How To Grow Your Email List With Bundles And Advanced Reader Campaigns

Editor-turned-book-coach Jessica Andersen returns to the podcast to join Juliet Clark in discussing how to grow your email list with giveaway bundles and Advanced Reader Campaigns (ARCs). Together, they talk about distributing ARC (even for nonfiction books) to secure maximum effort, the most effective bundle promotion strategies, and some DIY tips on building your very own brand. Jessica shares practical advice on creating compelling landing pages to boost sales through perceived value and setting up your email list for long-term success. She also discusses the importance of building hype around your email marketing to invite successful collaboration with other authors and content creators.

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How To Grow Your Email List With Bundles And Advanced Reader Campaigns

Welcome to Promote, Profit, Publish. I’m your host, Juliet Clark. We’re going to talk about something a little bit different that we haven’t talked about in the past, which is ARCs, advance reader copies. Stay tuned for that. I also want to remind you that we have a couple of events coming up on Thursday. We have our Go High Level Monthly Training with Rebecca Bertoldi. Our topic is Save Time and Build Relationships with Automation. You can go over to GHLMonthly.com to register. I would love to see you guys there if you’re a GoHighLevel user and you need a little extra support.

Also, on July 11th, you can go over to BAMagTraining.com. Our guest on July 11th is the Pre-Game Show: Getting Ready to Write Your Masterpiece with Kris Johnson. If you’re thinking about writing a book in 2026 or starting in 2025 and publishing in 2026, this is a great way to get started. Join us. You can sign up for Kris’s event at BAMagTraining.com.

Our guest is Jessica Andersen. She’s a returning guest, and she is an editor turned book coach. She’s from the USA. She moved to France one day in 2010 and never looked back. I’m not sure she actually meant to move there. I haven’t figured that out yet. Since starting her business a couple of years ago, she’s worked with authors all over the world on dozens of books. As the founder of Brand Book Bootcamp, she serves entrepreneurs who want to replace their content marketing with a Brand Book, which will position them as the go-to voice and attract ideal clients on autopilot. Stay tuned for ARCs with Jessica Andersen.

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Jessica, welcome.

Thank you so much for having me back, Juliet. I’m excited to be here.

Nonfiction Marketing Strategy Insight

I’m excited to have you because ARCs are something we don’t talk about very often, mainly because my clients are mainly POD, and they just want to get that book out there, but my fiction authors do engage with them. I think a lot more fiction authors than nonfiction tend to do that because it’s hard with your fiction stories sometimes. The flow and the story are not the same as nonfiction.

That surprises me. First of all, I’m so glad that you call it ARC, too, because I feel like people probably say ARC, and it’s ARC in my head. Just read it. What surprises me is that my method is easier for the nonfiction crowd to do for themselves than it is for the fiction crowd. I don’t usually work with fiction authors anyway, but I feel like they’re not necessarily in the mindset of marketing, email lists, and all that businessy stuff. Whereas nonfiction ones, if they have written it the way I teach it, their book is already aligned with their high-ticket offers. If they don’t already have an email list, they’re going to need one. My strategy requires an email list for it to work.

That’s amazing. Tell everybody what an ARC is because I’m sure there are a lot of people who don’t know.

An ARC is an advance reader campaign. It’s basically your book launch hype crew. When you’re launching a book, you’re not going to launch it to crickets. You’re going to have an audience behind it, and you want people to have already bought copies. Hopefully, they’re going to be verified on Amazon, and you’re going to start getting some actual reviews posted on Amazon or whatever platform that you’re distributing to when your book goes to launch.

That helps build hype when you’re coming out with your book for the first time. It gets everyone excited, people buy the book and get to know you, and any offers that you have. Maybe you have other books. If you’re in fiction, maybe you have written other books in the same genre. In the case of my clients and some of yours as well, if you’re in nonfiction, it’s going to once again start seeding your high-ticket offers to your audience at large, and specifically the people who picked up your book and read it as part of your ARC team.

ARC Giveaway Strategy Framework

Now that you’ve mentioned that, can you explain what a giveaway bundle is and why it’s so effective for authors? That’s part of what this article was about, which was intriguing to me.

I called it a couple of different things. I wanted to call it a collaborative giveaway because my method, specifically, that I implemented for myself, involves giving away products that are normally paid for free for a limited time. I use collaborative giveaway interchangeably with the term bundle because that’s also what I have seen on the internet. I’ve contributed to a bunch of bundles, and I love that as an async way to collaborate with other people and build our list together.

