Help Selling More Books – Mailing Lists Revisited

Help Selling More Books – Mailing Lists Revisited

I wrote a couple of posts early in this series about how to build a mailing list with Incentivized and Organic Subscribers, and all that stuff remains true. If you missed them, the first part is here, and the second one is here. This won’t be about the philosophical elements of making a newsletter, this will be about the nuts and bolts, the mechanics, and what I personally do with my mailing lists to monetize them. Some of this is stuff I’ve gleaned from the internet, some of it I’ve come up with on my own, and fair chunk of it is from notes I took in a long conversation with my friend Stuart Jaffe. If you want to read some kickass adventure or supernatural mystery stuff, check him out. And if you sign up for his email list, you’ll get some free shit! Eric Asher is another person I use for a resource on promos and mailing lists, and he’s also got a deal or two running right now.

But how do I deal with my mailing list(s)? Well, that’s been the subject of a lot of thought over the past few days, as I’ve recently relocated my mailing list from Mailchimp to Mailerlite, because for the number of subscribers that I have (currently about 3,600 across four lists) Mailerlite is $20/month, where Mailchimp was $50, and going to $75 when I reach 5K. So that’s not an insignificant savings, especially given what I have in the marketing budget most months, which is frequently dryer lint. By the way, if you click on those links and sign up for Mailerlite, you get a discount and I get a kickback, so if this is helpful, that’s one way to show the love.

As I mentioned, I have four mailing lists, three of which are active, and one I’m just getting moving (slowly) on. The lists are – my newsletter, the Falstaff Books newsletter, and the ARC team for me & Falstaff. Yes, those links are the signup forms for the linked newsletters. Yes, you can get a metric ton of free ebooks just for signing up to all of those email lists and then auto-dropping. I mean, by my rough reckoning, if you signed up for all the lists that I’ve shown you here, you would get six complete novels, two short stories, one sampler anthology, and one anthology. All for free!

But how does it work? How do I get people onto the lists, and how do I deal with the lists once I’ve got them there. Okay, here’s what I do. It’s more than most people, and scale it back to fit your productivity, but remember that I release at least one new product every month, and sometimes more, plus I have a publishing company releasing at least two new books each month, usually more. So I have a lot of shit to notify people about. But here’s the plan.

1) Consistency – I’m a flake, and anyone that has worked with me knows it. I know it, and I also know that I can’t do the things I need to do if I’m flaking out all over the place. So I have an event set up in my calendar to write a newsletter every Wednesday. It’s also when I write these posts, so it kinda just gives me a couple hours in publisher headspace to do this kind of stuff. I do a John Hartness newsletter one week, then a Falstaff newsletter the following week. If for some reason I don’t have anything new coming out that week, the week before, or the week after, I skip a week. That doesn’t happen very often, between appearances, book releases, and audiobook releases, I have something hitting the virtual streets almost every week, so there’s something to talk about. But consistency is critical. If you go too long without sending out a newsletter, people forget about you. And obscurity is our enemy. So I send out a newsletter about every two weeks for each of my major newsletters. The ARC team is a whole different story, and one that I’m still working on. I’ll keep you posted.

2) The Funnel – This is what I learned from Stuart, setting up my automation. I know he didn’t invent the idea. He’s smart, but not that smart. But he was kind enough to take the time to sit down and explain the whole thing to me. So here’s what happens when someone signs up for my email newsletter, and this is another place in which Mailerlite has Mailchimp beat, hands down. This shit was so much easier to set up on Mailerlite that it wasn’t even funny.

Step 1 – Janet signs up for the newsletter. Janet gets a confirmation email with a link in it directing her to confirm that she’s a human and really wanted to sign up for this crap. Once she does that, she is sent to an Instafreebie page. Instafreebie is a website that automates ebook giveaways and integrates them with mailing lists. It lets me do all this without actually having to sit down and send people ebooks. I use it for all my mailing list giveaways. Yes, there is a referral link buried in that link, too, so if you sign up for Instafreebie and upload a book, I get a discount. Just assume that I have put referral links in every link in here, because I probably have. It doesn’t add anything to your cost, and if I am recommending that you sign up for a service, might as well get them to pay me for it, right?

Step 2 – But anyway, Janet goes to Instafreebie and gets her free ebook. Then the automation starts rolling. In a few days, Janet will get a second email, with another Instafreebie link, this one to a different free short story. She doesn’t have to sign up for anything extra, she doesn’t have to get the story. But it’s free, and it’s a story I like, so why not give it away?

