The Right-Reader Method
The original four posts in a streamlined format
ONE
I’m going to give you a solution to the greatest frustration of fiction writers today: How do I find readers?
More than that, how do we find readers who aren’t just other writers? Writers are readers, sure. Absolutely. But a cannibalistic community of writers pushing their stories on one another isn’t enough. We need more. We need readers who aren’t writers too.
It goes deeper than that, and we’re still just on the ground-level, fundamental potential of the theory. We need the right readers. Anyone can read your book, but you’re growing a mailing list to whom you will sell your fiction. Who your subscribers are matters. Normally, we think in terms of percentages, knowing that some small percentage of subscribers will buy our books and I can get a hundred more subscribers, maybe that will translate into one more sale. We play the numbers game because we see no other option. We’ve never had the capacity to build a system that would draw in readers who are the most likely to connect with the stories we tell, but that’s exactly the potential of this method.
You will build an online system that does more than aimlessly grow. It hunts for your perfect reader, collects them for your mailing list, ready and eager for your next book release.
Don’t roll your eyes at the mention of the perfect reader. I’m not talking demographics, as if your perfect reader were a 23-year-old paralegal from Detroit. No. The perfect reader is the one who, once they understand what your book is about, will be drawn to buy and read it. It’s the audience with the greatest potential to become a fan and buy more of your books. That what I mean when I say a reader who’s right for your fiction.
24 hours a day, your system will hunt for those right readers.
Add the excellence of your work to an audience prime to respond to your core themes, and suddenly I’m at my keyboard shaking with excitement at the possibilities.
Excellence is a big, scary word. You’ll have to be good at what you do, but here’s the good news, excellence in fiction is whatever the writer and her readers agree upon. I love literary and classic fiction, but this is something the literary crowd often misses. I’ll never forget a tweet made the day Terry Pratchett died. This literary type said that he’d read a few sentences of Pratchett and the we needed “to stop rewarding mediocrity.”
The beauty of the sentence is only one possible measure of excellence, and Pratchett was a beloved and great author, not a mediocre one. There’s no one thing our fiction has to be.
You enter into what I call a contract of awesomeness with your reader, stating that these are the things that define greatness in fiction, and you promise to deliver upon those frequently. Nothing outside of that contract matters.
Now, all you need is a way of getting your stories with people who are more likely to share in your contract of awesomeness. My method pre-selects for an audience ready to plug into the kind of story you’re telling.
The promise of a competent implementation of the method’s strategies is the right audience, drawn from a diverse pool that isn’t all writers. The possibilities beyond this are that we can build a bigger, better fan base who is both eager for our stories and who sees their value. These are the people to whom you send your email about the presale of your next novel and they jump on it. These are the free subscribers who upgrade to paid.
Earlier this week, I saw fiction Substack devouring itself in frustration everywhere I looked. The crescendo was one guy asking, “Has any fiction writer really made it on Substack? Even one?”
The assumed answer was no, not even one. Depending on our definition of “making it,” I doubt many of us would challenge that assertion. Substack wasn’t made with fiction in mind.
And that doesn’t matter.
My theory uses Substack as it is to accomplish one of the most hard-to-achieve goals shared by fiction writers. Most of us aren’t looking to make a living off of Substack. We just want to build an audience, and that the method can offer. For some, they’ll come away with much more.
Once we’ve implemented these strategies broadly enough, there will emerge from among us those who will qualify as having made it, by whatever metric we care to apply.
TWO
When I was young, I lived in the Hollywood Hills, sleeping in the living room of a bedroom-apartment. I wasn’t an actor, but some of my life choices at that age were directed by the fantasy of living like one. Don’t get me wrong. Fantasies can be fun. I saw movie stars and worked as an extra, but if any of that was really important, I could have still accomplished more than just fantasizing. What I needed was to know my goals and determine what was necessary to attain them.
The way fiction writers approach Substack is dictated by fantasy. The good news is that we have both the reality and the role play. The approach driven by fantasy still has its purpose.
We are authors, but there is still the fantasy of experiencing all we’ve ever imagined that word entails. On Substack, we can set up an author site and get interaction and have our stories read and build a mailing list. It feeds the dream.