It doesn’t have to be a bundle. This might shock people, but it could also be a summit. Lots of people speak at summits, like you have lots of workshop recordings going on over 2 or 3 days. I’ve recently participated in an audio summit as well. We recorded everything on Voxer ahead of time. That was all async, too. That can still work. That’s also why I chose to call it a collaborative giveaway, because it can look a little different depending on where your strengths are. It definitely plays to your strengths.

It was a little bit difficult for me to parse out a framework to explain this to people, especially via the medium of text. For those who aren’t aware, I wrote an article for Juliet for her Breakthrough Author Magazine about my ARC collaborative giveaway process. It was difficult for me to organize my thoughts around this, but I had a friend tell me, “Why don’t you structure it around the three different landing pages that you need in order to pull this off?” I thought, “That’s a brilliant idea.”

Basically, you’re going to need collaboration partners, but you’re also going to need a series of three different landing pages. The first one that I recommend is to have an RSVP page, and this is probably the most work up front, but this is the secret sauce to my strategy. This is where you’re going to put all the information to attract your collab partners, aka those people who are contributing their digital products to your bundle.

It’s a place for them to get all of their questions answered, especially around what audiences they are targeting, what the theme is, and what contributions are going to work best here. Am I fit? They’re, in a way, your initial hype crew to then build the ARC team, who is going to be your hype crew for your book launch or whatever else you’re launching. If you’re launching something else online, the same method applies.

Side note, I ran this last summer. I hosted my first collaborative giveaway, aka bundle. I did not have a book in the pipeline at that time. I just wanted to build my list. Through this method, because I’m building my list this way, the contributors, aka my collab buddies, are also building their lists at the same time, so it’s a win-win. I realized after I did it that the exact same process can be transposed onto building an ARC team for authors. That’s why I decided to write the article for your magazine, Juliet.

Are you using collab partners like I talk about, power partners, and like-minded people in the industry? They don’t have exactly the same product, but they have author-related products.

They shouldn’t have exactly the same product. If it’s too similar, then the collective reach is going to be filled with too many of the same people. There’s going to be too much overlap. Ultimately, that’s not going to be helpful for you or your collab partners. You’re right to point that out. It’s very much like your idea of power partners. It’s the same idea as those of us who are contributing to your magazine.

A rising tide lifts all boats. The difference between your magazine, though, and the bundle is that yours is permafree. My idea is to sweeten the pot for people to come into the bundle and share their email addresses with us. It’s the fact that normally all these products are paid, but now we’re all offering them for free for a very specific reason and time frame to build in that urgency because psychologically, that helps people opt in and buy, or in this case, download for free.

Opt-In Page Setup Guide

After the RSVP page, you’re going to want to build what I call an opt-in page. This one and the next page get confusing out of the three pages. The opt-in page is like a welcome mat if you’ve heard of that for a landing page or a website. It’s the first thing that the public or the collective audience of the collab partners is going to see. On this page is an invitation for them to enter into the bundle, but they can only enter if they give up their email address.

Once they do that, their email address gets sent to you as the host of the bundle, and they get redirected to what I call page three, the gift mall page. That’s the page where they can select individually the gifts or the paid products that are now being offered for free that they want. In other words, I don’t want to spam people with 30-odd gifts, even if they only want 1 or 2 out of that whole bundle. I want them to be able to self-select. “I want this one, but I don’t want this one.” In doing so, the owners of those products collect the email addresses that are opting in individually on that third page. Does that make sense? I feel like it all lives in my head, and I don’t know how to explain to people who can’t see it.

We need to make you a nice lead magnet with this mapped out.

I do have video walkthroughs. I included the link in the article for the magazine.

By the way, for you, guys, this is in the magazine for July, so it’s two weeks from now that you’ll start getting the magazine.

Thank you, a good reminder.

On that page, talk about the gift mall a little bit because I like that idea where you have all this stuff dumped in, and then you’re spending all your time weaving through it. I love that the gift mall is there as an offer to choose what you need and leave the rest behind.

There are two parts to this. One, it helps to have a theme for your bundle or your collaborative giveaway up front. It’s like niching down. If you can make it narrow, I think it’s going to be more attractive to people who are interested in that specific topic. When I implemented this for myself, I didn’t do that. I kept it wide specifically because it was my first time, and I wasn’t too sure which people were going to say yes to contributing. I made it like a B2B bundle, a fun party theme.

