newsletters for indie authors
Two unrelated but interesting things happened on the same day, which made me decide to write this blog post about writers and newsletters.
-I read a blog post from a new-ish indie writer (I have 73 novels, so if someone has 2, I get to call them new-ish) who had just sent his first email newsletter. After sending his first newsletter, he expressed profound alarm that 20 people had unsubscribed from his list, and he spent several paragraphs agonizing about what he had done wrong and how he had somehow offended these former subscribers.
-On the 20th I sent out a newsletter promoting a new book and a bargain book of some writer acquaintances of mine, and one of the former subscribers wrote me a very detailed and apologetic letter explaining why she was unsubscribing. For some reason the email was accompanied by a picture of a smiling baby seal, perhaps to lessen the perceived emotional blow.
All this was, of course, unnecessary.
If you’re a writer, or if you have another business that uses an email list, here four things to remember:
1.) You have to make it easy for people to unsubscribe from the list. For one thing, if you don’t, people can complain and report you as a spammer, which causes all kinds of problems. For another, if someone winds up on the list by accident, it cuts way down on the ill will if they can unsubscribe easily.
2.) People unsubscribe from email lists for all kinds of reasons. I’ve sent out newsletters for every single book since GHOST IN THE FORGE back in February 2012, and for every single email, I’ve had people unsubscribe.
But that’s not surprising. One of the nasty secrets of email is that it’s really annoying and most people don’t like it, and they don’t like it when even organizations and people they like send emails. Like, I enjoy eating at Subway, but I’m not subscribed to any of their email lists because I don’t want to get emails about Subway every day.
A long time ago I had a coworker who took it as a personal insult whenever someone mass emailed the entire organization and spent much time on elaborate institutional schemes and policies to cut down on mass emails. (Granted, my preferred solution for dealing with unwanted email is SHIFT-click the entire inbox and then DELETE, but to each his own.) Therefore, you can’t take it personally when people unsubscribe from your email list. That way lies madness.
You also shouldn’t try to track down people who unsubscribe and try to find out why they did. That way lies an entirely different kind of madness.
3.) Because of this, it’s important to have value in your newsletters so people open them. That’s why if you subscribe to say, a restaurant chain’s email list, you’ll get emails with coupons and sales and so forth. I try to do the same thing with mine – my newsletter on the 20th had links to two free novels and 1 free short story.
4.) It’s best to let subscribers happen organically over time. Like, on my website, the newsletter signup form is prominent (I don’t do a popup because popups are the devil), and at the end of every book, I have a link to the newsletter signup form. That way, if people go to the trouble of voluntarily signing up for the newsletter, they’re much less likely to unsubscribe when I do send a newsletter.
If you keep these four things in mind, using your email newsletter will be much less stressful.
-JM