Let’s be honest — you didn’t become an author to spend your nights designing freebies in Canva or wrestling with landing page copy. You became an author to write stories.
But here’s the problem: in today’s online world, your book alone isn’t enough to build connection. Readers want more — and most authors are either too overwhelmed, too busy, or too burned out to figure out what that “more” should look like.
That’s exactly why I created the Ultimate Reader’s Reading Tracker — a done-for-you, plug-and-play reader magnet built into a Google spreadsheet (with 14 reader-focused tabs!) that saves you time, energy, and creative bandwidth. It’s the reader magnet your readers actually want — because it was built by someone who’s been your reader for 30+ years.
Here’s the thing about reader magnets:
every romance author knows she needs one.
The advice is everywhere. Build your list. Offer something free. Give readers a reason to sign up. Yes, fine, understood — but also you have a book to write and approximately seventeen million other things demanding your attention.
And building a reader magnet from scratch requires design skills you may or may not have, a concept you haven’t landed on yet, and time that doesn’t currently exist.
So it stays on your to-do list. And your list stays small. And you feel vaguely guilty every time someone mentions reader magnets in a Facebook group.
Let’s fix that today.
First, a confession from voracious romance reader.
I’ve been a romance reader for over 30 years. I’ve read more than 3,000 romance books.
I’ve loved characters so intensely that I wandered around in a book hangover for days, completely unable to start something new.
I’ve recommended books to friends with the specific energy of someone whose entire personality has been temporarily replaced by a fictional couple.
I am, in other words, exactly the kind of reader your author marketing is trying to reach.
And for 30 years, I wished my favorite authors had given me something.
Not another bookmark. Not a PDF with a chapter excerpt I could have read on Amazon for free. Something actually useful for my reading life — a place to track what I’d read, organize what I owned, keep my TBR from becoming an unmanageable spiral, remember the characters I loved, and find my way back into an author’s world whenever I was ready.
Nobody made it. So I did.
Introducing The Ultimate Reader’s Reading Tracker.
The Ultimate Reader’s Reading Tracker is a 14-sheet Google Spreadsheet built specifically for romance readers — the kind who take their reading life seriously, which is to say, most of them.
Here’s what’s inside:
- A reading calendar with 12 months that update automatically when you change the date.
- A 10-year daily reading tracker with checkboxes that’re deeply, unreasonably satisfying to fill in.
- A bookshelf for physical books.
- An e-shelf for every Kindle, Kobo, and platform purchase she’s accumulated since 2011.
- Instructions to know how to edit this, make it your own, and then sell it to your readers.
- A wishlist for the books she desperately wants whether she can afford them right now or not — because romance readers are aspirational like that.
- A TBR list. A current reads sheet — because what she’s actively reading is not always on her TBR, and yes that is a whole thing.
- A current reads sheet — because sometimes you’re not just reading romance books! You’re reading other things too!
- A reading journal for thoughts, favorite quotes, and the characters she’ll never forget.
- A reviews sheet for the avid reviewers.
- A favorites collection for the best of everything.
- A library books tracker for borrowed books.
- And a lending tracker, because every romance reader has lent a book to a friend and then spent six months wondering where it went.
That’s 13 sheets of genuine usefulness.
The fourteenth sheet is the one that makes this a reader magnet instead of just a useful tool.
The sheet that changes everything.
Sheet fourteenth is called [YOURNAME]’s Books.
You fill it in.
Every title. Every series. Your reading order recommendation. Where to start for new readers. What comes next for the ones who’ve already read everything. Buy links. Tropes. Heat levels. Notes you want your readers to have.
And then at the top of that sheet — your website links. Your Start Here page. Your Reader Hub. Your online shop. A direct download to your booklist. A direct download to your reader magnet.
Every time your reader opens her tracker to check off a reading day or add a book to her wishlist or look up who that secondary character was in Book 2 — she sees your world. Your books. Your links. Everything she needs to go deeper, right there, without searching for anything.
That’s not a marketing funnel. That’s residency!
Your books, living inside her daily reading life, permanently, quietly, every single day. No algorithm deciding whether she sees it. No post getting buried. No email going to spam.
Just your name, your books, and your world — open on her screen every time she picks up a book.
Now let’s talk about what this does for you.
Because here’s where it gets genuinely good for romance authors.
You didn’t build this from scratch.
