Adventures in Indie #7: The Dreaded Newsletter

[j_cheney]

Originally published at J. Kathleen Cheney. You can comment here or there.

I’m heading into the area of promotion, and I have to admit that I’m at a bit of a loss here. Trying to grasp all the types of promotion available is like drinking from a fire hose. It’s overwhelming.

But there is one staple I can start with: A newsletter

Now, a large percentage of writers have newsletters. This is currently ‘what you do’. Who knows whether it will remain that way? But I am using the newsletter to keep reader apprised of my new publications, special prices, and various freebies I’m running.

When I was with Ace/Roc, I mostly flailed around with the newsletter, not sure what to do. And at that time I had about 50 subscribers, so it was what is sometimes called an ‘organic’ list. All of those people had sought out my webpage and joined, but I wasn’t making special efforts to attract new readers.

Essentially, I didn’t know how.

One of the differences in going mostly indie is that I have no choice but to get that in hand, so I started researching ways to reach more people. My friends at Codex (one of my writers groups) made some GREAT suggestions that had really helped.

So here’s what I’ve got…so far.

1. Use a newsletter service like MailChimp, MailerLite, or Sendy to handle the newsletters for you. My friends are fairly evenly divided between the first two, but I’ve seen Sendy gaining ground for those people with huge mailing lists (like 13K). Sendy is installed on your webpage and you basically send the newsletter rather than having MC or ML send it for you.
2. Have a newsletter sign-up pop-up on your webpage. I actually created a new web-page so that I could do that (it wasn’t possible on my old webpage).
3. Look at other author newsletters to see what you like. Copy shamelessly.
4. Use a service to attract new readers like Instafreebie (my favorite) or Bookfunnel. I use Instafreebie to offer free books to people who join my mailing list. There is some question whether this people will ever -buy- a book, but it’s also true that exposure is exposure.
5. Join group promotions. When someone comes to look at Author A’s offering, they might also enjoy yours.
6. Try not to inundate people’s mailboxes. I mail once a month at most.
7. Offer them incentives, if you’re feeling magnanimous.  I often include a free short story with a newsletter. For me it’s a chance to expose more people to my writing, and a chance for me to practice my formatting skills, as I often create .mobi and .epub files especially for those.

All of that said, I’m not an expert. I’m just starting out.

In the last several months, though, I’ve gone from about 50 members to about 1600. That’s a decent increase. I cannot attest to the ‘quality’ of my subscribers (a lot of people who pick up free books will only read free books, so they’ll never become purchasers), but I have seen a consistent increase in numbers of books sold.

And my aim was to have a bit of a base built before I released Original in April (I hope). So for those aims, it’s meeting my needs well enough.

So what’s worked for you and your newsletters?