WWN50 : The Welcome Guest

Today’s Write Way is brought to you by the Sacred Statements launch.

As promised, that’s now done and dusted. The doors are closed and never shall publicly open again.

But as it was themed around bible verses that I used to springboard into writing lessons, I thought it would be fun to build this Write Way Newsletter around the same theme.

And given I sent seven emails (four here, plus three bonus emails in the cabin) to promote that over thirty-three hours…

…and would have done more if I hadn’t been on holiday…

…I thought…

…there’s only one verse that fits.

And so, without a trace of irony or a scintilla of shame, let us begin!

Because this ancient wisdom is crucial to writing.

In fact, understanding this is why I was able to send emails every few hours and only “lose” about 0.5% of my list over the whole promo.

As an aside, I say “lose” in inverted commas because it’s never a true loss.

When you run a brief promo like this, it’s never engaged readers or buyers that jump out. It’s the people who weren’t really reading or engaging who finally stop taking up list space. The ‘lukewarm’ as Ben Settle calls them, in reference to another Bible verse (Revelation 3:16).

And the reason feeds into the point I’m slowly making in this fiftieth issue of the Write Way Newsletter.

You have to be a welcome guest

not the neighbour who won’t stop “popping in”.

The first part of that, of course, is that you’ve been invited. Not just banging on the door. Spam is evil and I hate it. People keep adding me to Substacks without asking and if I could hunt them down and throw cans of spam at them, I would.

So if you run an email list, use double-opt-in. Make them check a box to confirm. Tell them in simple words what you’re going to do when they sign up.

(E.g. my early email says straight up that I’ll send them a twice-weekly newsletter plus more when I promo. So people expect the occasional flurry. When you join the cabin you get a similar email setting out the rules and expectations there.)

The second factor is fitting the message to your market. Which is a fancy way of saying…

…talk to the people listening.

Dan Kennedy, the mutton-chopped marketing maestro, has an excellent story to illustrate the point. Someone hammered on his front door one morning.

Which he stubbornly ignored because he was trying to work and thought it was a marketing pest, only for the man to climb the glass-encrusted walls, and start banging on the glass door!

Well, he couldn’t keep ignoring the chap, what with him being on one side of the glass and Dan being on the other.

So he opened up, and it turned out the chap was so persistent because Dan’s shrubbery in the front yard was on fire. He was hammering on the door to get Dan to call the fire department and offer to go back out front and work the hose to stop the house catching fire.

In that moment, Dan said, he went from annoying pest to welcome guest.

Why?

Because he had the right message at the right time.

That’s one big part of our puzzle. If you want your writing to arrive like a welcome guest, you need to be writing things that people want to read!

This may seem a statement of the bleedin’ obvious, but it ain’t for most writers. Truly, the number of times I’ve seen a writer wonder why nobody wants to read their book…

…and been able to tell from a paragraphs that it’s a tedious self-insert that they wrote without a single thought to their reader…

…who is the only person that matters!

Now, none of this means that you adjust your message to tickle their wandering ears. You’re in the writing business, not the marketing business, and sometimes that means telling people what they need to hear and not what they want to hear.

But it does mean stopping and asking:

What’s in it for them?

And not spending all your time on what’s in it for you.

Writing is a giving act, a selfless act. Yes, we profit rather nicely from it if we do it well, but the goal is always to love and serve your readers. Self-indulgence is self-destructive.

(Sacred Statements buyers will be perking their ears up because over the last few paragraphs I’ve referenced concepts that I drill into in several of those lessons.)

And so that means that you write less about yourself and more about how your story can help your readers with where they are.

Be welcome in the way you write. And write well.

Yes, quantity of contact is key when it comes to sales, as any guru will tell you. But without quality, quantity is counterproductive.

When it comes to your writing results, quantity is a multiplier. But it’s important to have something you want to be multiplying before you start…

Multiply a negative and you just end up with a bigger negative.

Write ten bad emails and you get ten times the unsubscribes.

Write ten good emails and you get ten times the sales.

In fact, if you write well enough, people will read even when they don’t care one whit about the subject.

And one last point before I head to bed… The timing is crucial. Another of my favourite Proverbs comes a couple of chapters later than our opening verse:

And as someone who doesn’t much like to talk to anyone first thing in the morning we can all say Amen.

While the gurus are beating their face with bananas and taking ice baths, I’m wriggling back under the duvet for another ten minutes and looking forward to a nice hot shower.

You can show up with a bundle of blessings but do it before coffee and I don’t want to hear it.

That’s one reason why I love email. Yes, there are often deadlines in my emails, but it’s not like I’m ringing you up and

demanding attention NOW.

As anyone who has kids knows, that stuff is a pain in the ass because there’s never a good time.

If you like to batch check your emails in the afternoon, fine and well. If you prefer to deal with them as they come in, also okay. If you’re a morning or evening person, pick what works for you.

But there’s a broader point here:

The time that I write a message might not be the time that someone wants or needs to hear it…

…so I say it again.

And again.

And again.

Yes, there are short-lived promos like sacred statements that will never be repeated. But my core messages will be hammered home again and again and again. Especially if you join Carran’s Cabin and hear from me daily.

Let me draw all this together and bullet point it in a rare “Tl;dr” because I know I’ve rambled a little but it do be late and I’m tired.

“Is too much, I sum up.”

• Be invited by your readers

• Be upfront about your expectations

• Write for your readers and not yourself

• Write well, so that people enjoy reading even when they’re less interested

• Repeat the important things so people can hear it when it’s right for them

And if you still missed any of those points, don’t worry. I’ll repeat them all in time. Until next week, may your pipe smoke be welcome and your prose even more so,

James Carran, Craftsman Writer

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