakdown of this strategy right here.
Most people I talk to don’t want to invest in advertising and don’t want to do social media, but they still want to grow their publications.
I get it. I would like to grow infinitely without paying a dollar for it or investing any time, too. Unfortunately, if you don’t want to be on social media, you can start doing paid ads and get the same effect, or hire somebody to do it for you.
I go through this same conversation with most of my clients when we get started.
You’ll be investing either money, time, or both. You can’t get through that. No, there’s not somebody who will work on performance for a person that isn’t proven.
You either have to pay somebody to do it, pay an algorithm to do it, or do it yourself. The less you want to do, the more you have to pay.
The goal is to make enough to pay for the advertising/help, and make a profit. Meanwhile, you get to do the things you like more, and will hopefully be able to be more productive so you can make even more.
I wish the world worked differently, but you either have to pay capitalism in time or money.
Are y’all still going around asking people to follow you and making yourself the center of the universe?
No wonder everyone hates marketing and sales. That’s honestly the worst possible thing you can do both for your own mental health and for your business as a whole.
Even if you are the center of your brand, nobody is buying anything because of you. They are buying things because of how you make them feel about themselves.
This will feel cynical, but that goes for everyone, down to your parents and best friend. It’s baked right down to the DNA.
I listened to the Happiness Lab this week and the guest was talking about how your “soul mate” is the one who connects to the right smells in your brain that make them pleasing to you.
You never sell yourself. If you talk about yourself, it’s only to convince people you have enough authority to deliver on their transformation.
You sell the transformation. Not only is this better for your audience, but it completely eliminates taking rejection personality.
Because rejection is not personal.
Rejection is saying “This transformation did not resonate with me right now” and/or “I’m not at a place in my life to deal with that transformation at the moment.”
Not only will it get you way more sales, but it feels less gross because you are being of service to people.
Write for yourself, but edit for the transformation. Every story I’ve ever read that resonated in any way found a way to connect their inner journey with the inner journey of others in a way that sparked a transformation in them.
The #1 note I hear agents give to memoirists is “Can we make this more universal?” which really means “How can we sell the transformation better?”
It is easily the #1 note I give to writers who publish with us.
If you are having trouble growing your publication, I can almost guarantee it’s because you don’t sell the transformation well enough either in your work or the marketing around it.
Virality has nothing to do with you. It has everything do to with how you make somebody feel about themselves.
Always. Sell. The. Transformation.
All these very technical pieces become much easier when you have a brand. Everyone rolls their eyes at the word “building a brand”, but I think they have it all wrong. They don’t want to become a marketing machine.
A brand is not a thing you become, it is an expression of what you already are, expressed in a way that helps people who resonate with your work find you. Done well, a brand is something that speaks for you when you can't speak for yourself and calls out through the darkness to people who need to hear your message that you are there to help them.
You cannot be a light in the darkness if nobody can see the light, or know that it is a friendly light and not a malicious one.
If anything, good branding helps you better inhabit the unique expression of your own voice, not dull it.
It doesn't matter if somebody wants to make money with their work, I've never met an author who didn't want to find more people who resonated with their message.
You probably don’t hate advertising. You just hate seeing advertising for things you don’t want. You probably don’t hate marketing. You hate marketing for things that don’t resonate with you.
You probably don’t hate sales. You hate being sold things you don’t want.
You likely love finding a new cool thing you really want that resonates with you. People can sell that to you all day.
The problem is you expect people not to want your work, that it won’t resonate with them, and that they will hate you because of it.
What if, instead, they…didn’t hate it? What if, instead, they loved it? What if, instead, they were grateful you showed them this thing they now love?
What if, instead, you stopped treating your work like it sucks for a change?
There is one thing I want you to remember in all this when things get hard. It's supposed to be hard.
That is not a flaw of the universe. It is a feature of it.
The universe makes it hard for a reason. I don't know what that reason is, and I don't think anybody else does, either. We can take a guess, but it's probably going to be wrong. We can study and philosophize about the why, but at best it will only ever be an educated guess.
However, I have been on this earth for a few years now, and I've worked on enough projects to know that just because something is hard doesn't mean it's a design flaw.
In fact, more often than not, that thing people put into the game to stump you is integral to the design of the game. That level that you just can't get through in a video game is that way for a reason, more often than not. That part of the book that's really difficult, well that's to teach you something as well. Even lessons that we teach in school, are often designed to be harder than they need to be so students learn through struggling.
Sometimes, it's stupidly hard to the point of fatigue.
So stupid hard that you fall off the cliff a thousand times trying to find a way off the island in the video game, but that makes the end result all that more satisfying when you figure it out. It makes that growth even more pronounced.
Every time I've struggled in my life, I've come out stronger on the other side. With each struggle, there is also a chance for catastrophic failure as well. A player might walk away from the game or put down a book and never pick it back up again. However, usually, those failures gnaw at you until you get back and pick that controller up again.
I have found that it's the same in life. Smashing through the glass wall after hitting your head against it a thousand times is infinitely more satisfying than getting through the first time. Killing that boss at the end of the game is so much more satisfying if you failed a bunch of times, and it's way more satisfying than beating that first boss. Getting to the end of that series is all the sweeter when you've read the other books first.
Even if you buy every course you see, and book every mentoring session from gurus. Even if you go to every show and have every connection in the world...it's still hard. All we can do is try to limit the pain, but we can't stop it completely. Maybe that's why it's supposed to be hard, to make it more satisfying when we get to the end game. I don't know. I do know, though, that it's supposed to be hard. That's just a feature of the system.
Trying is better than nothing.
Jumping is better than standing still. So many people say "I'm gonna do it when X happens " as if there is ever a good time.
If there was a good time, everybody would do it. Even if you can only do something very slowly, you are 1,000 times further along than if you keep making excuses.
Starting gives you a baseline for growth. Once you have a baseline, you can progress from there. If you don't start, then you have nothing. When you don't start, everything is theoretical.
It's very hard to help somebody who's standing still. If you are moving, no matter how slowly, then it's so much easier to correct.
If you haven’t read my free 45,000-word guide about Substack growth, I recommend reading that in tandem with this one.
If you liked this article, consider becoming a paid member. 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.
Funny how YOUR mish-mosh, to me, always parts the clouds over my head and I start hearing music all around me.
Is that just ME?
Bueller? ...Bueller?
Thank you for sharing this! I’ve never heard of this voicemail thing and it’s so cool!