Effective Brand Building for Authors

How do you recommend using email marketing after the bundles are out there? I feel like, sometimes, your bundle closes, then what do you do with that list, because that’s your list building?

When this is your very first subscribers to your email list, I can understand that there’s going to be a lot of overwhelm. You don’t need to have a list in order to implement the strategy. Also, if you already have a list, you can still implement the strategy. It works to start your list or grow your list, either way. If you already have a list, you should be in practice with emailing them regularly. If you don’t already have a list, you’re going to need to welcome them.  Explain who you are because you don’t yet have an audience, so they need to remember, “I opted in for this free thing, but I wanted that one product that I saw that looked interesting, so who is this Jessica emailing me all of a sudden? What are these Brand Books she’s talking about?”

You’d be surprised how many touchpoints you need. For you to start having brand recognition with other people takes a lot of upfront educating. I suggest you do a lot of that educating and nurturing so that you get the know, like, and trust factors before you ever go and start to sell them anything. As this applies to authors, if you have a book in the pipeline, consider doing a collaborative giveaway way up front, weeks or months before your book comes out.

That will give you enough time to nurture them so that they know who you are, they like you, they trust you, and they’re staying on your list because they have a reason to buy from you later. That will make your book launch much more successful in the end, as opposed to implementing this bundle, and then, as soon as the doors to the bundle close, you’re immediately selling them something else. It’s not enough time for them to, first of all, dive into the resources that they’ve just downloaded as part of the bundle, but also to understand who you are and why you’re emailing them.

Effective Bundle Promotion Strategies

We have a new vendor who’s doing these amazing marketing programs, and right along with what you said, when the report comes out, it starts out unaware. What do you do when people have no idea who you are? I feel like that’s where that fits in. They’ve opted in because the collaborators brought them, but now, who are you, and what education? How long would you say you would nurture them in that space with good education before you started selling the book?

That’s a tough question because the answer is one that everybody hates. It depends. If I had to choose a time frame, I would probably give it four weeks before you sell them something else. A book isn’t going to be high stakes because a book isn’t a high-ticket item. We’re not selling a book for hundreds or even thousands of dollars. That one, you could get away with selling a little bit earlier, especially if you’re reminding them a lot in advance, like, “My book launch is coming up,” then you’re okay. You can squinch that in there before you start selling them a different offer that costs more. That’s what I would recommend, but as soon as possible, do the bundle so that you can build your list, and then you can say whatever you want to them while they are on your list.

I also want to touch on the previous question, and just add one thing. Let’s say you have a live date of ten days, and someone opts in for your bundle on day two. Between days two and ten, it would be great to have an automated sequence set up so that it’s sending out to people who are opting into your bundle, so that person who joined you on day two is now getting regular reminders that the bundle is still open, and you can feature contributors individually. Some people get fancy with this, and they ask those contributors to pay the host for those sponsor spots on individual emails.

You don’t have to do that if you don’t want to. It can be something that you set up in advance, like “Thank you so much for joining the bundle. I hope you’re enjoying the gifts that you already got. If you are, did you happen to see this gift from this other person? This is what’s in it. I think you’ll love it,” and another call to action like, “Click here to download,” or something like that. That keeps the interest in your bundle happening all the way through the campaign.

I love that. Get that and highlight those for people. Especially when you’re over on social media and you’re tagging those people with the posts, and now you have a drip campaign, people are seeing, “My friend Tracy is interested in this. Maybe I should go check it out because she’s in it.” I think it does boost that as well.

People are busy, and we’re overwhelmed with content and noise online anyway, so it’s easy on that gift mall page. If you’re featuring, for example, 30 contributors, it’s easy for people to miss something that they would honestly enjoy or that could help them because they were so focused on getting that one thing that they saw on the previous page, “I want that,” and then they make a beeline for that thing, and they skip over everyone else. As you said, having that drip campaign that’s spotlighting individual contributors will boost their conversions as well.

What’s running through my head is that this would be a great campaign-type thing to run as a LinkedIn newsletter as well. That would be an excellent place as well. Here’s where I feel like authors get hung up on this. What are your tips for them to write effective copy and design eye-catching graphics? I hear my authors all the time, “I’m an accountant. I’m not a copywriter.” How would you recommend that they do that and be able to do it effectively?

