FFS! Give your list a story!

Your author newsletter doesn’t have to be dry. Do what you do best.

General wisdom among indie authors is that if you maintain one marketing tactic to help your writing business, make it an author email list.

I completely agree with this, and it’s rare for me to agree with any advice unequivocally. You absolutely have to have a direct way to communicate with your readers. You never know if a retailer will pull your books, Facebook will suspend your account, you’ll end up on the wrong end of an industry witch hunt (yes, I know plenty of good people who have been the victims of this sort of thing, so don’t think that you’re immune just because you’re innocent of all charges), or whatever other black swan event might occur. In any case, it’s imperative that you can still reach the readers who love your work and want to pay you money to keep producing it. You need that direct line.

But even if there isn’t a catastrophe, the author newsletter is an incredible tool that you can use to take your audience from readers who maybe signed up to get a freebie to die-hard fans who would buy a plane ticket across the country to see you in person.

Unfortunately, most author newsletters suck and make me want to claw out my eyeballs just to feel something, anything.

There are plenty of practical guides out there for what your automation sequence should be to onboard new potential buyers. It’s not a bad place to start. But some materials get as specific as actual templates, and I cannot say this enough: do not use any sort of a template for the copy of your emails to your list. Oh god, please no!

Avid readers are no doubt subscribed to many of these lists, which means that to keep your open rates high, you have to set yourself apart.

So: if you want to know what to put in your emails, ask yourself this simple question: What do readers want to hear from me?

Some “experts” will answer this with, “book deals” or “sales” or “new releases.” And yes, readers might want to know about those. Might. But what if they’re not in the market for a new book right now? And what if they begin to suspect you only want one thing from them, and that’s money? They’re not going to keep opening…

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