Connect with Readers, Grow Your Audience

Reframe these key marketing tools to nurture authentic engagement

Today I’m thinking about readers. Our relationship with them. How obsessing about them can be counterproductive. And how, at the same time, we can’t act like they don’t matter in the life of any writer. 

I’m thinking about the seasons we travel in and out of as writers. How one season can be made for musing, unearthing something new inside us. And how others can be meant for rolling up our sleeves and getting serious about our craft. I’m thinking about how eventually, a lot of us writers are invited to shift from the cocoon of our inner writing life to consider how to bring it to readers. 

How many times have I heard from a writer: “I spent a few years writing my book, and then I looked up and I had no way to answer questions from my publisher about readers!” Most of us are thrown into the complexities of the writer-reader relationship, it seems—whether that’s through our first book launch or trying to understand something like email sequencing in a newsletter on Substack. 

My work as a writer, editor and editorial strategist has always involved thinking about and intentionally researching the reader's experience. This shaped me into the writer I am today, and I recognize that in some ways, stepping into someone else’s voice or mindset also created an intellectual or emotional barrier to finding my voice for a long time. But I’ve also never been able to completely throw out the notion that readers are still there, still part of the equation.

Do I write for myself? Or do I write for readers? Yes.

Even after years of rejecting all the traditional marketing and writing advice and digging so deeply into myself, to find some sort of inner sovereignty, still I can’t pick a side in the “Do I write for myself? Or do I write for readers?” Because the answer is yes, I do. I wasn’t made to be a writer who finds contentment while scrawling on the walls of caves. Just as there is no leader without followers, I’m not the writer I want to be without readers to give my voice to.

But how do we find those elusive readers? (I’d argue writing on Substack is the best place to start.) Once we find readers, how do we create a connection with them? (There are a lot of answers to this one!) And, of course, how do we make sure we’re understanding and tracking an evolving understanding of those readers as we, too, are also changing as writers?

These are all big questions, and today I want to explore the places that I think most impact our relationship with readers. This includes: 

• perceptions around self-promotion; 

• the use of “lead magnets” in the Substack environment; and 

• how I keep learning about what my readers need in a newsletter experience.

Here are some of the main things I’ve reframed in the context of producing and marketing my writing that have made a genuine, long-term difference.

Self-promotion

Last Christmas, I felt a nudge to share more consistently about the work I’ve been doing in my newsletter. But the sheer volume of advice, statistics and best practices rolling around in my head were paralyzing me. I decided to give myself a paid subscription to a newsletter written by

Lucy Werner

called Hype Yourself. She has become a consistent voice in my reading life, reminding me that no one is going to bring my writing into the world except for me. And how do I do that? Well, one way is to find creative, conscience-friendly, values-driven opportunities to talk about my work every day. 

Like most writers, the thought of “selling myself” makes me deeply uncomfortable. It can feel slimy, even manipulative. But when I step back and examine my daily life, the reality is that there are services, products or community events being “sold” to me that often meet a need that I have. Does that feel slimy? Or do I feel relieved, thankful even, when I find the exact garden fertilizer or vegetable seeds I’ve been looking for? 

The relationship between me and, say, an online garden supplier, is entirely predicated on the notion that their product is the tonic I need. And they were ready to cultivate a relationship with me precisely when I was also ready—through a well-organized website, organic or paid search results or a podcast conversation. 

Self-promotion doesn’t have to be innately slimy; it can also be expansive, generous and responsible. Self-promotion can feel uncomfortable and also be fueled by a genuine desire to connect and be helpful. To parallel this with our work here in our newsletters, I believe my writing (and your writing!) has a gift—a medicine, even—for people in the world. And it’s our respective jobs to be responsible and steady in how we share it with them. 

Practically speaking, I’ve discovered that “selling myself” every day creates a cumulative effect that’s hard to measure directly. Messages are carried inside a network of people through osmosis, and that’s not something I can control to a tee. But this sharing about my writing slowly builds momentum on itself. My job is no longer to sell myself. It’s to cooperate with the mysterious accumulation of awareness around the message in my work.

Lead magnets

In 2012, when I joined a marketing agency to help manage their content department, I turned my attention to blog and ebook production. At the time, ebooks were all the rage in inbound marketing and considered a prime “lead magnet.” I was brought in to design production processes to bridge the gap between commonplace digital content and traditional publishing standards, which is where I’d spent the first five or so years of my career. 