Step 3 – Seven days later, Mailerlite runs an if/then sequence. If Janet opened the email, then she gets an email inviting her to join the Falstaff Books email list. This will get her two more free ebooks, plus another set of notifications. If she didn’t open the email, it will resend, to give her a little reminder to become an active fan and read all my shit (and get more free shit!).

Step 4 – Seven days after that, another step runs. If Janet didn’t open the email a second time, she’s removed from the list. I pay per subscriber, and if people aren’t reading the things I’m sending, then I would rather not pay to keep them around. If they are actively interested and just got busy, they can sign up again and get more free shit all over again. If Janet opened the email the second time it sent, she then gets invited to the Falstaff Books email list. To get more free shit. If she opened the Falstaff Books invite, then she gets another email inviting her to join Stuart’s email list and get his shit for free. Because we all like to work together, and a rising tide lifts all boats. So the more books Stuart sells, the more books I will eventually sell, because we’re all about training people to buy indie and small press books, and love us all. So I like pimping my friends.

If Janet didn’t open the Falstaff Books email, then nothing else happens. I don’t refer only moderately active subscribers to other folks, but I don’t boot them, either. If they’ve opened 2/3 of the emails I send, then I definitely want them around.

That’s the way my funnel is currently set up, and it’s constantly evolving. But I want to draw people in as much as I can, and engage them as much as I can. Those are the initial steps to building a list, signup forms, and creating a funnel to suck them into your loving arms forever.

We’re way over the thousand word limit I try to keep these at, but just a quick note – there’s a new Quincy Harker short story coming out soon, and I’m giving away 100 copies on Instafreebie. You don’t have to sign up for shit, just click this link and you can get a free Harker story. Now, you CAN sign up for the email list while you’re there, but it’s not required. There are 80 or so available as of this writing, so go get some free shit!

Help Selling More Books – Mailing Lists Revisited

Help Selling More Books – Part 3 – Building an Email List – Incentivized Subscribers

Last time around, we talked about the two types of email list subscribers – incentivized subscribers and organic subscribers. Organic subscribers are the ones that come to you naturally, they are interested in you or your work, and they seek you out and sign up of their own free will. These are the unicorns of email list subscribers – they’re lovely, they’re beautiful, and may very well be mythical.

Nah, not really. But while they are the best type of subscriber, they are also the toughest to acquire, and the ones that require the most effort to cultivate. They are the folks that sign up from convention appearances, from links in the back of your books (you do have a link to your newsletter signup page in the back of your ebooks, don’t you?), or just from finding you on Facebook or the interwebs.

The other flavor of subscriber is much more prevalent, and they are the ones who subscribe because you give them something for signing up. I call these incentivized subscribers, and while it may seem at first blush that I value them less than organic subscribers, that’s not true at all. They just require different care and feeding.

Organic subscribers are easy to keep, but much harder to get in the first place. Incentivized subscribers are easier to get in the door, but much harder to keep once you have them. Both type of subscriber can turn into true fans over time, you just need to know what kind of cultivation you’ll have to do for each one.

There are good and bad ways to incentivize people signing up for your newsletter, and multiple methods of each. My favorite method of getting people to sign up for a newsletter is to give them a free ebook. I offer a free Quincy Harker short story, High Fashion Hell, to new subscribers. If you aren’t already on my email list, you can click here to join and get your free ebook. This story is available for sale, and it’s also available in an anthology, but there have been hundreds of copies of it claimed by people signing up for my email list since I started giving it away. So there is still some incentive to sign up, even with a story that is available elsewhere.

The way this works is – people see the link, click the link, and they are taken to a signup form on Mailchimp. Once they fill out the signup form, and confirm their email address, they receive another email that directs them to a page on BookFunnel. Book funnel hosts the ebook file and sends it to people in whatever format they request, for Kindle, Nook, iPad, whatever. You don’t have to put anything else in place. Mailchimp costs a monthly fee based on the number of email addresses on your list, and Bookfunnel charges based on the number of downloads per month.

I pay $25/ month for MailChimp and $10/month for BookFunnel. I also pay $20/month for Instafreebie, another service I use to send out ARCs and rewards. I’ll talk more about IF in a later post. With Hootsuite, another service I’ll talk about later, I spend about $60/month in automation and services to help with my marketing. As my lists and reach grows, so will that number. Nothing in life is free, and if it is, it’s probably worth what you pay for it. Hell, I even have a blurb at the end of this post asking for money, so this advice isn’t even really free. (BTW, if you think this advice is valuable and want me to continue making posts like this, feel free to join my Patreon.)

