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Notes on growing a brand new mailing list
I thought this might be of interest to the self-pub people here! One of my major goals this year is to take everything I've learned about promoting myself through the Zoe project, as well as the Lauren Esker project on the side, and apply it to relaunching my real-name books, and see if I can make some decent money off them without compromising the stories and themes I want to work with. I'm working against a steep uphill curve here because none of my books are particularly commercial and most of them are books I wrote years ago, had rejected by a bunch of agents, and eventually ended up sitting on. So I'm entirely unsure if I will actually make any money doing this at all. But I'm going to try.
My first major book release will be Rogue Myths (retitled version of Wayward Myths) in July, followed closely by the rest of the series. I'm also releasing a novella at the end of this month, The Girl Who Loved Mountains, mostly just so I have something around for people to buy while I work on my mailing list and social media. And here again, I don't want to be a promotion machine. I want to be just genuine me (and incidentally make money). So right now I'm just trying to get in the habit of using my author Twitter and Facebook and Instagram a bit more, interacting with people a bit in ways I find fun, but not really doing much to build them up in any other way.
For the mailing list, though, I'm really trying to build up a decent-sized mailing list by the time I have the major book launch in July.
Like I've already talked about in earlier posts, I wanted to give people something of value with the mailing list - not marketing promo blargh, but something *I* would like to receive on a mailing list! - so I'm sending out free short stories every Tuesday, three of them so far. It's actually going great! I'm having fun with it, people are opening and reading, and I'm even getting a couple of replies to each one. (Sign up here if you want! Next Tuesday's story, "Patch Work," will be a flashfic I wrote for a blog prompt ages ago that ballooned to about 2500 words before I was done, about a woman's life from the 1960s to the modern day using a quilt as a metaphor.) I also have a free story when you sign up; it's "Gilt and Glamour," set in the same world as Rogue Myths, my pooka-at-a-masked-ball story from Sherwood's ballroom anthology a couple of years ago.
Long story short, I only started working on growing my new mailing list in mid-February ... just about a month ago. At that point I had 10 subscribers, all of whom I think signed up years ago when I first tried to get a list going and then never did anything with it. Now, a month later, I have about 400, and I think I'm on track to have around 600-800 when the first book releases.
Somewhere between 1/3 to 1/2 of this is simply due to inviting people from a) my Lauren Esker mailing list, b) the Zoe Chant Facebook group, and c) my various fandom places. So I already had a social circle to lean on. I think probably at this point, most of those people who are going to sign up have done so.
The rest of it is via BookFunnel mailing list promos. For that I'm using a giveaway novella, Finder's Keeper, which I sold to now-defunct Storm Moon Press back in 2014-ish for their Big Damn Heroines anthology. It took me probably a ridiculous amount of time to work all of this out in my head, but basically my freebie giveaway structure is set up like this:
- Finder's Keeper: BookFunnel promo novella which I'm submitting to group promos and using to gather mailing list signups. People go check out the promo, browse the books, and you sign up for someone's mailing list to get their book.
- A day or so later, they get an email with "Gilt & Glamour", the regular mailing list signup freebie. (People who sign up for the list directly get it immediately.) They also get a brief description of what kind of emails they'll get from me (a new story every Tuesday) and a VERY LARGE unsubscribe link. I would much rather have people bail if they aren't interested. I've been reminding myself that unsubscribes are a good thing - it means they won't be getting what they want from my list, so they shouldn't be on it.
- A couple of days after that, they get an email with an overview of my projects and another big unsubscribe link. At this point they go into the regular email flow.
I'm only joining one BookFunnel promo at a time if I can help it, because you are required to promote it to your mailing list and I don't want to spam them. The nice thing about sending them weekly emails is that I have a nice convenient place to stash the promo links! I really struggled with this with my Lauren list; I wanted to grow the list but I didn't want people to feel like they were being spammed, and I normally only sent emails when I released a book. If I did promos, I had to send them an email that was just about the promos, and I didn't like it. When I get back to paying attention to Lauren again, I'm going to probably start doing something like sending out a monthly newsletter. The point is to not spam them; they should know ahead of time what kind of emails they'll be getting, rather than springing a promo email on them at random intervals - that's not very fair if they only signed up for book announcement emails. (I also keep my organic subscribers - that is, the ones who signed up through the link in the back of the book - separate from my promo subscribers, and only send the promo emails to the promo folks, so that does help a bit. But I still need a better system for sending regular emails to the Lauren list.)
Anyway, on the Layla list ... I've done one month-long BookFunnel promo so far (Feb. 15-March 15) and I'm now into another. I'm getting somewhere between 2 and 10 signups a day from these, probably averaging around 3-4; it's mostly on the low end, and some days none at all, but every once in a while I'll get like 20 signups in one day, and then I know that someone with a big mailing list sent out a link to their readers.
It's a trickle, not a flood. But a drip can fill a bucket, and it's actually very gratifying to get that tiny little bit of affirmation as my list grows a little bit almost every day. And I've added 400 people in a month, with an incredibly uncommercial set of attractions. I think I would be doing this faster if I were, for example, branding myself as a writer in a highly commercial genre. But this isn't that; this is all my fun and quirky stuff, so the mailing list is also fun and quirky.
I'm not naturally good at promoting myself. I think most authors aren't. Most people aren't; it goes against not just how we are taught to present ourselves, but it also goes against the social compact in general, especially if done clumsily. I don't want to be rude or egotistical or turn into That Jerk. In general, there has been quite a learning curve - I could have done MUCH more with Lauren than I did, but at the time, I just didn't know how! And I also don't want to promote myself in ways I would find unethical or offputting if they were done to me. So basically I'm taking all of this and hoping to put it together into a pretty good launch for these books despite the fact that they are all fairly different from each other and not very commercial to begin with.