Here’s what I insisted we do with ebooks we published back in the day:

• We made them more than glorified sales pitches. They included up-to-date research and statistics. When possible, we localized the information to reflect the costs of, say, a kitchen remodel in central Connecticut versus New Jersey. For Substack writers, this means giving readers something they can’t find for free anywhere else online (or in your newsletter) that creates a moment of surprise, helpfulness or connection.

• We learned a lot about the objections that buyers brought into the sales process. We wanted to understand the strengths and weaknesses (perceived or otherwise) in the products we were writing about. This changed how much we talked directly about costs, customer service differentiators and other perks that changed depending on the location of the business. This means if you’re writing to busy moms, it’s possible a 50-page ebook might get sent to the trash bin right away and seem out of touch (who has time to read that size of ebook, let alone tired parents?).

• We put ourselves into the customers’ shoes over and over and over again. We asked questions like, “What are they most stressed about? Where does a budget max out? Are we giving them as much choice and information as possible? Do we make it easy to find their way back?” One way to learn more about readers is to perform a mini content audit of your top 10 to 20 essays and see if there are any recurring themes or phrases in what readers share in the comment sections.

I insisted then and insist now that we write for humans and treat them (and their inboxes) with respect. We made ebooks as worthwhile as possible because we understood that access to someone’s inbox was the same as asking them for the keys to their house.

But of course, lead magnets can take so many wonderful, exciting forms — in the context of Substack your readers may not want a digital guide. Maybe they’d be interested in a vintage shirt (

Alex Dobrenko`

). Or a custom poem (

Tara Penry

). Or a book giveaway (

Tom Cox

). Or maybe it’s offering seasons of creative one-on-one calls (

Mike Sowden

). The point of a lead magnet is to give readers a reason to change the status of their relationship with your publication. To brainstorm around this, here are a few extra parameters that might help:

1. It should consider a need that readers have in their daily lives that intersects with your skills, writing themes or perspectives.

2. It should be a gift, free and clear.

3. And it should not ask the reader to do any more labor on behalf of your publication. (But work like sharing a shipping address, perhaps, could be acceptable if the gift is valuable enough.)

Marketing personas

One of the most interesting parts of shifting from traditional to digital publishing was learning how to work with marketing personas. Here, I had something to help me systematically consider and understand how strangers are wired inside. For agency clients, we used marketing personas to identify and then track specific data points around ideal, albeit fictionalized, customers. They also helped us hone in on content plans; blog topics; social media posts; giveaways, etc. But when I began working as a freelance writer, editor and editorial strategist, I reimagined them into “Reader Personas.” 

This ongoing exercise, of stepping into a reader’s lived experience, turns out to be one of the best ways to reorient to what is most effective in reaching readers for our work while also encouraging an exercise in empathy. It is also an incredibly helpful tool if you ever work with a marketing team or strategist in the future. Because they’re all going to ask the same question (Who are we trying to reach with this message?), and handing them a Reader Persona will genuinely be like Christmas Day for them.

I use a Reader Persona to help me step into my readers’ lived experience, as best as my imagination and curiosity can take me, at first. And then I create opportunities to test my assumptions about how I understand my readers. By asking questions like, “What does a typical day in their life look like?” or “What core values or experiences do I share with my readers?” I’m able to more confidently navigate when my marketing efforts seem to be plateauing—or when it’s time to launch a new season in my newsletter.

Transitioning between writing for yourself and connecting with readers

If I’ve learned anything in the last year and a half, it’s that building a connection with readers is an evolving journey. I started putting clear, focused effort into my newsletter with just 12 people on my email list in January 2023. Leading up to this time, I had spent a handful of years where I shut out all outside pressures and just focused on letting my inner voice come to the surface. 

What I continue to find in this journey as a writer/editor/editorial strategist hybrid is that I thrive when I give myself permission to toggle between all these facets of my personality. In any given week, I carve out a way to create a supprtive, honest writing cocoon — and then I hop back out into the lives of my readers, considering their experiences, perspectives and needs. In this way, the proverbial writer’s pressure tank seems to recalibrate for me, as does my comfort level with self-promotion and creativity around connecting with my readers.