| Hey, We're all just hauling water. One bucket at a time, we haul it back-and-forth - often not taking as much care as we should with the contents; it's all too easy to forget how precious that water is. So it goes with readers. Everyone wants to scale up - hire people to carry more buckets, or even build pipelines - but they often don't pay enough attention to how much water they are losing first. And if you scale up without plugging all the leaks, you just end up multiplying the amount of lost water - at great cost. ...and so it goes with readers. You have to do lots of boring stuff before you do the exciting part and turn it up to 11. Sorry, but success is boring. Or at least the path to success is boring. I'll ask the question now to save you asking yourself later: how much do you want it? A Game of Conversions Being an author in 2024 is a Game of Conversions. You have to fight, fight, fight to get any kind of attention, and that's only the beginning of your struggle. Because you still have to close the sale - you must convert that attention into a purchase... and then hold that attention for four hundred more pages, while delighting readers with your sparkling wit and delicious subversion of genre tropes. And if that wasn't enough, you then need a click on your newsletter sign-up link, readers to fill out their details correctly (and without clicking away), and everyone to confirm their subscription successfully. Then you must deliver their free book, or whatever you promised, without any hitches - and then keep them entertained too, until your next launch when they will hopefully buy something else. That's a lot of attention to hold. And conversion to achieve. The rewards are huge - potentially - if you can pull this off at scale. But to do that, you must optimize your reader pathways. All those ways onto your list - e.g. from your books, your website, your socials - are reader pathways. And all of them can be optimized. Think of them like those aforementioned buckets of water being handled carelessly, precious contents spilling free - readers being wasted every single day. Readers who could have (would have, should have) bought your next release. You can - and really should - minimize the number of readers being lost. Some natural wastage is unavoidable, to use another humanistic industry term, but there are improvements you can make, holes you can plug. It's not the most exciting part of being an author but it's absolutely critical if you want to grow your email list in a sustainable way. Because it makes little sense spending big on marketing if you are going to lose half the readers because of a leak somewhere. It makes a lot more sense to ensure all your pipelines are in great shape first, delivering happy, engaged readers at a healthy rate. This allows you to maximize the return from every campaign you run - changing the profitability equation considerably -something which will allow you to invest more of your royalties in growth, which is what will really turbocharge your career. I'm presuming that's of interest, so we better take a good look at those holes of yours. Identifying Your Leaky Bits It's possible to generalize a little in this sea of glorious authorial Rube Goldberg machines. Not least because while authors succeed in wildly diverse ways, we screw up like twins. Here are the most common places to lose readers while trying to capture that attention you fought so hard for. 1. The Book 2. The CTA 3. The Form 4. The Welcome 1. The Book Yeah, put the words in the right order or maybe they won't finish the thing. Kind of important, but you're on your own with that one. But also cover your bases: (i) make the sign-up link for your mailing list be the very first thing readers see after The End; (ii) put it at the front of the book too; and (iii) drop a third push in the end matter - somewhere like your bio, to sweep up any stragglers. It's not too much; you're not allowed to be shy. 2. The CTA Make it eye-catching - make it visual. I'm not against text (hello, I'm an author!) but you will capture more readers if you use every trick at your fingertips to win their attention. Make a nice graphic showing readers the freebie they'll get for signing up. (Having a cool freebie helps BTW!) Write some compelling copy to push those sign ups. Aim to hook readers from multiple angles: catch their attention with the graphic, double down on genre with the cover, sell the emotional pay off with your text - hype it! Make them want it. (You're also not allowed to be shy here, if you haven't guessed). The amount of readers you will lose at this point by half-assing the text, by not taking the time to craft a nice line which will hook them, by being lazy with the graphic - it's criminal. Put the effort in and you will reap the rewards, and continually so over time, if that helps the medicine go down. 3. The Form Okay, they made it through your book, saw your arresting ad, clicked it (yegads!), and have now landed on your website which is taking forever to load and looks awful on mobile. What a shame, you just lost another superfan-in-waiting. To prevent this awful fate, keep things simple and focus on what truly matters. Your entire website doesn't necessarily need to be fancy and expensive - cutting-edge design or whatever. But you must ensure your newsletter sign-up page is slick: clean, clear, minimal, mobile-friendly, and fast-loading. That's it. Don't overcomplicate it. And resist the urge to clutter. Get rid of all those links - to anything. Literally trap your readers on this page and have your sign-up box be their only escape. As for that form, that sign-up box, well, little things matter here - this is one area where small changes can have a huge impact. For example, we can talk about the psychology of buttons - get ready for the best 8 minutes of you life! - or you could just do white text on fire-engine red. Feel free to test alternatives yourself, but it almost always wins for me, and in any studies I've seen. Yellow/black can be a good combination too, but if you are trying stuff outside that, just be sure to use something with high contrast that really grabs attention. Oh and if you aren't working with your own site where you can make all these customizations - and are just using a temporary landing page from your email provider - well... do the best you can within those restrictions, and make a plan to build your own site soon where you can control things fully. The newsletter sign-up page is the most important part of your site - it's not even close - so your site can be super minimal outside of that page. At least to begin with. I don't want to say too much more here because the problem is usually people doing too much here! So: pare it back. Keep it simple. Get the sign-up. 4. The Welcome People worry about screwing up their welcome sequence so much that they often put it off. Which is ironic as the biggest screw up you can make here is... putting it off. If a reader signs up and doesn't get an immediate message of some kind they'll assume something went wrong - especially if you promised them something like a free book. But that's not the only job of your welcome sequence - or the only challenge. Chief among them: keeping that reader attention after you gave them a cookie. Thankfully, this one is easy to measure - via your open rates - but tricky to iterate. You just gotta keep trying new subject lines (and email content) until you are maintaining healthy open rates throughout your sequence. Some drop off between emails is inevitable, but you will be surprised how much you can minimize that drop-off with a bit of sweat. And don't worry if this is an ongoing project which plays out over time - it almost always is! Incremental Gains There's nothing exciting about incremental gains - improving each part of a process by 1% or 5% is hardly headline stuff. But with something like email sign-ups and welcome sequences, when you chain together several gains like that the cumulative result can be a game-changer. People always ask me things like "how can I use Facebook Ads to really boost my mailing list" and everyone hates the answer because I normally start by suggesting they improve their landing pages, their buttons, their sign-up forms, their welcome sequences - these are the places where you make enough gains to make things like ads profitable. Once they are profitable, then you can scale them - i.e. turn up the juice - with the confidence of knowing that every dollar spent is coming back to you, with interest. And then that's when the really exciting stuff happens. But you have to do the boring stuff first, sorry! Dave P.S. Writing music this week is Daft Punk with the drumless edition of Instant Crush. | 
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