9 and ¾ Steps to Set Up Your Author Mailing List
In the age of Bookstagram, BookTok, and BookTube, why bother with an old-school, unsexy marketing tool like an email newsletter? The answer is simple: control. With social media, you have very limited control over who sees your content and when they see it.
The Why
When you create an account with a social media platform, you operate under their rules. Social media companies are businesses with the goal of monetizing their product and generating income and profit. Each platform uses technology and complex reasoning to feed their users specific content in the hopes that the users will respond in income-generating ways. Although it’s a bit more complex, we can refer to this process as “the algorithm.” Top-performing accounts (all those influencers you hear about) get preferential treatment because their content drives profitable action. As a small fish in an ocean of content generators, you are unlikely to get the same benefit for your run-of-the-mill posts. In fact, the platform can throttle your reach to encourage you to spend money to get your message in front of your readers. It doesn’t make sense in their business model to give you free advertising.
This is a conundrum for authors. You sell more books when you cultivate a base of loyal readers. You develop that base by engaging in relationship-building activities with your readers. Social media is a natural fit because that’s where (for most authors) your readers hang out. Let’s say you have 500 active followers on your Instagram account. These are your fans who look forward to your new releases and engage with your posts. Now let’s say you post a story with the link to your latest release. How amazing would it be for even a quarter of those 500 loyal readers to rush out and buy your book on launch day? It would certainly boost your rankings on Amazon. But Instagram’s algorithm has prioritized other content in your readers’ feeds, so only 50 of them see your post as soon as it goes live. Instead of 125 sales, you make 12. Now your rankings barely budge.
Here's another (even worse and also all-too-common) scenario: you spent twelve solid months grinding away on Instagram (or TikTok or Facebook or wherever). You created video after video. You sought out and engaged all the right people in your sphere. You built a solid little community, and you started to gain actual traction. One day, you open your app only to see that Instagram has banned your account. All they’ll give you is a vague notice claiming you “violated their terms of service.” Your only recourse is to request a review. You aren’t guaranteed to get to talk to a human. You aren’t even guaranteed a response. Given the ongoing developments around social media platform regulation, we’re likely to see a lot more policy fluctuation—and therefore a lot more banned or censored accounts—for the foreseeable future.
What to do?
Enter the humble newsletter. When a reader opts in to your mailing list, they are giving you permission to contact them. You now have direct access to their inbox without a third party deciding when or if your newsletter actually gets delivered. If your 500 loyal readers subscribe to your newsletter, then your launch day email goes to 500 inboxes. And if you’ve done a good job of collecting subscribers and ruthlessly culling the list for only those who are truly engaged, you have a powerful sales tool.
The How
The idea of having a group of adoring fans just waiting for your next newsletter to drop sounds amazing—until you have to figure out how to get those names on your list. (Enter the ever-present imposter syndrome and dread of selling oneself to the masses.) Take heart, though. You can create a checklist and use some free/inexpensive tools to build your community. Note that there are many paths to the summit; we’re focusing on this one today.
Step One-Quarter—Decide On Your Email Platform and Initial Strategy
Although you can use a spreadsheet and your Gmail account to send out emails, we don’t recommend it. Pick one of the big names to start—MailChimp or MailerLite. Both offer a range of tools and are easy enough to learn as you go. Plus, you can make your newsletters visually appealing and use their analytics to determine what works and what doesn’t. Figure out how often you want to send emails. Most authors range from once a week to once a month. It depends on what kinds of topics you want to cover and how much time you can dedicate to creating content. Once a month is an achievable goal at the beginning. Make yourself a content calendar so you know what you’re going to talk about and when. Keep it simple. Keep it brief. Keep it consistent.
Step Half—Test the System
Before you send any real campaigns, take the time to set up your email platform properly and test it. Follow best practices. Make sure you feel good about how things look and how they operate before you send anything to actual subscribers.
Step Three-Quarters—Shamelessly Recruit Friends and Family
You need a place to start. Find a handful of people who will agree to be on your initial list. They don’t have to open the emails if they don’t want to, and they don’t have to stay subscribed forever. Set a goal of around 20 people, more if you can get them. Don’t feel bad if you can’t.
Step One – Write Something Short to Give Away
Aim for 10,000ish words. Do more if you want. Some people also choose to use the first few chapters of a full-length novel. The idea is to give potential readers an entry point to your world. Let them experience your voice, your style, your characters. This writing is the literary equivalent to the little samples the hairnet brigade hands out at Costco—just a taste to entice the reader to pick up the complete package.
Step Two—Put a Cover on that Bad Boy (and edit and format it)
Just because it’s small doesn’t mean it isn’t deserving of the full treatment. You don’t have to do a full jacket, because this piece will only be available digitally. Just like with covers for your full-length novels, you want this cover to fit alongside all the other books in your genre. You’re also going to edit and format the words just as you would with any other book. It’s an expense without a direct ROI, but it’s a worthy investment. This may be the only chance you get to impress someone. You wouldn’t hand them a resume full of typos and printed on the back of a piece of scrap paper. Shine this one up before you put it out in the world.
