As time has gone by I’ve been hearing
more and more how important a mailing list is.
I disregarded its importance as I felt that emailing people was more of
a nuisance to both me and the people I’d be emailing, and I didn’t see how it
would be effective. I figured that if
someone was interested enough to give me their email address, they were already
looking at my work, and they didn’t need me to bother them with reminders about
it.
However, I heard about mailing lists
being important enough that I finally looked into it, and I began to see the
value. First, it’s really only helpful
if you are regularly coming out with material.
So if you have a mailing list for you as a writer, then you need to
regularly be coming out with books or other written materials. If the mailing list is about a series, then
you need to be regularly coming out with written materials for that series.
The problem with the former is that
your list will likely be made up of people who became interested in your
writing because of one specific book. So
you’re going to need to stay within that genre in order to keep their
interest. If your newsletters become
about a subject they’re not interested in, they’ll unsubscribe, even if you’re
just taking a short break from that type of writing.
So it’s best to focus on a
particular series and collect names and addresses of people who want to follow
along. For me, that’s been Relic Worlds
because not only is it a series, but it’s a series with a lot of ancillary
elements. There are short stories,
games, a comic book, etc. There’s
something to talk about every month, and more material to release, so the
newsletters have material and aren’t just empty ramblings of me saying, “something
more is coming sometime, I promise!”
I’ve found that there are two
methods to build the mailing list that work the best, conventions and
giveaways. At conventions, you’re trying
to get people to look at your books, but they’re not sure whether they’re ready
to commit to buying or even reading them yet.
So a mailing list is a good way to get a taste without a
commitment. It’s also a way to remind
them that you exist, as opposed to a flyer which will likely get thrown away
once they’re home, no matter how interested they are in your product.
Giveaways are the way to do it from
home. You need to get a prize people
will want, and it’s a great idea to get something that matches what you’re
selling. In my case, I gave away a
Kindle Fire and I included one of the Relic Worlds books. That way they not only get a prize they want,
they also have a means for which to read my books, and a starter. But the real prize for me was all the email
addresses that people had to give in order to enter the raffle.
Now, I don’t want lists of people
who won’t be interested in my series.
That wastes everyone’s time. Even
once I have their email addresses, when I send them a newsletter, they’ll just
unsubscribe because they’re not interested.
Or, worse yet, they won’t unsubscribe and I’ll continue to send them
information that’s useless to both them and me.
So I promote it on sites where I think my readership will go, and I make
sure keywords are always included that have scifi, adventure, books, etc.
I use Shortstack as my sweepstakes
provider. They help collect all the
email addresses, and provide a means by which to make a good looking
sweepstakes page. I might switch this
out as I wasn’t extremely impressed with their service considering the
cost. But it wasn’t bad. They’re at: http://www.shortstack.com/
I use Mailchimp to create and send
the newsletters. They’ve been
fantastic. They’re at: http://mailchimp.com/
No comments:
Post a Comment