What can I give away for Free to Grow my Newsletter?
Newsletter freebies aka "cookies"
Q: For those of us who may be switching genres or new authors, what should we use as a reader magnet since we don't have a book to give away for free?
A: If you don’t have a book out yet that you can write a bonus scene for, there are still ways you can give readers something for joining your newsletter!
You could do just a scene, a teaser. You could do the first chapter of the book that you're working on.
You could do an inspiration photo if you wanted to hire someone off of Fiverr or somewhere like that to do a cartoon version of your characters for people to see if they sign up for your newsletter. If you're like a fantasy or sci-fi or somewhere that's got a lot of world building, you can do a short story. You can do a map of the world. Or if you're writing something like the college, you could do a map of the college or the university that the characters attend.
Really just about anything that you can think of that would be interesting to people who want to read your books to be able to look at.
Once you have more books, you can use bonus scenes or bonus epilogues.
If you don’t like writing those, you can be like me and use short stories or novellas. Several of my short stories and novellas that were previously published in anthologies are now newsletter cookies.
I also have a novella that I wrote as a book, put it up on sale for a while, and eventually I kind of realized it wasn't doing that great as a sale because it wasn't part of the series. It was series adjacent. So it made a really good newsletter freebie for me.
However, you don't have to write something new, and you certainly don't have to write a full-length novella or book. You don't have to write a full-length book. You don't have to write a book to put in your newsletter to give away for free. You can do a short story.
After co-writing Tsenturion Masters with Lee Savino, she had the brilliant idea of creating a website that readers could click through to at the end of the book to sign up for the mating service with the aliens that we were writing about. So I've seen things like that. That wasn't newsletter specific, but I'm just saying like you can be creative with it.
And you don't have to have one to start with either. I did not have one originally. It does help getting signups, but it's not necessary in order to have a newsletter or to start growing your subscriber list. Some people will just sign up because they want to know when your next book is.
But if you want to grow it faster… offering them something for signing up usually works really well.
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