So how do you boost your numbers quickly? Well, there are a couple of ways. First, you can do newsletter swaps with writers that have more subscribers than you. Or even writers with the same number of subscribers as you, because they’re almost certainly different subscribers. Here’s how that works – A few months ago, Eric Asher set up a six-author mailing list swap. Each author sent out a newsletter to their list with everybody else’s book cover in it, and built a link in the cover to that author’s signup page. So all the people on Eric’s list who clicked on the High Fashion Hell cover got the chance to sign up for my email list. All the people who clicked on Eric’s cover in my newsletter got the chance to sign up for his list (and get some awesome free books. Go to his website. Sign up for the list. Tell him I said Hi).

I gained several hundred new subscribers, because they wanted free ebooks. A lot of them stuck around, because they were already pre-sorted as people who wanted to read the kind of stuff I write, because Eric and I write in similar genres. Those are incentivized subscribers, but they’re vetted leads, and much more likely to become “sticky” than a blind signup in my next example.

That’s a good way to incentivize signups – you aren’t spending much cash, and the thing you’re giving away is something that people who want to buy your books will want, but the general populace will have little interest in. Someone who doesn’t read will have no interest in signing up for my email list to get a free ebook. But they might want a free iPad!

Yeah, big-ticket giveaways aren’t worth a shit. They just aren’t. There is some value to giving away something like a Kindle Paperwhite, but a Kindle Fire or an iPad has just as much value to a non-reader as it does to a reader, and even with a PaperWhite, there’s no guarantee that the winner will read in your genre. If you write paranormal romance, you aren’t going to get a whole lot of value if a Chris Kennedy fan wins a Kindle from you. But if you like Military Sci-Fi, check Chris out. He’s good people.

The stickiness of a subscriber who joins up for a big-ticket giveaway like that is much, much lower than someone who signs up to get a free ebook. When I’ve done big massive email list building promotions, I see a lot of quick signups, then a lot of quick unsubscribes as soon as they get the first newsletter. And that costs money, not just in the cost of the item given away, but also in the escalation of your mailing list numbers, which costs more for MailChimp. So be careful about participating in those kind of campaigns. I just don’t think they’re worth it.

So what should you do if you’re just starting out trying to build an email list?

  1. Set up a MailChimp Account. This will manage the list so yo don’t have to fuck around in Excel or Access or something else awful. If you don’t like MailChimp, find another email list service. But use something of that ilk.
  2. Set up Automation so that you as soon as someone signs up for your list, they get a welcome email from you. This is where you can set up your giveaway as well.
  3. Set up a BookFunnel with a free ebook to lure subscribers in. It can’t be anything that’s available in Kindle Unlimited, but it also doesn’t have to be a novel. I feel like too many writers give away the farm to get email subscribers. If you’ve only got two novels published, don’t give one of them away for an email address. Write a prequel novella, or even short story, and use that as bait.
  4. Put a widget on your website with a link to drive signups. The book cover with a “Sign up for my Email List” tag is all you need.
  5. Create a Call to Action button on your Facebook Author page that is a signup button for your email list.
  6. Automate your Twitter and Facebook (or other social media outlets) to send out one message every day reminding people that they can get free shit by signing up for your email list. Every. Single. Day. Yes, even you, with one book out. Don’t do it every hour, but do it every day. Less than 20% of your FB contacts see the things you post, so you have to post frequently to get them out there. I don’t care if you think it’s annoying, shut up and do it. I’ll teach you how to Hootsuite later.
  7. Find some other authors who have shitty newsletter numbers and do a swap with them. Find other writers in your genre and do a newsletter swap with them. See if your publisher will send out a newsletter with your book cover linking to a newsletter signup page.
  8. Find authors who like you that have much bigger lists who will let you ride their coattails a little and do a newsletter swap with you. Don’t use this willy-nilly, and don’t email me. If everybody that reads this emails me, I’ll be overwhelmed. I might even get ten emails, given the traffic I get here. 🙂
  9. Communicate with your list regularly. At least once a month. Don’t consider it spam. Don’t consider it bothering people. Your readers, as much as you love them, aren’t your besties. They are your customers, and your job is to make sure they know about everything you have out there that they can buy. So go get their money!

That’s a pretty good primer on building an email list. I hope it’s been helpful. If you think I missed something, hit me up in comments. If you think I’m an idiot, then you probably shouldn’t have read this far and should go do something more fulfilling. 🙂 If you think I’m brilliant, buy all my shit. Or click the link for my Patreon.