Once we begin the right-reader method, it will require us to make choices that aren’t part of the fantasy, and though they’ll get us closer to our goals, that’s still hard.
Did I mention I ran into Robert Culp? Twice? In restrooms? Not impressive is it? It’s a bit like trying to explain the significance of your author website. Experts say they’re important. When people want to find more of your work, they need some place to go.
Yes, but…
People must have read your work so they’re in need of more in the first place! Your author website isn’t doing that. You gain subscribers and feel the euphoria of progress, but your subscribers are other writers, feeding off that same fantasy.
Is anyone actually getting any closer to achieving their goals?
If you want to keep an author website as one of your Substacks, you’re going to need at least two accounts. That’s part of the mindset difficulty, building one or more publications that don’t cater to the fantasy, but the other difficulty is the true challenge. You have to understand your own work.
Your first task is to determine one or two central, overarching themes that are present throughout your work.
The word themes throws people off. They immediately think they’re in English class, but we’re just talking about whatever you see repeated in your work. This might be very specific and intellectual, but it can also be broad or emotional. Maybe you write often about grief. Perhaps you specialize in space-centered science fiction with non earth-based trans-planetary societies. Understanding your own work can be harder than understanding someone else’s. If there’s somebody who’s read much of your work, ask them for ideas, but one way or the other, you’ll have to be able to articulate those themes that reoccur in your writing.
If you’re willing and able to do those two things,
a) approach Substack in a way that serves your purposes but not your fantasies, and
b) examine the body of your writing to understand your core themes—
then this method will be meaningful for you.
THREE
Let’s turn our focus on how we introduce ourselves and our work, and there are so many opportunities for that introduction, it can be exhausting and tempting to overlook the opportunities as unimportant. Even when we make the effort, it’s easy to end up with something meaningless.
On a basic level, this is something everyone needs to understand to implement the method, but I’m not giving you the one right answer. This is how I understand this point at this moment, but it’s advice some of you need to hear.
First, let me be blunt. You’re not selling your Substack to your grandmother.
For some, the only description of your writing is the word “my”. This is my writing. This is my Substack. That’s a great sales pitch for your grandmother but no one else.
You need two things when you introduce yourself: what you promise and how who you are relates to that promise.
My method will help specify that promise in your mind so you convey it to your potential readers, but the application of the method is mostly outside of the scope of the author website. It will help you focus on the perfect reader for the majority of your writing–or maybe for subsets of your writing, in which case you’ll make multiple accounts.
Your author website is broader than that. It should be where people can easily find anything you’ve written after they’ve discovered you and want more. This also highlights that while it may be annoying to think that you need more than one account, it’s vital if you’re going to still maintain an author’s website. By trying to do too much with the publication, we often end up failing at the basics.
Starting with that site, though, tell the version of your story that is relevant to the promise you’re making as an author. Earlier, I talked about the contract of awesomeness. Tell me what you write in such a way that hints at that contract. If you use the word “literary” you’re making a promise that pertains to form. If you use the word “fantasy”, you’re making a promise that pertains to storytelling.
When it comes to your biography, even when that bio is a single line, you’re telling the version of your life story that best relates to the promise your site is making. Live long enough or hard enough, and you’ll have lived many lives. As your promise changes, so do the parts of your life you focus on.
For this book, the parts of my story I focus on will depend on how I articulate this book’s promise. If this were about being a better writer, I’d talk about my being a school teacher, a fiction critique forum founder, and a president of a local Literary Council.
Yet, the quality of your writing isn’t the promise of the book, and so my personal story changes. We’ll get into that at the end of the next section.
RESOURCES
Get your free subscription to The Literary Salon, learn more, join others implementing this method, and become part of a community that will engage with and support your writing.
That community aspect is being developed for non-fiction communities at Post Op. Your bookfunnel promotions are supported at The Free Bookstore, and all of this is free.
You can also follow along with me as I implement the system. My author Substack is ThaddeusThomas.com, and my non-fiction publications are The Sibyliad and Our Deeper Stories.