The Funnel Starter Pack gives every romance author the four orientation tools her NTM readers need at the moment of first discovery, plus the complete marketing suite to deploy them. Here’s what’s inside, why each piece exists, and how they work together as the first layer of a reader-first funnel.
When a romance reader discovers an author for the first time, she asks three questions in rapid succession — often without realizing she is asking them.
What kind of world is this? Genre, trope, emotional atmosphere, heat band. Is this for me?
How much of this world exists right now? How many books? Can I binge?
What else is here beyond the books? Is there more world to inhabit?
These three questions happen in the first thirty seconds. If the answers are not immediately available — if the reader has to navigate to find them, if the language is structural instead of emotional, if the website has nothing beyond a book list — she moves on.
The FREE Starter Pack is built to answer all three of these questions, simultaneously, the moment a New-to-Me reader arrives.
What’s Inside the Starter Pack
The Starter Pack contains four core templates plus a complete marketing suite. Every template is customizable in Canva and built specifically to serve the NTM reader at the moment of first discovery.
Template 1: The Updated Author Booklist
The orientation tool that answers the second discovery question: how much world exists and how do I navigate it?
This isn’t a publication-order list. It’s a reading-order guide — organized by series, numbered within each series, with character names, tropes, heat band signals, and a clear entry point recommendation for new readers.
It exists in three formats within the ecosystem:
- The ungated simple text version lives on the website with no email required — because the reader who cannot find the reading order is a reader who already wants the world and has hit a practical obstacle. Removing that obstacle should not require a transaction.
- The designed cover version in the Starter Pack is gated — available in exchange for an email address, because this reader wants the beautiful version of the world she has already chosen. This is a desire-led magnet.
- The checklist version is also gated — it turns the reading experience into a progress journey, activating completion drive and binge momentum.
The Starter Pack includes the designed cover version as a customizable Canva template, ready to populate with your books, covers, and series information.
Template 2: The Universe Timeline
The orientation tool that answers both the first and third discovery questions: what kind of world is this, and what else exists beyond the books?
A universe timeline shows the complete chronological arc of your storyworld — not just the publication history, but the story timeline. Which book goes before which book and why. Connections between series. The series thread that runs across multiple books. The timeline answers the question that curious readers ask most often: how big is this world and how does it all fit together?
This template is gated — available in exchange for an email address — because the reader who wants the universe timeline already has enough emotional investment to trade it.
Template 3: The Cast of Characters
The orientation tool that answers the first discovery question most directly: who are these people, and will I fall for them?
Romance readers follow characters. They choose books by character attachment potential before they choose by plot or premise. A cast of characters document — showing the main couples across the series, their names, their roles in the world, and a brief emotional hook for each — gives the NTM reader the character map she needs to identify which story she wants most.
This template is gated. It’s the desire-led magnet for character-attachment readers — the ones who need to know who these people are before they commit to reading the books.
Template 4: The Book Quotes Journal
The emotional connection tool — the template that answers the third discovery question: what else does this world offer beyond the books?
The book quotes journal features curated quotes from the main characters across the series. Not plot summaries. Not blurbs. The specific lines that made readers feel something — the sentences that carry the emotional promise of the world in concentrated form.
For the NTM reader encountering this world for the first time, a quotes journal gives her the emotional atmosphere of the world before she has read a page. A reader who is moved by a character’s words before she opens the book is a reader who is already emotionally invested.
This template is gated. It is the purest desire-led magnet in the suite — nothing practical to solve, just more of the feeling she came for.
The Marketing Suite — Included!
The Funnel Starter Pack isn’t just four templates. It includes the complete deployment system.
The opt-in page copy — done-for-you copy for the landing page that converts visitors into subscribers. Written in Level 7 emotional keyword language, organized around the three NTM discovery questions, with a clear call to action that tells the reader exactly what she is getting and why she wants it.
Three email templates — the delivery email that delivers the magnet and makes the first impression, the welcome email that deepens the relationship before asking for anything, and the nurture email that continues the world experience while introducing what else is available.
The placement guide — the five locations in the ecosystem where reader magnets should live: the website homepage, the Start Here page, the Reader Experience Hub, the individual book pages, and social content. Each placement serves a different reader at a different moment of her journey. The guide shows which magnet belongs where and why.
35 social media content ideas — organized by the three NTM discovery questions, with caption templates built around the Semantic Fingerprint keyword system. Every content idea is tied to one of the four magnet types, so every social post points toward an asset that answers the question the post opened.
