Your job is to be top of mind when your people are ready to make a decision

an interview with Lexi Merritt

Let’s say you have a book or a class to promote, or a Substack you want to upgrade to paid. How do you get one of your followers to move beyond “liking” your post or saying “I see you, mama!” to actually getting out their credit card?

Lexi Merritt

is a marketing expert I trust because her marketing… worked on me. Her content showed up on my FYP and her Big Paper Planning Day was the first thing I ever bought because of a TikTok video.

I find Lexi’s content to be warm, cozy, inviting, and approachable. It’s the opposite of a girlboss in a blazer and false eyelashes selling you a seat in her mastermind program that promises to make you a millionaire by shifting your limiting beliefs.

Here’s one of Lexi’s videos that I think Attention Economy subscribers will appreciate.

prettydecent

A post shared by @prettydecent

If you watched my conversation about TikTok with Stacey Yu (the video is still available until Friday), and you’re inspired to start making more video content, Lexi has a $5 Game filled with prompts that you can download.

I talked to Lexi about her content strategy, what writers can do if they’re afraid to put themselves out there, and what she thinks the relationship is between The Artist’s Way and running a small business!

1. Many writers are afraid to be visible online. Or they're willing to be visible but they're afraid to post "wrong." How do you treat social media like your laboratory?

By really leaning into the metaphor. If social media is a lab and every piece of content is an experiment, then the results of those experiments can’t possibly mean anything about me. How many likes my post gets doesn’t tell me anything about the value of my work or ideas, but it can tell me something about the variables both in and out of my control.

I really go back to an 8th grade science fair perspective on it all: If my hypothesis is “wrong” and something doesn’t work, that doesn't mean I failed the experiment — if anything, it means I have significantly more data. I know way more than I did before. To me, treating social media like a laboratory means paying attention to all of the tiny variables that go into a piece of content and being curious enough to keep adjusting those variables to figure out what works for you.

2. I discovered you on TikTok. From watching your video content, I felt like I trusted you, and I was also drawn to the DIY vibes of Big Paper Planning Day, which reminded me of making zines in my childhood bedroom (and then when we DM'd, you told me you'd read Self Care!) Do you have any tips for writers who want to create content around something they're promoting (like a book)?

I really did read Self Care in a day after stumbling into it at the Silver Spring Library. That was a great day. I would tell writers to look at what’s working in other mediums. Even though I’m technically promoting marketing classes and resources, I get a ton of inspiration from the beauty, music, and publishing industries. Structurally a book launch is not all that different from a new tech product or an album launch. 

It does help to get a little nerdy about the strategy. When I was first learning how to launch and sell things online, I remember I’d join as many sales funnels as possible and pull the emails and sales page copy into these massive Google Docs just to try and understand the flow of what was happening. And again, I’d recommend going outside of your own industry or topic. Getting a bunch of emails from people who do the same kind of work as me is my personal self-critical doom spiral, but I learn just as much if not more from watching how a beauty brand launches a new eyeliner as I would obsessing over the latest trends in digital marketing. 

From a technical standpoint, remember that a launch is a series of touch points. Your job is to be top of mind when your people are ready to make a decision. When they get paid and want to treat themselves, when they’re walking through the bookstore and see your cover or title, when they finally decide enough is enough and they need to solve the problem they have…will they remember you? That’s really what a marketing strategy serves to do—a launch just puts it onto a timeline.

3. You've told me that many small business owners in your online community follow The Artist's Way. Can you talk about the relationship between creative practice and running a small business? What have you learned from The Artist's Way that influences your own business?

My ideal client definitely has either gone through The Artist’s Way or (and this is more common) bought it, started it, and now feels guilty when it stares at them from a bookshelf somewhere. 

For me, I knew that I wanted to lean into the idea of Pretty Decent being an “Internet Café” but didn’t know where to start, so one of the first things I offered as a brand was a live group run of The Artist’s Way. It was at the height of 2020 lockdown and I was living in Brooklyn feeling totally directionless. I have such vivid memories of sitting outside in my backyard on a tapestry, talking through the book with other makers and creatives on Zoom. That was definitely my moment of “Oh, I’d actually really like to do this for a living.” 

