One common piece of advice that indie authors get is that you ought to have an author newsletter. This is an email newsletter you send out on a regular basis to your fans. It’s a way of reaching them that doesn’t rely on fickle social media platforms. And following on from last week, it’s an inexpensive way of marketing your books. Here are a few suggestions on how to start and what to do.
First you should choose a service. The two most popular are MailChimp and MailerLite. The reason why you should choose a service is that you get templates, tracking, and ways to set up links and pages to make it easy to get subscribers. Right now there’s not much difference between the two. I use MailChimp but others are happy with MailerLite. Explore which one you feel the most comfortable with then go with that service.
Next you should consider how often you’re going to send it out. If you’re releasing a few books or more a year you should think about a monthly newsletter. Even if you aren’t releasing that number of books a year, you should still think about releasing it monthly. A monthly newsletter not only keeps you in practice, but it lets your readers know that you’re still writing. I say steer clear of putting out a newsletter more often than once a month. That could make your newsletter feel like email spam.
What will you put into your newsletter? Obviously you want to promote your books. You’d want the cover, the blurb, and maybe an excerpt or something about what inspired the book. If you’re running a sale or have other special deals mention those. Beyond that?
Talk about your life. What are you reading? What are you writing? What are you doing? Where can readers find your books? Where can they find you on social media? Be as conversational as you can.
That said, you should have a format for your newsletter. A format will keep everything in its place. A format can give you a focus for writing each section. Another advantage of having a format is you can experiment with it if recipients aren’t engaging with it. Rather than writing in a whole new style you can simply re-arrange sections to find an overall template that works.
How then do you get subscribers? You should have a landing page, like the one for mine that I posted above. Put that landing page on your website and in a service like LinkTree. If you have a website you can also create a dedicated subscription box or page. Share on social media that you’re doing a newsletter.
Don’t share it once and forget about it, either. Once or twice a month post about your newsletter on your socials. Tell people what they’ll get if they subscribe. Follower counts go up and down on social media, so get into the habit of reminding everyone that you have a newsletter.
Finally, don’t presume that your author newsletter will drive book sales right away. You might need to get to 50, 100, or a few hundred subscribers before you notice any sales impacts. To be honest, your newsletter is your insurance that no matter what happens on social media, your readers and fans will be able to know what’s going on with you and your books. View it as an enjoyable method of keeping in contact and you shouldn’t go wrong.
Writing Update: I have 12 chapters done on the book, so I’m making steady progress.
As next Tuesday is the July Fourth holiday, I won’t be putting up a post here next week. If you have any part of the holiday off, enjoy it and be safe!
Find all of my books here. Thanks for reading!