How This Functions as a Reader-First Funnel
In B2B marketing terms, these four templates and the marketing suite constitute the top of the email funnel — the tools that convert a curious stranger into a subscriber.
In romance reader psychology terms, they are the meet cute. They’re the first moment a reader really encounters the world — not from the outside looking in, but from inside it. And like every great meet cute, they do not ask for anything. They just make her feel something she wants to feel again.
The sequence the Starter Pack enables:
A reader finds the author through a social post, a search result, or a recommendation. The social content — built from the 35 content ideas — uses Level 7 emotional keyword language to answer the three discovery questions. She clicks to the website.
On the website, she encounters the orientation tools: the booklist on the Start Here page, the cast of characters in the Reader Experience Hub, the universe timeline in the magnet library. Some are ungated and immediately available. The more beautiful and emotionally rich versions are gated — available in exchange for an email address.
She signs up. She receives the delivery email with the template she chose. The welcome email arrives — warm, personal, written in the voice of the world rather than the voice of a marketing sequence. The nurture email deepens the relationship. The world she was beginning to fall in love with has more room than she expected.
This is the free layer of the free-to-paid funnel. Every reader in this sequence is being given genuine world value before being asked to spend a dollar. The paid layer — the premium character dossier, the expanded universe products, the deep-world digital products — exists for the reader who has moved through the free layer and wants more.
The Starter Pack is the entry point. It does NOT complete the funnel. It starts the relationship that the funnel deepens.
Where the Funnel Goes From Here — The Free-to-Paid Architecture
The four templates in the Starter Pack are the beginning of the funnel, not the complete funnel. Understanding where the free layer leads — and the psychology of why it leads there — changes how you think about every reader magnet decision you make.
The Psychology of Starting Small
There’s a principle in purchase psychology that’s particularly relevant for romance readers: a reader who makes a small financial investment in your world is significantly more likely to make a larger one.
Not because you manipulated her into it. Because she has demonstrated — to herself as much as to you — that your storyworld is worth paying for. The first $3 to $9 she spends isn’t primarily a revenue event. It’s an identity event. She has become the kind of reader who buys things from this author. That identity, once formed, is sticky.
The reader who downloads only free content is a reader you hope will eventually buy.
The reader who bought her first small paid item is a reader who’s already decided she will.
This is why the free layer matters — it builds the emotional investment and the trust that makes the first paid transaction feel natural rather than pressured. And it’s why the first paid item should be priced at a level that removes every barrier to saying yes. Not because the item isn’t valuable.
Because the identity shift is the point, and identity shifts happen more easily when the financial risk is minimal.
The full free-to-paid funnel psychology — including the specific pricing relationships between tiers, the content decisions that move a reader from one tier to the next, and the email sequences that support each transition — is covered in a dedicated article coming soon. What matters here is the shape of the architecture.
The Framework Is Flexible — Not a Formula
The free-free-free-paid-paid sequence in the BFF Strategy is a framework. It’s NOT a rule, and it’s NOT a ceiling.
The principle is that free content should always precede paid content — not because free is always better than paid, but because the reader’s emotional investment in the world should be established before she’s asked to make a financial one. How many free items precede the first paid one, and how many paid tiers exist, is entirely determined by the size of your world, the depth of your reader relationships, and the creative IP you have available to package.
A romance author with one book might have: Three free items (ungated booklist, gated cast of characters, gated quotes journal) and one paid item (a character connection plan for her one couple).
A romance author with a complete series might have: Five free items and three paid tiers — a low-ticket single-character dossier, a mid-ticket series companion bundle, and a premium made-for-you experience for her most invested readers.
An author with multiple series and years of world-building might have: Seven or eight free items across two worlds and a full digital product shop with items at every price point from $3 to $47.
The framework scales with the world. The sequence — free investment before financial investment — is the constant. Everything else adjusts.
What the Paid Tiers Could Look Like
The Starter Pack templates are the free-gated layer.
Here’s what the paid layer can grow into, drawing from the creative IP every romance author already has inside her books.
Low-ticket ($3–$9): Single-asset character or world items. A premium character dossier for one couple — deeper than the free cast of characters, with relationship arc analysis, pivotal scene breakdown, behind-the-scenes of their specific emotional dynamic. A single-book universe map. A character aesthetic collection for the MMC. A behind-the-scenes companion to one specific book.
👉 These are items that serve a specific reader desire — more of one character, one story, one world moment. They’re priced to remove every barrier to the first yes.
