WWN54 : Two approaches to list-building for creative side projects

I’m away on holiday this week and normally, I’d stick one finger up to the “muh ConSiSteNcY” CAW-CAWs and just take the week off.

Because any long term Write Way readers know I do love to stick it to the guru’s idea of the good life…

But three weeks ago, Codename Phantom gave me so much to go on that I wrote two weeks of the Write Way in a row. So here I am, writing this a week in advance.

(Unheard of…)

If I have time I’ll give it a light edit on the day it goes out, but if I don’t, and the world changes between now and then?

Oh well.

It’s unlikely though, that’s the advantage of timeless advice instead of “keep it current” algorithm bait.

To recap:

In part one (WWN52 : Starting a creative project on the side) we learned the first thing Codename Phantom got right was establishing some financial security.

In part two (WWN53 : Creative Side Projects) we clarified the financial foundation aspect and learned that the second thing Codename Phantom got right was avoiding becoming the “one step ahead” guru teaching copywriting.

And here, in part three, we are going to start answering his question and we’ll see if we end up needing a part four…

(Codename Phantom is a patient man.)

With all that out the way, here is the relevant excerpt from the original question:

There is a small misconception in Codename Phantom’s first point, that he’s new to my niche and doesn’t understand it.

The misconception is that I have a “niche” which is sharing my lessons from creative writing + helping writers/creative writers/ghostwriters write better.

The truth is that I have no niche. I am, as Ben Settle says,

A niche unto myself!

And that’s important.

Because I think it’s the only way to successfully build a list around creative writing and creativity. You have to build it around your interests. You have to build it in a way that you can rabbit endlessly on about your existing projects without getting bored.

And there are different ways to do it but it all ends up with becoming the niche yourself.

Ben, his business partners Troy and John, and I dived into this in the free-ranging conversation we had a year or so back on X-Twitter spaces. You can listen to that here if you want the full discussion.

But I’ve transcribed and lightly edited the relevant part around an hour into the recording, when longtime Write Way Reader, Cabin Crewmember, and fiction enthusiast Josh Wade asked an excellent question:

James Carran:

I think Josh had a question.

Josh Wade:

Yes. I did. So this might be, like, out of left field, but not really. I'm a big fan of fiction.

And my question really is revolved around, if that's the only product that you have, it's fiction, say you only have one novel. How do you approach that from a longterm daily email marketing perspective?

James:

I feel like Ben cut out just there, and he's the perfect person for that.

Troy Broussard:

Yeah. I was waiting for Ben to chime in because he's the fiction writer. I'm writing a couple of fiction books right now, but, I'm not prepared to put myself in that category yet so I'll just let Ben do it when he comes back in.

John Wood:

I think that, there used to be an interesting show on VH1 called Storytellers. And where the different artists would talk about their circumstances for the songs, their famous songs.

And I always found that very interesting. I think that in your case, to me, if I was gonna, if I was selling fiction, I would talk about the circumstances of the book.

Why did you write it? What about this character? Was there any inspiration? Was there anything that was drawn from real life or something like that?

Some kind of meta analysis essentially of the book itself. And to me, I find that more fascinating, the actual nuts and bolts that goes into writing the book, or or your fiction. To me, that's that's a never ending source of things to talk about. So that's the angle that I would take.

Troy:

Yeah. And I think that, also another interesting angle to take is if you're writing a fictional book, you... there's some genre to it. Right? Like, the one that I'm writing is historical fiction where I'm going back into historical events but fictionalizing a different outcome. Right?

And it is in a genre.

And so when you have that genre, you could just write and engage people and collect, you know, give away some freebies and give away some things that are genre related, some PDFs or little research things that you did and tidbits.

Because what you wanna really do is cultivate a list that's gonna buy your book. So if you cultivate a list around the genre like Ben's writing zombie books and stuff, I mean, he's not gonna wanna be building a list about marketing to sell that. Right?

He wants to build a separate list for that. Right? So the point is I would just do stuff that would attract the genre that I'm writing for.

Ben Settle:

James, am I, am I back? I am back.

Troy: You're back.

James:

You cut out at the perfect time.

