Your books are published, you’re building a social media presence, and you’ve got an official author website and/or blog. You’re rocking it! But…do you have a newsletter?
I know what you’re thinking:
What? More book promotion I have to do? When will I have time to write the next book??
But keep reading. It’s worth starting a newsletter, and it needn’t be a big time investment.
First off, what is a newsletter exactly?
Glad you asked. A newsletter is when you add a form to your website (or blog) where visitors can sign up (opt in), thus agreeing to receive periodic email messages from you. Their names and email addresses are compiled into a mailing list, and you can then “broadcast” a message to your entire list at once.
What you write in those newsletters is up to you. If you’re an author, the people who sign up are going to be fans, probably fans who’ve read many of your books and enjoyed them enough to hunt down your website and give you their email addresses.
Think of your newsletter subscribers as your inner circle. What cool things can you do to reward them for being fans?
At the very least, you can let them be among the first to know when you have a new book coming out. Maybe you can even give them coupons for discounts or let them take advantage of a low initial ebook price (i.e. you might sell your novel at $2.99 for the first couple of weeks before raising the price to $4.99).
What’s in it for you?
Okay, you’re thinking, you could start a newsletter, and you could give things away, but why? How is that helping you sell books if you’re just writing to people who are already fans?
First off, as I mentioned, a newsletter is a way to let your core fans know when you have a new book out. More than that, having the emails of hundreds of readers can give you the power to get a bunch of people buying your new releases at once.
Savvy independent authors have used their newsletter subscribers to shoot their latest books to the tops of the bestseller lists at Amazon. This gets their books noticed by lots of other people (who aren’t newsletter subscribers and just happen to browse the bestseller charts, looking for new books to try).
Sending newsletters out to your fans is also a way to keep your name in their minds, something that can be especially useful if you’re not the most prolific writer. They’ll probably be more likely to recommend your books to friends if you’re able to stay on their radar. Otherwise, they might forget all about you in the interim between publications. And if they forget about you, they won’t remember to keep an eye out for your future books.
Always remember, it’s easier to sell to an existing fan than to convince a new reader to try your work.
Now that I’ve convinced you (even if I haven’t, please nod your head and grunt an affirmative so we can move on), let’s talk about how to set up a newsletter.
How to start a newsletter
The basics are to sign up with a newsletter service (they’ll send out the message for you and keep all the addresses in a secure database) and add a sign-up form to your website or blog (or both). The process will be a little different depending on who you go with and where you host your blog (if you want to install it on a blog), so I’ll keep things basic.
Sign up with a newsletter service
There are free ones out there that are perfectly fine if you’re just getting started (they can get you pretty darned far, actually!), though the tradeoff is that you’ll usually have advertising or something like inserted at the end of your newsletters. For an indie on a budget, that’s probably not going to be a problem.
I’ll mention the provider I use first and then another one I’ve heard authors recommend (mine costs money, but the other one has a free option that’s available for those with less than 1,000 subscribers).
The service I use is Aweber, and the main reason was that I already had an account there because of the day job. They’re the gold standard when it comes to mailing list providers, but they’re pricy at $15 a month and offer more services than we generally need as authors (Examples include click tracking, the option to host multiple newsletters, and the ability to create series of scheduled “broadcasts” that can go out automatically to a new subscriber at intervals. They also have a huge selection of video webinars to educate you on marketing with newsletters).
If you know right away that you’ll quickly reach 1,000 subscribers, or if you have multiple pen names and want to easily manage newsletter lists for each under one account, you might check into Aweber.
If not, here’s another option:
YMLP (Your Mailing List Provider) has a free level that might very well do everything you need. As I said, you can have up to 1,000 subscribers and send up to 25 emails a month. For many authors, that may be plenty. (I’m not anywhere near 1,000 subscribers yet myself, though I hope to be by this time next year!).
Add a form to your site/blog
Both of the services I mentioned have form-creation wizards. You can pick out a background and what fields you want people to enter (name and email should be sufficient), and it’ll give you a snippet of code to place on your site.
How to insert that code will vary, depending on your blog platform, but for WordPress, I created a new “text” widget, pasted the code into it, and added it to my sidebar (I’ve done this on Blogger and Typepad, too, so I imagine it’s possible everywhere).
