Ten questions authors asked in class — and Coral Hart’s answers, quoted from the recordings.
A reader magnet is a free book you trade for an email address. A newsletter swap is two authors agreeing to mention each other’s book to their lists. Together they are how most working romance authors build an audience that does not depend on a retailer’s algorithm.
Everything below is Coral Hart answering these questions live, in class, to authors who were actually doing the work. The answers are quoted from the recordings — not paraphrased, and not written for this page.
The four things people get wrong most often:
PlotProse holds a transcript archive of Coral Hart’s live teaching: 262 recorded sessions across 42 courses, 437.6 hours, 3,444,595 words of which 3,279,604 are Coral’s own. This page is a curated selection from that archive on one topic.
On privacy. These were live classes with real students. Every question on this page has been rewritten into generic form, and no student name, voice, manuscript detail or personal circumstance appears anywhere on this page. Where an answer originally addressed a named person or a specific book, that detail has been removed. Coral’s answers are quoted accurately; cuts are marked with an ellipsis and nothing has been added.
On the figures. Numbers inside the quotes — subscriber thresholds, swap-pool sizes, prices — are Coral’s own statements in class at the time of recording, not measurements taken by PlotProse. Third-party service pricing and features change; check them before you rely on them.
A list only pays off if the next book is aimed at real demand. Those tools are free and open:
The full teaching on lists, launches and swaps sits in the PlotProse training library, and Ask Coral answers from these transcripts rather than from the open internet.
“All my lead magnets are for sale for 99 cents. So even if they’re long — I have a 100,000-word lead magnet that’s also $0.99. So all my lead magnets are $0.99 for sale, free on BookFunnel, and then everything after that into KU. And people don’t get upset, because if they are KU readers and they’re like ‘oh, book one’s for sale’, you can always say: go and grab it on BookFunnel, here’s the link.”
Coral Hart
The point of the 99c listing is that the magnet still exists as a real, buyable book on the retailer — it is only free through the delivery service you use to capture the email.
“BookFunnel is a specialised service that specialises in ebook delivery and audiobook delivery now too. When you want to give readers a free book, particularly your lead magnet, BookFunnel generates a download page and handles all the technical support of getting the file to the reader’s Kindle, Nook, phone, etc. No more manually emailing EPUBs or giving PDF links that can be pirated and stolen… They also wield the ‘it doesn’t want to open on my Nook’ questions. You don’t have to deal with it, they do… It looks professional. It looks like you know what you’re doing. You’re not just willy-nilly sending a book link out to a PDF file.”
Coral Hart
“You have to have a PO Box or a physical address or an actual address at the bottom of your newsletter. It’s law. It’s anti-spam law. It has to be there. Don’t use a fake address. You will get banned… If you don’t want to use your address, ViaBox is almost like dropshipping for PO boxes — they’ll give you a PO box that you can use if you’re worried about privacy… Don’t break the rules. You don’t want to set yourself up to fail before you start.”
Coral Hart
This is the single most common reason a new author list gets shut down by its own email provider.
“I have a domain for my publishing house, and my MailerLite is all under it. I am not logging in and out of anything 19 times a day. I’m not having separate MailerLite accounts and paying for separate MailerLite accounts for every pen name. I separate my pen names by the list. Yes, I do have email addresses for all my pen names that go in my books… What you could do, if you have one domain, is set up your publishing domain, and then your emails would be penname1@yourpublishing.com, penname2@yourpublishing.com.”
Coral Hart
One account, one billing line, one send calendar — pen names separated by list segment rather than by login.
“You’re going to set up that domain, you’re going to migrate your contacts from your others over and cancel, so that you’ve got one subscription running, not three subscriptions. Segment those lists nicely… You just export the CSV and import the CSV. And when you import that CSV, you assign it to that pen name… So it’s one list, but it’s segmented or grouped. If you work in MailerLite, it’s groups.”
Coral Hart
“My lead magnets, I will swap the signup link everywhere I can, unless they say they don’t take a lead magnet, then I would swap the sales link. Why? Because I want to use that lead magnet to build my list, not to sell books. That lead magnet’s purpose is to build my list. So if I’m swapping my lead magnet, I will swap the sign-up link as much as possible. Some people don’t allow sign-up links, then I would swap the sales link to book one on Amazon, because I’m still going to get the book seen — but by readers who buy books, so they’re probably going to buy it as well.”
Coral Hart
The rule underneath it: decide what the asset is for before you decide where to point it.
“There are 55,000 mailing lists available to swap on BookClicker. Some of those have as few as 10 or 12 people on their mailing lists. Some of them have up to 50,000 people… It is like Tinder for newsletters… You will find fellow authors, agree to promote each other’s books in your newsletters, you’ll book a swap. This is how I launch every book. This is how I launch every pen name, every series, and maintain consistent sales on every single book.”
Coral Hart
Figures quoted are Coral’s own, as given in the recorded class.
“Once you’ve sent a newsletter, 48 hours later it will show up in that confirm page, and you literally paste the preview link from MailerLite into it and click it off. If you use Mailchimp, your newsletters will automatically come up in the little click area, and you click them and it sends it off and lets them know it’s been confirmed.”
Coral Hart
Unconfirmed swaps are the usual reason a swap partner stops accepting your bookings.
“How short is the novella? Is it a whole story? Are people going to be asking for more, or wishing it was more than what it is? If you feel it can get good reviews and drive them to buy book one, use it. If you feel like it is not going to drive them to buy book one, I would swap it around and use book one as your lead magnet.”
Coral Hart
The test is not length. It is whether the reader finishes it wanting the next one.
“You can host it on BookFunnel. If you up your subscription to include audio distribution, they will distribute the audio. So if you have a shop on your website — a Shopify or whatever, TikTok store, whichever one it is — they can buy the audio and BookFunnel facilitates the hosting and the delivery of the audiobooks for them.”
Coral Hart
Short, practical notes from Coral Hart on tropes, structure and what romance readers are actually buying.
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