My first major book release will be Rogue Myths (retitled version of Wayward Myths) in July, followed closely by the rest of the series. I'm also releasing a novella at the end of this month, The Girl Who Loved Mountains, mostly just so I have something around for people to buy while I work on my mailing list and social media. And here again, I don't want to be a promotion machine. I want to be just genuine me (and incidentally make money). So right now I'm just trying to get in the habit of using my author Twitter and Facebook and Instagram a bit more, interacting with people a bit in ways I find fun, but not really doing much to build them up in any other way.
For the mailing list, though, I'm really trying to build up a decent-sized mailing list by the time I have the major book launch in July.
Like I've already talked about in earlier posts, I wanted to give people something of value with the mailing list - not marketing promo blargh, but something *I* would like to receive on a mailing list! - so I'm sending out free short stories every Tuesday, three of them so far. It's actually going great! I'm having fun with it, people are opening and reading, and I'm even getting a couple of replies to each one. (Sign up here if you want! Next Tuesday's story, "Patch Work," will be a flashfic I wrote for a blog prompt ages ago that ballooned to about 2500 words before I was done, about a woman's life from the 1960s to the modern day using a quilt as a metaphor.) I also have a free story when you sign up; it's "Gilt and Glamour," set in the same world as Rogue Myths, my pooka-at-a-masked-ball story from Sherwood's ballroom anthology a couple of years ago.
Long story short, I only started working on growing my new mailing list in mid-February ... just about a month ago. At that point I had 10 subscribers, all of whom I think signed up years ago when I first tried to get a list going and then never did anything with it. Now, a month later, I have about 400, and I think I'm on track to have around 600-800 when the first book releases.
Somewhere between 1/3 to 1/2 of this is simply due to inviting people from a) my Lauren Esker mailing list, b) the Zoe Chant Facebook group, and c) my various fandom places. So I already had a social circle to lean on. I think probably at this point, most of those people who are going to sign up have done so.
The rest of it is via BookFunnel mailing list promos. For that I'm using a giveaway novella, Finder's Keeper, which I sold to now-defunct Storm Moon Press back in 2014-ish for their Big Damn Heroines anthology. It took me probably a ridiculous amount of time to work all of this out in my head, but basically my freebie giveaway structure is set up like this:
- Finder's Keeper: BookFunnel promo novella which I'm submitting to group promos and using to gather mailing list signups. People go check out the promo, browse the books, and you sign up for someone's mailing list to get their book.
- A day or so later, they get an email with "Gilt & Glamour", the regular mailing list signup freebie. (People who sign up for the list directly get it immediately.) They also get a brief description of what kind of emails they'll get from me (a new story every Tuesday) and a VERY LARGE unsubscribe link. I would much rather have people bail if they aren't interested. I've been reminding myself that unsubscribes are a good thing - it means they won't be getting what they want from my list, so they shouldn't be on it.
- A couple of days after that, they get an email with an overview of my projects and another big unsubscribe link. At this point they go into the regular email flow.
I'm only joining one BookFunnel promo at a time if I can help it, because you are required to promote it to your mailing list and I don't want to spam them. The nice thing about sending them weekly emails is that I have a nice convenient place to stash the promo links! I really struggled with this with my Lauren list; I wanted to grow the list but I didn't want people to feel like they were being spammed, and I normally only sent emails when I released a book. If I did promos, I had to send them an email that was just about the promos, and I didn't like it. When I get back to paying attention to Lauren again, I'm going to probably start doing something like sending out a monthly newsletter. The point is to not spam them; they should know ahead of time what kind of emails they'll be getting, rather than springing a promo email on them at random intervals - that's not very fair if they only signed up for book announcement emails. (I also keep my organic subscribers - that is, the ones who signed up through the link in the back of the book - separate from my promo subscribers, and only send the promo emails to the promo folks, so that does help a bit. But I still need a better system for sending regular emails to the Lauren list.)
Anyway, on the Layla list ... I've done one month-long BookFunnel promo so far (Feb. 15-March 15) and I'm now into another. I'm getting somewhere between 2 and 10 signups a day from these, probably averaging around 3-4; it's mostly on the low end, and some days none at all, but every once in a while I'll get like 20 signups in one day, and then I know that someone with a big mailing list sent out a link to their readers.
It's a trickle, not a flood. But a drip can fill a bucket, and it's actually very gratifying to get that tiny little bit of affirmation as my list grows a little bit almost every day. And I've added 400 people in a month, with an incredibly uncommercial set of attractions. I think I would be doing this faster if I were, for example, branding myself as a writer in a highly commercial genre. But this isn't that; this is all my fun and quirky stuff, so the mailing list is also fun and quirky.
I'm not naturally good at promoting myself. I think most authors aren't. Most people aren't; it goes against not just how we are taught to present ourselves, but it also goes against the social compact in general, especially if done clumsily. I don't want to be rude or egotistical or turn into That Jerk. In general, there has been quite a learning curve - I could have done MUCH more with Lauren than I did, but at the time, I just didn't know how! And I also don't want to promote myself in ways I would find unethical or offputting if they were done to me. So basically I'm taking all of this and hoping to put it together into a pretty good launch for these books despite the fact that they are all fairly different from each other and not very commercial to begin with.
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