How do you get people to sign up for your newsletter?
The cool thing about being an author is that people searching for your website are probably already fans. They’ve read your books, and they’re interested in learning more about you or perhaps when the next book comes out. You shouldn’t have to sell them too hard on your newsletter.
That said, you can do the tried-and-true internet marketer’s method of acquiring newsletter subscribers: give something away for free to folks who sign up. Perhaps a short story or some kind of special fans-only extra? It’s up to you.
That’s all there is to starting a newsletter. It’s much easier than formatting an ebook or editing your manuscript or any of the other things you’ve done as an author!
Very thorough article, thank you. I’ve also heard that MailChimp is good for newsletters.
After you ran the newsletter post over on the main site I eagerly signed up with Aweber, and it all looked soooo easy, until I kept being sent in circles by their wizard, which refused to let me move to the next step.
Being in West Africa their no-doubt wonderful tech help at the end of a phone is of no use to me.
I’m a author, not an IT person. I just want to click one button that says “Make unique newsletter exactly as you want it” and move on.
And the same for everything else that goes into behind-the-scenes sites.
“That’s all there is to starting a newsletter. It’s much easier than formatting an ebook or editing your manuscript or any of the other things you’ve done as an author!”
Give me a manuscript to edit any day!
Sorry to hear that Aweber is vexing you, Mark. I’m not sure what to suggest since I’ve never had trouble making the forms. They have customers from around the world and email support, too, so I’m not sure why location would be a problem. But maybe you can get your money back and try one of the free services with fewer bells and whistles.
“I’m a author, not an IT person. I just want to click one button that says ‘Make unique newsletter exactly as you want it’ and move on.”
Since you do very well with your book sales, another option is just to pay someone to set it up for you. I’ve hired folks from Odesk and VWorker before (this would be a quick job for someone experienced) or you might even put a call out to people who visit your blog. Just a thought. It’d be a shame to give up the newsletter idea altogether.
The problem being indie is a freaky desire for total control.
Bad enough handing over our covers to a third party.
Luckily we persevered and got the newsletter sorted, using your recommended service. Many thanks.
I’m glad you were able to get it to work out, Mark!
Oh, some little bee talked me into this.
I haven’t sent anything out yet and I signed some people up, telling them they didn’t have a choice. lol
I went with YMLP and have found it a fine experience so far. But, as I said, I haven’t sent anything out yet.
Read. Done. Thank you.
What do you send in the email updates besides book announcements?
Good question, Quincy! It’s really up to you, but here are a couple of things I’ve done (I try to send out an email a month):
–Announcements for giveaways on my blog — I’ve done Amazon gift certificates and signed paperbacks (for the latter, I had three winners and made sure at least two of them came from my mailing list, so that I could reward folks who had taken the time to sign up).
–Coupons — I’ve done coupons for my own stuff, of course. And one month, I didn’t have anything new of my own to talk up, so I asked some other indie fantasy authors for 100%-off coupons for their ebooks on Smashwords. This was a win for them since they got some exposure amongst my readers, and some of them had brand new ebooks out and ended up getting reviews out of the deal.
–Notes about freebies or cut scenes (I’ve started posting some cut scenes on my site, and fans seem to get a kick out of that).
Nice article. I’ve been thinking about starting a newsletter for some time. I have read that MailChimp is a good option for a newsletter service. It usually ranks just under AWeber in lists of top services. I just revisited their site and notice they have a Forever Fee Plan that lets you have up to 2,000 subscribers and send out 12,000 e-mails a month. There are some features from their premium service that are not included, but if you get to the point you need them you can then start to pay. I know that if I reached 2,000+ subscribers, I would not mind paying. I would love to go with AWeber, but it’s hard to pay from the start not knowing if you’ll even get 100 subscribers. Wish they offered a free trial also.
Oops! That would be “Forever FREE Plan” – I pay too many fees already!
I love your site as I am a new indie writer and am learning so many things from you.
So far I have five paperbacks out and three ebooks on smashwords and Amazon, but now I have to learn how to sell them.
Thank you for your help!