I would say, “Don’t sweat it.” My favorite tool is Canva, and you can find wonderful templates in Canva. I know you are well-versed in AI, much more than I am. There are probably opportunities in AI as well. I would say it’s not as important as having an actual standout product that makes sense for the bundle. When I implemented this for myself in 2024, I had an application form for contributors so that I could collect all of their information up front before I even designed any of these pages. They gave me the details, like contact information, but also their headshot. I asked them for a mock-up of what their contribution was and some copy from them.

In other words, as the host, you don’t have to make any of this stuff up. You can put the onus on the contributors to give you the materials that you need. To your point, if some of the contributors are authors and they’re like, “I don’t know, I’ve never done this before,” don’t sweat it. Take your best shot in Canva, and don’t spend hours over it, because honestly, that’s not the most important thing that you’re doing.

I personally don’t know how to use Canva. I am much better at WordPress and some of those other things. What I would say about that is, even for the magazine, I will take some of your articles, usually the ones that I think are the most interesting for the month, and I’ll run them through Perplexity and say, “Write a promotional piece about this.” You can use AI to do some of that stuff as well when you get the stuff from the other collaborators. All my collaborators write their own copy. For me, if I ask you for some copy on something, you’re going to write it much better than I because I don’t know as intimately what you do as you do.

I think that’s the most fun part for me, but I understand that for many authors, marketing is daunting.

There are things that make it easy. As you said, don’t sweat it. It’s not the end of the world if it doesn’t hit. You can always tweak it. 

Effective Landing Page Strategies

The other thing is another tool that I use for the actual landing pages. I want to touch on this. I get fancy because I’m a Leadpages user, and I love it. It’s probably the most expensive tool in my tech stack, but it’s well worth it. I am an affiliate if you’re interested. Leadpages itself is a huge learning curve, and I struggled with this upfront. I knew that it would be the best for conversion, so I stuck with it, and I learned it. Were the landing pages especially beautiful when I made them in 2024 for this bundle? I don’t know. They worked.

It doesn’t have to be the most beautiful thing. If you’re spending so much time on that, I feel like that’s not where you should be putting your time and effort. If you don’t have expensive, fancy software like Leadpages, there are many email marketing platforms out there, like Kit, formerly known as ConvertKit, which even the free version gives you some landing page templates that you can use. Even if you don’t have that yet, you could use Google Docs. I’ve seen many big-name creators online using Google Docs as a landing page.

DIY Business Implementation Guidance

How interesting. I use GoHighLevel. There is an AI function in there. I don’t use it because I spent my time on Leadpages many years ago, and once you learn something as complicated as that, everything else is going to be easy, because it is the hardest thing to learn. For most authors, once you master those things, you don’t have to pay for a lot of marketing. You’re doing your own. You’re probably doing it once you learn pretty well. It’s taking time and the frustration because I remember throwing things like, “Why isn’t this working?”

I know, so many hours spent. The reason I got Leadpages originally was in order to sell my high-ticket offers, so the ROI was there already. I didn’t need to question myself. Once again, if you’re worried about that or you don’t want to pay for another tool, Google Docs is free. It works just fine.

What do you use for the gift mall? Is that a landing page with different things on it, or is it actually like a shopping page? You would put a shopping page on a website.

What is the difference? It’s a lead page for me.

I know in Elementor, there’s a shopping page in the one I bought, where you fill out different information. It’s like a template. You have to put in how much this weighs, all this pricing, coupons, and all that.

It wasn’t that fancy. This was a landing page that we built in Leadpages. Full disclosure, I had a VA helping me with this. We built it from scratch. I had an idea of what I wanted it to look like. I gave her some inspiration in terms of screenshots. I like this, and I don’t like that. This is what I’m envisioning. We worked together in conversation to create the final product.

I do want to mention. You guys out there, don’t feel bad about hiring a VA to help you. We’re going through a very complex funnel right now that triggers people who are involved. I have a VA helping me. I can conceptually see it, but I can’t make it work. Sometimes, those people have that little extra skill you’re learning, and you’re learning it.

Conversely, if you don’t want to go that route, or if you’re scared to ask someone else to have their eyes on your business and what you’re doing, that’s okay, too. I calculated. We spent maybe an hour a day for 30 days, from start to finish, implementing this whole thing. If you don’t have a VA, maybe that means you’ll spend two hours a day for a month. Bear that in mind. I’m not saying that you need to have a VA either in order to implement this. You can totally do it yourself by applying to your swings and assessing, “I do want to invest in this for my business, or I don’t want to invest in that.” You do you.

