Branding Focus: Send the Swap Request!
This week’s branding focus in Page Turner Planning asks you to do something emotionally uncomfortable for many of us: ask for help.
This week, I’m asking you to send a newsletter swap request.
Choose an author in your genre who writes for a similar audience and reach out to ask if they’d be interested in recommending each other’s books to your respective newsletters.
When you reach out, don’t send a generic template blast. Take a few minutes to personalize the message.
Mention a specific book of theirs you enjoyed. Reference a shared trope or theme in your stories. Congratulate them on a recent release. Show that you know who they are and why their readers might also enjoy your work.
Connection always works better than convenience.
Your email doesn’t have to be long. It just has to feel genuine.
My Turn Too
For me, this exercise lands as I’m launching my next Kickstarter. It’s a fiction campaign—an epistolary romantasy experience—and part of my strategy is reaching out to other authors who currently have campaigns running on Kickstarter.
Which means I have to do the very thing I’m asking you to do.
My Gen X, oldest daughter, single mother, hyper-independent self always struggles with asking for help. I’m very comfortable building things on my own. Less comfortable saying, “Hey, would you do me a solid?”
But community is built through small brave moments like this.
So if I’m asking you to do it, I’m doing it too.
Deep breath.
Send the email.
And if you need help crafting story questions and themes, check out my Trope Journals. These are workbooks that setup all the beats and plot points and universal fantasies and heartbeat moments readers are expecting in your love story.
Im in a authors group, not quite mastermind, but definitely business and growth oriented, and a woman I had met prior generously shared my newly published first in series book with her newsletter. I am an emerging fiction author, this woman has a total huge backlist and is a way stronger writer than myself. The generosity was and is breathtaking.
I was thinking about when I met her at a conference a year ago, I sat down at a table to rest, train my service dog for managing a full space, and meet people. Those were my objectives, in that order. She mentioned she was going through a divorce, gave specifics on what was going down, and I said,” I don’t even know you but I’m ready to hop in someone’s mom van and kick his ass.”
Connection and reciprocity and relationships are the result of my I’m a girls girl attitude.
So I’m gonna share her work with my newsletter, they are genre adjacent. My newsletter has less than half the amount of people on it that have downloaded my book in book funnel since her newsletter went out. She knew that before she offered to share my work.
Shes such a gem. Guess we are both girls girls.
Hi, Ines! I was just checking out your workbooks on Amazon, and I was looking at your Romance Workbook Map and you have stop 3 and 4 backwards on the pathway of your map. (It's a little awkward, because they are in the correct order if reading from left to right, but the pathway journey "trail" leads through them backwards.
But looks like awesome workbooks!