The Easter Egg
Reward your True Fans with a secret surprise
There are readers, listeners, and fans who love your work.
No, really.
They exist. I promise.
How can we reward them? How can we show our appreciation for those who support us, follow us, while also guiding us and helping inspire us to create even more great work?
Enter The Easter Egg
Here’s the history of the easter egg from Wikipedia:
The use of the term “Easter egg” to describe secret features in video games originates from the 1979 video game Adventure for the Atari 2600 game console, programmed by employee Warren Robinett. At the time, Atari did not include programmers’ names in the game credits, fearing that competitors would attempt to steal their employees. Robinett, who disagreed with his supervisor over this lack of acknowledgment, secretly programmed the message “Created by Warren Robinett” to appear only if a player moved their avatar over a specific pixel (dubbed the “Gray Dot”) during a certain part of the game and entered a previously “forbidden” part of the map where the message would be found. When Robinett left Atari, he did not inform the company of the acknowledgment that he included in the game. Shortly after his departure, the “Gray Dot” and his message were discovered by a player. Atari’s management initially wanted to remove the message and release the game again until this was deemed too costly. Instead, Steve Wright, the Director of Software Development in the Atari Consumer Division, suggested that they keep the message and, in fact, encourage the inclusion of such messages in future games, describing them as Easter eggs for consumers to find.
So it needs to be a little bit hard to find but not impossible.
Here’s an example from my “Audio for Authors” book leading to a 50% discount on the online course.
The thinking is to reward those who actually read, who dig in, who want more, and will be pleasantly surprised to find a discount or a freebie or just something fun that others will skip over.
Egg photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