Mid-ticket ($10–$19): Small bundles and expanded single assets. A complete series character bundle — all the main couples across the series in one designed document. An expanded universe timeline with series thread details not available elsewhere. A reading guide that includes the emotional beats of each book, the series thread placements, the character connection map. A deleted scene collection.
👉 These serve the reader who’s read the whole series and wants to go deeper into the complete world rather than into one book.
Mid-ticket variant ($19–$27): The Book Companion Bundle. This is the second paid offer inside the BFF Funnel Starter Pack Mini-Course — and the concept worth building toward regardless of the specific format you choose. A book companion bundle is a curated collection of assets that extend one specific book or one book in the series beyond what the narrative contains: the deeper character content, the world extras, the reading guide elements, the behind-the-scenes material.
👉 Think of it as everything a reader could want to enrich her experience of one specific book (or book series), packaged in a way that rewards deep investment in that story. The exact format — digital booklet, designed PDF collection, interactive document — is yours to decide. The concept is consistent: one book, everything around it, for the reader who loved it most.
Higher-ticket ($20–$47): Series companion experiences. A complete series survival kit — everything needed to binge the full series from beginning to end, in a format designed for the reader who is committing to the whole world. A universe companion that covers all the series, all the characters, all the connections, all the series thread details.
👉 A designed reading challenge companion that makes re-reading the complete series into a structured, satisfying experience.
Premium ($50+): Tailored and made-for-you. Character calendars with commissioned art featuring specific MMCs. Personalized reading companions built around the reader’s own experience of the series. Done-for-you products created at the author level for her most invested readers.
👉 These are the items that exist at the boundary between digital product and experience — they command premium prices because they deliver something genuinely unique to each reader or to each author’s specific world. Contact me if you’re ready to create one for your funnel.
The Compounding Logic of Multiple Tiers
Here’s what the full tiered system produces that a single product does NOT:
Every reader who enters the ecosystem at the free layer has a clear natural path upward — not because she’s being pushed, but because the world she loves keeps offering her more of what she already proved she wanted.
- The reader who downloaded the free booklist can buy the beautiful designed version.
- The reader who bought the character dossier can buy the series bundle.
- The reader who bought the series bundle can buy the premium tailored experience.
No reader is asked to jump from free to $47 without intermediate steps. Every step confirms the desire the previous step revealed. The first $7 she spent told her she was willing to invest in this world. The $19 she spends three months later is not a new decision — it is a deepening of the same one.
This is NOT a funnel in the buyer-psychology sense — pressure, urgency, limited-time offers. It’s a reader relationship in the fan-psychology sense — consistent world value, natural next steps, emotional investment accumulating until the next purchase is the obvious expression of a desire that has been building since the first free download.
The Starter Pack is the entry point. This architecture is where it leads.
The Starter Pack and the Mini-Course
The free Starter Pack delivers the four templates and the marketing suite. The BFF Funnel Starter Pack Mini-Course ($27) delivers the implementation layer — the step-by-step teaching that takes a romance author from “I have the templates” to “I have a functioning reader magnet funnel.”
The mini-course is five modules:
Module 1 — Why This Works (the NTM reader psychology, the Language Gap, the free-to-paid relationship arc, the three discovery questions in full)
Module 2 — Your Four Orientation Magnets (Canva build walkthroughs for all four templates with reader-first content decisions for each field)
Module 3 — Your First Paid Magnet (the Character Connection Plan — the first paid-tier magnet that turns the free relationship into a paid one naturally)
Module 4 — Your Marketing Suite (the opt-in page, the three email templates, the five placement spots — deployed and functional)
Module 5 — Your Content Strategy (the 35 content ideas organized by the NTM discovery questions, the caption templates, the weekly anchor system that keeps the magnets in front of new readers consistently)
The free Starter Pack gives the tools. The mini-course makes them work. Coming Soon!!
Get the BFF Funnel Starter Pack
The Starter Pack is free. Four Canva templates plus the complete marketing suite — the opt-in page copy, three email templates, the placement guide, and 35 social media content ideas with caption templates.
Download the FREE Reader Magnet Starter Pack
The BFF Funnel Starter Pack Mini-Course — five modules, approximately 90 minutes total, the complete implementation layer — is $27.
Get the Mini-Course here → Coming Soon!!
The complete ecosystem this funnel lives inside — all seven core pages of the romance author website and how the reader magnet system connects to each — is in the FREE Reader-First Author Platform Guide.
The full curriculum for building everything the Starter Pack deploys into is in BFF University Module 3.