Newsletters and Lists
The received wisdom is that the thing that you will want to work on from day one is building a mailing list. In short, a group of people who actively want to see a newsletter email from you.
This section, we should be taking a look at lists and list building. The truth is though I do not believe in lists. I hate email and avoid it at all costs. I cannot in good conscience teach you to build a list and mass-mail people.
Do I need to build a list?
This guy in the video below, he seems to think so. Me, I have other ideas.
Did you know email misses certain types of customers?
It is true. There are some people that just hate email. They avoid it and they delete as fast as they can to get to inbox-zero – that zen state of having no emails in the inbox.
If you send them a newsletter this is what will happen – it will be urged to make room for other things.
The trick, you see, is to make your email so interesting that people want to read it. Which means writing, regularly. Writing that is not your next book. Writing that is just keeping the attention you have struggled so hard to get.
For authors where any writing that is not book writing is bad, I have no easy answers. If you have any suggestions please drop into our working group and share them. You can learn about our working group on the “about” page.