BooksGoSocial Conference Magazine
WRITING AN OFFICIAL READING GUIDE By Peter Mularney You’ve tried perma-free, without seeing many sales flow through to the other books in your series. People download your free lead magnet and sign up for your newsletter but don’t buy any of your books unless you offer special discounts or give them away for free. You’re questioning the wisdom of continuing to pay for Facebook ads to attract people to your list when it seems no-one’s willing to pay full price for your books. ________________________________________ When I was wondering if there was a way to get my work in front of potential readers that wouldn’t cost me a small fortune and would increase the value of the people who joined my list, I came across Rachel Amphlett’s Official Reading Guide. Rachel was motivated to release an Official Reading Guide after someone else had written a reading guide about her popular crime series and put it up for sale on Amazon. She saw the value of writing her own, and making it available for free across all the platforms that carried her titles. Caught my attention. I decided to write one. Unlike Rachel, I write across genres, so I saw the potential for a reading guide to showcase all of my titles and provide potential readers with a pathway to both of my mailing lists within the one book. I also saw an opportunity to drive traffic to my website from people who had discovered the guide with little or no help from me. An Official Reading Guide is a book catalogue with author insights and extracts from each title listed in the guide. As I also write non-fiction, I included an overview of each non-fiction title and a list of the topics covered in that book. The guide contains links to the landing page for each book to encourage people to buy, and invitations to sign up to each of my mailing lists and download the free lead magnet attached to each list. Most of the content for the guide came from two sources: the books themselves and blog posts I had written as reading guides for my crime series. The only content I had to generate specifically for the guide was the summary of the topics covered in my non-fiction self-help books and the author insights I wrote for the books I write as a mystic.
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