My copy is probably 90% highlighted at this point, but the most impactful thing for me was definitely the morning pages. I’ve kept them up almost daily since 2020, and I don’t think I could run my business without them. When you work for yourself, you just spend all day bouncing around in your own head—writing morning pages and “clearing the channel” as Julia Cameron calls it is an essential part of my creative practice. There really is just something to getting all of the messy self-doubt out of your head at the start of the day, especially when a large part of your job relies on self-advocacy.

4. Students who have taken my "How to Get a Book Deal the Easy Way" class have heard me speak about thinking of your book from a reader's point-of-view. What's in it for them? How will it change THEIR life? You're going to be teaching empathy mapping on November 13th, which I think leads us to ask similar questions about our audience or "ideal reader." Can you tell us a little bit about how empathy mapping works?

Empathy mapping is a design thinking tool. The standard “Ideal ___” (client/reader/customer) worksheet might ask you to focus on demographics like age, career, income level, etc. and what that often ends up doing, at least in my experience, is creating a really prescriptive, “niche down" approach to marketing and design. Constraints are helpful, but communities aren’t just made up of one type of person with one specific experience. 

When I teach empathy mapping, we start by visualizing our Dream Community: Those people we really want in the room engaging with our work and ideas. From there, we can make assumptions—whether from data and experience or just from what we imagine might be true—about what those people are experiencing. What position are they in? What do they want? What problems are getting in the way? What does it sound like inside their head? 

From these assumptions, or what you might even think of as hypotheses, we validate our empathy map through conversations and experiments. An empathy map is a living document. You learn more through every interaction you have with “your people,” and you can and should add more notes to that empathy map every time someone who you want to have around your business describes their experience to you. 

I read The Vanity Fair Diaries years ago, and in it Tina Brown describes what she calls “observation greed,” where you just are obsessed with listening and paying attention. That’s the most important skill I think any self-employed artist can learn.

5. Everyone always asks me how I have time to write and create content. How do you balance running your business and creating content? What do you tell your clients when they say they don't have time to post on social?

Honestly, this is THE question. My process is very light-hearted and I cut as many corners as I can. I repurpose a lot. The newsletter I publish gets turned into a video script for TikTok. The captions are often the same across platforms. I try and always find a way to use what I already have. 

I also have ADHD and am a “pantser” in every part of my life, so my content calendar, which I actually call my Sales Planner, focuses more on the general themes I want to discuss than super specific scripts or pre-made pieces. I prefer to wake up on a Tuesday, glance at my Sales Planner, and turn to my morning pages with the question “What do I want to say about this today?” and then let the process flow from there.

Everyone has different strengths and finds joy in different things, so what I recommend my clients is to find the mode of expression that feels natural and easy and prioritize that as often as you can. It doesn’t matter if Canva carousels are performing well if you dread making them (unless, perhaps, you have support from someone who does love it). 

And again, I think it really helps to get nerdy about the process. Studying the variables of whatever medium you choose—figuring out what subject lines get the best open rates, what hooks get the most views, what Instagram stories get the highest engagement, etc. When you know what works and can replicate it, it becomes a lot easier to take a "less but better” approach to content creation.

On November 13th, Lexi is teaching a class for writers who want to make more income by marketing their classes, their editing or coaching services, or their book or Substack newsletter, directly to students, clients, and readers.

You’ll learn how to answer these questions:

What are you selling? Who is it for? Why does it matter? How does it work? How will people pay for it?

You'll leave with a renewed sense of conviction about what you're selling and why it's valuable.

This is for writers who:

• Have previously taught writing classes for literary institutions but can see the earning potential of marketing directly to potential students

• Have already gotten freelance editing clients through word-of-mouth referrals and would like to do more to promote their services

• Have unique expertise (e.g., pitching magazines, or writing personal essays) that they want to share with more writers

• Have a weird idea for a class they'd like to teach, without worrying about getting it past institutional gatekeepers!

• Have fantasized about building an editing or coaching business, in order to have more time and freedom to write their own books

• Have a Substack they would love to monetize, if they could just figure out what to offer paying subscribers!

• Have a book coming out and want to design an amazing preorder offer to incentivize their fans to order the book early

Register here

This will be recorded if you can’t attend live! The video will be available to watch for 30 days.

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Chat Room

My next two Chat Room events are with Allison Hunter, a founding partner at Trellis Literary Management, on October 24th, and with Aly Mostel, recently promoted to Executive Director of Marketing at HarperOne, on November 20.