We hosted another awesome demo last week highlighting a fantastic marketing and community-building tool for authors: StoryOrigin. This easy-to-use site helps authors build and grow their email lists, increase book sales, find reviews, network with authors, and more. We have a ton of resources highlighting the benefits of StoryOrigin! There’s also a limited-time 30% discount code to get you started. Let’s take a look.
StoryOrigin basics and benefits
Overall, StoryOrigin is just plain cool. It has a ton of features that authors can take advantage of to promote, connect, and grow. Here are some of the features that caught our attention.
Build your email list
Starting off as an author can be hard enough. But it’s that much harder when you’re a Mom Who Writes doing 100 other things while world-building and brainstorming. However, once it’s time to sell your book, the marketing world is a whole other beast. There are endless ways you can market yourself to reach potential readers. One of the most powerful and popular methods is email marketing; this is where StoryOrigin shines.
StoryOrigin helps authors build their email list by creating landing pages that offer reader magnets and freebies. A reader magnet is a reward for your subscribers when they sign up for your mailing list. This is typically a written work between 10,000-20,000 words. It could be any piece that draws your potential reader: a short story, poetry collection, chapter of a book, or even a limited prequel to a series. Once an author creates their landing page, StoryOrigin handles the delivery of the file to anyone who signs up.
Find reviewers
As much as some of us despise them, book reviews are important for authors. They give potential readers an initial impression of your book, instantly turning on (or off) interest in your story and future works.
StoryOrigin has a feature that allows authors to collect requests to build a review team. It also has an automation feature to track your progress. You can see the reviews posted on various platforms (Amazon, Goodreads, etc.), check their completion rate, automate follow-up requests, and authenticate reviewers before they are allowed to download an e-book file.
Gather Beta-reader copy feedback
Beta-reader feedback is crucial to the development of your story. But depending on how many readers you have, managing the feedback can be overwhelming. StoryOrigin allows authors to gather feedback, sort it, and even track their Beta reader’s progress as they work through the story. Unlike GoogleDocs and other shared documents, readers can comment and highlight directly in the document privately, without seeing the feedback from other Betas.
Network with other authors
If you’ve been in the online writing community for a while, you’ve probably already noticed the level of competition among some authors. Yes, there are only so many genres, tropes, and ideas that can go around. But competing with other authors should not be your ultimate goal as a writer. The ultimate writing goal is to connect with your readers.
To put it simply, authors are stronger when they band together. StoryOrigin encourages cooperation among their communities rather than competition. This helps authors grow in more ways than one. Maybe you aren’t writing something at the moment or you’re waiting for your best-selling release to hit the shelf. Promote another author while you wait!
In addition to building your list of readers, StoryOrigin also helps you cross-promote with fellow authors. This drives more traffic to both of your landing pages. StoryOrigin helps facilitate newsletter swaps for optimal growth, as well as a matchmaking feature to funnel you right into the writing communities that will support you the most. Additionally, StoryOrigin helps you create group promos, featuring the books of all participants on one landing page.
Why is email marketing so powerful?
When it comes to marketing, social media platforms are wonderful. So many of the features are free, easy to use, and can allow you to reach millions of fellow authors and possible readers.
The downside? You don’t own these platforms or the followings that accompany them. At any given time, a social media platform can shut down and leave you high and dry, without any follow-up contact information to reach back out to your followers.
The number one benefit of email marketing, by far, is your mailing list. These are customer contacts that are yours—managed and owned by you. No social media platform can tamper with it or decide when and who is allowed to be your customer. Once you start building your email list, you have the power to point your readers directly to your secret weapon: your website.
StoryOrigin resources and limited time code!
We know this is why you’re really here…it’s all good! Last week’s demo was hosted by StoryOrigin indie developer, Evan Gow. While we don’t have the actual video, we did get our hands on the meat of it.
This StoryOrigin PowerPoint covers everything reviewed in the demo, including building your mailing list, creating welcome sequences, vetting reviewers, arranging cross-promotions, and more. For more links on getting started, StoryOrigin provides a ton of video tutorials to get you started.
If you’re ready to take the leap, use our DISCOUNT CODE: MWW2309 for a 30% discount off the first year when purchasing the yearly plan. This code expires July 22nd, 11:59 pm Central Time!
Good luck and happy writing all! (And networking and marketing and all the things!)
About the Writer: Shell Sherwood is a poet, fiction writer, freelancer, and creator of silly children’s stories who could live on coffee, pastries, and romantic tragedies. She lives in Hudson Valley, NY, with her three boys and aspires to own a small writing getaway in every climate. Shell is currently working on her debut poetry collection. Learn more about Shell and follow her writing journey via her author blog, Instagram, and TikTok.