Ben:

Yeah. I wanna I wanna help Josh because I get it, man. It's not the easiest thing to figure out. I don't have a separate list for mine.

I have an app that I use, but I don't really use it for much. Right now, I think everybody… No matter what you're selling, whether it's fiction, nonfiction, whatever you're a coach, client, it doesn't really matter, whatever you're doing, freelancer, is to become a niche unto yourself... eventually. Right? Now this just happens organically.

A lot of people, just, this just happens. Where no matter what you sell, you're still gonna have fans and customers on your list because they're not there for that, they're there for you. So that's how I sell my stuff. I just talk about my fiction sometimes. Right?

It's a little off topic, but I don't really care. Right now, this whole week I'm talking about options trading. Now, Troy will tell you I'm the last person in the world anybody should take options trading advice from. I don't even know what an option is still. And yet, I invested all this money to buy shares in this company because I like where he's going with it.

But I'm still gonna talk about options because it is interesting. It is related enough to my list and my market where it's still gonna be something useful that I can talk about and coming at from my perspective which is why they're on my list.

So if you're selling fiction, talk... you just talk about the topic. Right? You just whatever it is, you can become the person about that.

And maybe you only have one book to sell. Right? Well, there's nothing saying you can't become an affiliate for other offers related to that to sell and while you're writing your next book right?

But at the all at the end of the day you want to be that niche into yourself, so no matter what you sell it all they'll listen to you and they'll buy from you or at least a certain portion of people will that's my take on it.

…You wanna be the, you wanna be the DVD extras. That's what you basically… And people love that. And there's nothing saying you can't sell something else at the same time. Right? So yeah.

Now, I’m ending the transcript there in order to make a few points, but we went on for a while more.

In fact, right after that, I covered what I see as the biggest mistake that many writers make when they’re building their list and audience.

But there was a lot in there, so we’ll come back to that section next week. Codename Phantom is getting his money’s worth out of his question. One day I might have to turn this into a book…

So instead of carrying on with that conversation, I’m going to split the next part out into next week, and I’m going to pull out some of the lessons from in there to give you something to consider.

Because there are lots of avenues you can go down (one of which is a creative dead end, but more on that next week) when it comes to building an audience around your creative interests.

First up, you can approach it from the meta-angle John Wood suggested.

Let people behind the curtain!

So you can talk about how you approached the writing, decisions you made. You can show some of the scenes you cut from the fiction. You can talk about how you edited the prose.

My “niche”, if I have one, is talking to writers (more on that next week). So I do a lot of this from the point of view of breaking down techniques, mindset, teaching you how to write better etc.

E.g. I just finished drafting [Undisclosed Book Reduction Project] for [Major Publisher], where they paid me thousands of dollars to take a 45,000 word book and cut it down to 11,000 while preserving the essence.

And because I have a course on Effective Editing which is currently in beta testing, I’m creating an hour long case study which breaks down every single step I took and decision I made, talking through the approach, doing over the shoulder rewrites, and so on.

That’s an example of talking shop, but there are plenty of other ways to approach that too.

But if that’s going backstage, the second approach is setting the stage.

i.e. Troy’s suggestion of talking genre!

Yes, harder to do if your creative expression is poetry, but still doable.

If I was building a list around my hymnwriting I’d focus on writing theological stuff, more than I wrote about poetry. Likewise, if I was building a list around my kids books I’d talk Bible teaching, parenting, Christian education.

We’ll look at the reason for that next week.

But the point for now is to broaden your outlook beyond the words and ask what your readers would be interested in. What are you interested in talking about?

Because as Ben says, your end goal is to become the niche.

Your goal is to attract a tribe of readers who want to read whatever you write, who are interested in what you have to say, who will follow and buy your stuff because it’s you.

So if I can offer one overriding and overarching principle from all of this for you to think about this week it’s to

write with personality!

The more that you let yourself come through everything you write, the more you have a distinctive and powerful voice, the more effective you’ll be at becoming a niche unto yourself.

And that’s the secret to building a writing audience around creative pursuits.

But more on all that in part four next week.

Meanwhile, may your pipe be full of good baccy and your prose full of personality,

James Carran, Craftsman Writer

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