 

Help Selling More Books – Mailing Lists Revisited

Help selling more books – Part 1 – The Mailing List

This is not going to be exciting. None of these posts in this series are going to be exciting. I’m not going to tell you how to jump up the bestseller lists and go from selling five books each month to 5,000 in the span of thirty days. I’m not going to tell you The Secret To Becoming An Amazon Bestseller. I’m not going to tell you how to Make A Million Dollars Selling Ebooks.

I’m not going to do any of that crap. Because those posts are bullshit. The only people getting rich off the words in a bunch of How To Sell Ebooks books are the people that wrote the book. And I’m giving this shit away, so I’m obviously an idiot.

But I’m an idiot who makes a living selling books. So that puts me ahead of most idiots out there.

I pay my bills and feed my family off my writing. Most writers can’t do that. We live modestly, and we try to manage our spending, but we are a single-income family, and that income grows out of my writing. These posts will try to give you some of the tools that I use to sell more books. I’m not looking to make anyone (except me) into the second coming of Stephen King. I just want to help you find more success in your writing.

So let’s start with the basics – a mailing list. You’ve heard you need one, but you don’t know shit about how to build one. You don’t know what a newsletter should look like. You don’t know how to get people to subscribe to it, and you don’t know how to create one that doesn’t look like it was drawn by a three-year-old epileptic chimpanzee. So let’s start there.

Yes, you need a mailing list. Your newsletter is the single most important piece of marketing material that you have, with the exception of writing amazing books. People who sign up for your newsletter, for the most part, are already interested in you and your work. So first you have to create a mailing list, and figure out how to send a newsletter. Then we’ll move on to how to get people to sign up for your mailing list.

Mailing List Services – there are plenty of companies out there that will manage your email list for you. Constant Contact is the one that most big companies use, and you probably get 2-3 emails using that service every day. I use Mailchimp, because it’s cheaper at the level that I’m at. I’m currently at around 2700 people on my email list. That’s not a huge number, but it’s decent. It’s all the better because most of those people are there organically, but we’ll get to that later.

Mailchimp is a subscription service. They charge you for their work. In exchange for your monthly fee, they will collect all the email addresses and give you tools to send out good-looking newsletters and autoresponders to people when they contact you. I currently pay $40/month for this service, because of the number of people I have. I’m not far from looking for another service, because once you get over about 3500 names on your list, Mailchimp isn’t quite as cost-effective. But that’s a discussion for later as well.

Once you sign up with MailChimp, you have to start building a list. First add yourself. That lets you see the emails you send out in their natural and complete form. Then go over to your Facebook Author Page and build a button. Facebook lets you make a Call to Action at the top of your page, and yours should almost certainly say “Join my Email List.” It’s very easy to build the button, Facebook walks you through every step.

Once you’ve built your button on your author page (if you don’t have an author page, that’s a hint – you better get one), then it’s time to post some notices on your personal timeline and on your author page, telling people to sign up for your email list. You have to do this a few times. Facebook doesn’t show everything by everybody, so to get through their signal-to-noise ratio, you have to repeat yourself a few times. Also, you will have better success if you put the link in comments, as FB hides posts with links built in.

Don’t post all the damn time, just once a day or so. Let’s not be complete dicks about this promo thing. Yes, I understand exactly how often I post promotional things myself. But I have a LOT of shit to promote. So I’m not posting the same thing more than once per day.

While you’re waiting for someone to sign up for your mailing list, it’s time to set up some automations. MailChimp lets you create stored newsletters and welcome letters that go out whenever someone signs up for your mailing list. This way, whenever someone signs up to hear from you, they get a nice welcome email from you. A lot of people recommend sending one note within a few hours of signup, then another in a couple of days, then a third a week or two later. I send out two, one an hour or so after signup, then another a few days later. I figure a couple of weeks after they’ve joined the email list, they’ll be getting a newsletter anyway.

That’s always another question – how often should I send out newsletters? I have been doing mine once each month, but I’m about to increase to twice a month. Some folks send stuff out weekly, but I think that’s a little much. You want people to remember you, but not get tired of hearing from you. If you only have a few releases each year, then once a month is probably fine. But it is important to stay on top of it and send stuff out. Even if you don’t have a new book coming out, you can solicit reviews for older work, pitch your upcoming audio releases, publicize events and appearances, or promote stuff by your friends. All of those make for good newsletter fodder.

But you must send out your newsletter regularly. That’s the only way it’s going to get traction and you’re going to be “sticky” in people’s heads.

I’ll be back next week with talk about ways to grow a newsletter, like newsletter swaps, and incentives. If there are questions about what I’ve written this week, leave them in the comments! Thanks!