You’re time blocking, like you would do with writing. It is a good skill to have. I like that you did that instead of saying, “I’m going to sit down, and I’m going to be massively overwhelmed because I’m going to finish it this week,” instead of an hour a day.

Give yourself plenty of lead time. During the time we were setting this up, I had one or both children with me at home full-time on any given day. A huge reason why I asked my VA to help me on this project specifically is that I knew I couldn’t even devote the two hours a day to do it myself. Give yourself plenty of lead time, especially if this is the first thing. No one expects you to hit it out of the park on your first try, and you shouldn’t either.

Boost Sales with Perceived Value

One idea I had, going back to you mentioning the shop page, is that, and I know I mentioned in my article as well, every product that you’re featuring, make sure that you assign it a monetary value because perceived value, psychologically, is very good for buy-in, and people wanting to say, “Yes, I definitely want that because normally I would have had to pay $50 to get this product, but today, it’s free.” I did that this morning. I saw in my email that someone I follow was promoting a collab partner’s product for $50. She’s saying that for the next couple of days, this person is offering it for free. I clicked over, and now, I’m on someone else’s email list because I have her product for free now.

There you go. Jessica, your article is going to be out in July. Where do we find you because this comes out first, if we want to know more about the campaigns, and are you helping other people set these up?

I could. I don’t have a specific offer around that. I wanted to tell people about how I implemented this to show up and give them value because I believe in doing that. If you want more one-on-one help, I’m open to that. You can find me on LinkedIn. My name is Jessica Andersen. There are some of us on LinkedIn with the exact same funny spelling, but make sure you’re landing on me. I’m active on there. Juliet, I’m sure, will put links down below. I also have full video walkthroughs of all of these landing pages that I created in Leadpages. I can give you the link to that as well, and then people can see this visually.

That would be great, especially with video, because then you can step-by-step stop. I always like video training because you can stop it where you’re at, go do it, and go back.

Yeah, I do, too.

Thank you so much for sharing this with us. I’m sure it’s going to be helpful for a number of people. You guys, it’s not just your book launch. As she said, high-ticket launch. You can use this for anything that you’re putting together.

I was using this purely to grow my list ahead of a launch that I was doing a couple of months later. Once again, if you look me up on LinkedIn, please make sure to connect with me, and my DMs are open. Outside of any paid consulting that I could help you with implementing this process, I am always available to answer your questions about what I’m saying. I realized so much of it is vague and nebulous when you’re not actually going through the funnel yourself as a visitor to the bundle or as a contributor. Send me a DM with any questions about this process. I’m happy to answer it. LinkedIn is the best place to reach me.

I love that because the minute we say the word funnel, a lot of you go, “That’s scary.”

Successful Content Collaboration Strategy

I have to say I used to be one of those people. I used to think that was scary, and I didn’t know what it was. “It lives on the internet. It’s in the metaverse. Not sure. I can’t see it.” The thing that helped me drum up the courage to host my own bundle in 2024 was that I had been through so many already as a visitor to the bundle. As someone who was opting into the page, going to the gift mall, and shopping for the gifts that I wanted, I started to apply to other people’s bundles to be a contributor in there. From that perspective, I understood that this is what I need to provide to the host in order to be a successful contributor.

Once I had done those things a few times, I felt confident enough to say, “Maybe I could put this together myself and be a host.” I won’t say that I pulled it off perfectly, but I think one hour a day for 30 days is pretty good for 100 new subscribers to my list. Again, you can use that to build your ARC team, and a great way to forge deeper relationships with collab buddies that we can then do different one-off collaborations later. It was an asynchronous effort. I’m always a fan of that. I can’t complain. I’m glad that you invited me here to talk more about that.

Good. Thank you so much, and we’ll talk soon.

Important Links

• Jessica Andersen
• Jessica Andersen on LinkedIn
• The Collaborative Giveaway Workbook
• Go High Level Monthly Trainings with Rebecca Bertoldi
• GoHighLevel
• BA Mag Training
• Breakthrough Author Magazine
• Canva
• Perplexity
• Leadpages
• Kit

About Jessica Andersen

Jessica is an editor-turned-book-coach from the USA who moved to France one day in 2010 and never looked back.

Since starting her business four years ago, she has worked with authors all over the world on dozens of books.

As the founder of Brand Book Bootcamp, she serves entrepreneurs who want to replace their content marketing with a “Brand Book” which will position them as a go-to voice and attract ideal clients on autopilot.