Step Three—Choose a Delivery Mechanism
One of the easiest ways to make your book available to potential readers is a service like BookFunnel. For $100 a year, you can create a landing page for your snack-sized book that will automatically collect email addresses and deliver a download link to the reader. (You could opt for the $20/year option, but you don’t get email address collection at that level, and that’s the whole point.) There are alternatives like BookSweeps and StoryOriginApp. You could also create a landing page on your own website. We’ll focus on BookFunnel today, but feel free to do your research and create a pros/cons list for each option.
Step Four—Promote Your Freebie
Just because you are building an email mailing list doesn’t mean you have abandoned social media. Post about your freebie, with the link to the landing page, on all of your platforms. Fire up your author network and ask them to link to your freebie on their pages. Even better if you set up a swap plan—you agree to mention one of their books or promos at a future date in exchange for them talking about yours now. Put a pop-up on your website. Find deal sites that will let you list your BookFunnel landing page and submit your listing to them. You’ve likely heard of the ones you have to pay for like BookBub, FreeBooksy, or Indie Author News. You can dig around and find some that will include your link for free. It will take a lot of time and vetting, but they exist. Take advantage of BookFunnel’s built-in Group Promo option. Even with no email subscribers or a very small list consisting only of friends and family, you can join some of these promos. Make sure you pay attention to the rules for each one. Then do your part.
Step Five—Start Sending Emails
You’ve got a subscriber list. Yay! Unless you popped for the integration at an extra cost from BookFunnel, you’ll have to manually port your list into your email platform. You have a couple of competing issues here: begin as you mean to go on vs. you don’t know what you don’t know. Begin as you mean to go on: in marketing and sales, data is crucial. Think about what kind of information might help you make good decisions in the future as well as what tools your email platform provides. Can you tag your contacts with additional, useful labels, like demographic information, acquisition channel, or other authors/genres they are interested in? Set up your system to capture and manage as much useful data as possible. However, you don’t know what you don’t know: going overboard on research and technicalities at this point can slow your progress. Put some thought into how you can get the most out of your campaigns, and then move on. Follow your content calendar, and start communicating with your subscribers.
Step Six—Test, analyze, adjust, repeat.
Every time an email goes out, pay attention to the variables and the metrics. How many people opened the email? What links got the clicks? Did a swap or mention of a particular author cause a surge in engagement? Collaborate more with that person. Did a Tuesday a.m. email get a significantly higher open rate than a Friday mid-afternoon email? Go hard for Tuesdays. Change up all the areas of your newsletter, from the subject line to the body content to the footer. Track the results. Make spreadsheets. Make charts and graphs. Do more of what creates engagement. Test. Analyze. Adjust. Repeat.
Step Seven—Cull the Herd
I’m never going to buy ten pounds of calf liver at Costco. But if one of those stations is handing out calf liver samples in a little white cup, I’ll probably take one on the off chance that I might find a new favorite food. Your newsletter subscribers who find you through your freebie are motivated by “Why not?” rather than true love. At least some of them will become fans (otherwise there’s no reason to do this), but a good number won’t. And that’s just fine! You’re casting a wide net in a way that isn’t a huge drain on your resources. However, you shouldn’t keep every subscriber for eternity. Let’s say you build your subscriber list to 10,000 people. That’s huge! That’s an accomplishment! But let’s say only 200 of those subscribers ever actually open your emails. That indicates you have a lot of dead weight in your list, and it’s time to cull. Don’t be afraid to get rid of the people who aren’t engaging. Those numbers are just noise. The real value is in the subscribers who open, read, and take some action when you send an email. You’re much better off with a tiny list of subscribers who all click the buy link when you launch a book than with a giant list who automatically trash your email as soon as it hits their inbox. Size only kind of matters in this context. Don’t let more than a year go by without pruning your list so it’s full of the most active and engaged subscribers.
Step Eight—Make the Most of Your Tools
Email platforms get paid when they do a good job, so they have a vested interest in providing you the kinds of tools that will help your newsletters be successful. Use those tools to their fullest advantage, especially if they offer automation and other time-saving benefits. Some authors create a multi-step onboarding process. When a subscriber opts in, they receive an automatic welcome email followed a week later by another automatic email, maybe highlighting the author’s best-selling titles or maybe showing snippets of some of the highest-performing emails. Then, they may get another email asking about joining the street team or completing a survey of favorite authors or something else. This is an opportunity to mine data. On the flip side, maybe there’s an automated function that will identify dormant subscribers and start a series of re-engagement emails. Make note of pain points in your process and see if your email platform has a solution. Ultimately, you want an effective and efficient email newsletter system as part of your marketing machine.
Step Nine—Always Be Curious
Talk to other authors. Ask them what they’re doing that works. Ask them what they have tried that didn’t work. Keep an eye out in forums or at conferences for conversations about newsletters. Technology changes. The industry changes. Trends change. You don’t have to be the foremost expert in all things newsletter, but it’s good to stay informed.
Marketing books is hard. It’s a challenge to cut through the noise and reach your ideal reader, especially if you’re working through platforms that throttle your control. An email newsletter, with a solid strategy behind it, is a powerful tool for building relationships with your readers.