How (and Why) to Set Up Your Author Newsletter

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The trick to growing your author platform and selling more books is building an email list of fans. Truly, it’s your number one book marketing goal.

Cue the groans from writers who don’t want to start an email list. Writers tell me: 

“They’re a lot of work.” 

“They’re boring.” 

“No one reads emails.”

To which I say, sorry, but you’re wrong. 

Email lists are POWERFUL. 

They are far more valuable than your social media following. And they give you far more control than social media. 

With social media, we don’t control the algorithms and can never guarantee our followers will even see our posts. Plus, it is very hard to grab attention on social media and get people to do something other than hit a heart button. “Likes” don’t help us in the long run. 

Ultimately, we need the right readers to buy our books. So we need to collect a list of the “right” readers that we can reach anytime we want and build the relationship so they’ll happily order our newest book (and our backlist for that matter!).  

Assuming you have your website up and running, here are the steps to setting up your email list.

STEP 1: CHOOSE AN EMAIL SERVICE PROVIDER. 

In order to set up your email list, you have to have an email service provider. You can't just use your regular Gmail account to send out newsletters. You need to have something such as Mailerlite, MailChimp, or ConvertKit in order to follow all the laws and compliance and to make it easier on yourself to manage an email list.

Step 2: Create your reader magnet. 

You need to have a reader magnet, also called a sign-up incentive. One that people want. Figure out what you can offer to people that would make sense for your ideal reader, always coming back to who your ideal reader is.  

In the Happily Ever Author Club, there’s a big list of sign-up incentive ideas to offer, ranging from a free short story for fiction authors to free webinars for nonfiction authors. 

In order to create just the right one, you have to know who your ideal reader is. 

Knowing your ideal reader helps you make so many marketing decisions. Who are they? What do they want? What do they need that thematically ties to you and your books? What would they enjoy? What would solve a problem for them? 

Once you know this, you can create your reader magnet. 

STEP 3: CREATE SIGN-UP FORMS

Your ideal reader can’t sign up to your email list if you don’t have sign-up forms on your website. Your forms should be visually attractive and designed to appeal to your ideal audience.

Your forms should not say “Sign up for news and updates” because, sorry, but nobody cares about your news and updates. (They don’t care about mine, either.) 

Instead, say “Get your free historical thriller when you sign up to my list” or something similar, depending on your reader magnet. 

Or, if you’re offering a keto shopping list, say something like “Want your complimentary keto shopping list? This will also sign you up to my email list.”

This is all about what is in it for the reader. 

If your form is bland or only talks about news and updates and doesn't mention your reader magnet, you’re missing out on a chance to optimize converting your website visitors to subscribers. 

You also want to ask for as little information as possible: first name and email address only. The more fields that you add increases the odds that potential subscribers will click away without doing anything. 

STEP 4: GET MORE PEOPLE TO OPT IN.

If you've got people coming to your website and most of them are not signing up for your email list, how do you get your list set up so that they will? Here are a few ways to optimize your opt-ins.

Have a pop-up form

Your target conversion rate for a pop-up is between three and ten percent. If you just have static calls to action on your webpage, pop-ups can really help. They don't have to be the annoying ones that take over the entire screen and don't let you do anything else. 

Forms that just hang out in the bottom corner and pop up after a certain amount of time and linger in the bottom corner are good.  A pop-up should stay there as a reminder if the site visitor scrolls to let them know that there is something cool for them on the other side of signing up. 

Put your form in multiple places

People look in different places for different things so the more often they see the chance to subscribe, the better the odds that it will catch their attention, or it will be in the right place for that particular person so don't bury it down in your footer.

Create a special landing page to use for appearances/podcasts

For instance, if I'm on a podcast, say I'm on Joanna Penn’s podcast, I'm going to suggest listeners go to pagesandplatforms.com/creativepenn to get my offer.  I'm creating it specifically for that audience. Crafting it specifically for them will help me tweak the language to appeal to them. 

That will also help me if I have more than one reader magnet to choose from. It will allow me to choose which one I'm going to give to them, and I will have a way to track whether or not going on that podcast was worth my time. What was the impact of going on that podcast? How many people visited the page?

I’ll learn how many people from the podcast enjoyed what I had to say enough to visit the page and then how many people from those who visited the page actually took the trouble to sign up. That can be a really good indicator whether or not you have some kind of a reader magnet problem.

You want to have a target conversion rate for your special landing page of thirty percent or better. If it's less than that, then you may not have the right reader magnet or you may not be talking about it in the right way or for the type of audience you're trying to attract. 

STEP 5: SEND REGULAR EMAILS

Choose a regular schedule for sending your newsletter and stick to it — Aim for once a month at a minimum; two to four times a month if you can swing it. For more ideas on how to write your author newsletter, read this post.

REALLY, IT’S WORTH IT

Setting up and optimizing your email list can seem daunting, but it’s well worth doing. It’s a one-time set up that builds your audience, helping you sell more books now and build a loyal following for your future titles as well. 

Need help setting up your email list? Our team can help. Email support@pagesandplatforms.com with the subject line: NEWSLETTER HELP.