The tracker exists. The 14 sheets are designed, formatted, and ready. The reading calendar formulas are built in. The journal columns are set up. The lending tracker is organized. Every sheet has been thought through by someone who has spent three decades knowing exactly what a romance reader wants from her reading life.
Your job is customization, not creation. You add your name. You add your books. You swap your branding into the Canva templates. You do one pass through the marketing copy with a find-and-replace, swapping brackets for your actual details. And then you’re done.
One hour. Possibly less if you type fast and already know your reading order.
You keep 100% of everything it earns.
This is a PLR product — Private Label Rights. You buy it once, at $27, and everything it builds from that point forward belongs entirely to you.
Every subscriber who downloads it: yours.
Every email address that joins your list because of it: yours.
Every sale if you choose to offer it as a paid product: yours.
No royalties. No revenue share. No ongoing fees.
No checking back in with anyone.
$27, once. Everything after that is yours.
You can offer it free or paid.
As a free reader magnet with an email sign-up, it grows your list with exactly the kind of reader you want — organized, invested, the type who finishes a series and comes back for more.
As a low-ticket paid product at $3–$9, it qualifies buyers. A reader who pays even a small amount to have this in her life is signaling real investment in her reading world. That’s a different kind of subscriber than someone who signed up for a generic freebie.
Either way, the readers it brings you are the right ones.
You can offer it every single month.
Here’s the part that makes this different from most reader magnets: it doesn’t expire.
A deleted scene stops being relevant when readers have moved on from that book. A character profile only works for readers who already know that character.
But a tool for organizing a reading life? That’s useful in January and July and every month in between.
A reader who didn’t download it in February might download it in August. A reader who already has it will see your fresh Canva graphic and remember it exists.
The marketing suite includes 12 Canva templates — one for each month of the year. Fresh image. Seasonal angle. Same product. You re-promote it once a month and it keeps working without you building anything new.
One product. Twelve months of content. That’s the math.
What romance readers actually think about this.
Let me be direct about something because I am a romance reader and I can say this with authority.
Readers don’t want more email. They don’t want another newsletter they’ll read once and ignore. They don’t want a PDF they’ll download and never open.
They want things that’re actually useful for their reading life.
A tracker that organizes their shelves, tracks their TBR, gives them somewhere to keep their reading journal, and has a sheet from an author they love right there in the middle of it? That’s not a lead magnet. That’s a gift.
Romance readers are deeply organized about their reading lives. They maintain TBR lists on Goodreads and StoryGraph and in notes apps and on physical sticky notes on their nightstands. They track series. They remember character names. They notice when reading order matters. They want to know everything about the storyworlds they love.
This tracker meets them exactly where they already are — and puts your books in the middle of it.
The reader who downloads this is telling you something about herself before she’s said a single word: she’s invested in her reading life, she’s organized about it, and she’s the kind of reader who finishes every book series.
That’s your ideal reader. This is how you find her.
The two problems this solves at once.
Romance authors need reader magnets.
Romance readers need somewhere to organize their reading lives.
Most solutions in the author marketing space try to solve the first problem without thinking about the second. They teach authors to create magnets — character sheets, deleted scenes, sample chapters — that serve the author’s marketing goals without genuinely serving the reader’s actual needs.
The Ultimate Reader’s Reading Tracker solves both at the same time.
It’s a real tool for a real reading life, built by someone who has lived that reading life for 30 years. It happens to also grow your email list, keep your books visible inside your reader’s daily routine, and connect curious readers to your ecosystem every time they open it.
That’s not a compromise between marketing and reader experience.
That’s what reader-first marketing actually looks like in practice.
Here’s what you do with this.
You grab the tracker. You fill in your books sheet — every title, every series, your reading order, your buy links. You swap your name into the marketing copy. You set up your landing page. You send one launch post. Shouldn’t take you longer than an hour to edit the copy into your own voice and style.
Your readers start downloading. Your list starts growing. Your books start living inside your readers’ daily lives in a way no social media post can replicate.
And next month, you post a fresh graphic with a new caption and do it again.
That’s the whole strategy. It’s not complicated. It’s just consistent — and it’s built on something your readers actually wanted.
The Ultimate Reader’s Reading Tracker is $27.
Everything included: the 14-sheet spreadsheet, the complete marketing suite, 12 Canva templates, landing page copy, email sequence, and 15 social post captions.
Add your name. Add your books. Start sharing.
Already have your reader magnets sorted and want to build the full ecosystem around them? The BFF Playbook is where that system lives — the complete reader-first framework for romance authors who are building something that lasts.