Ask any author what the hardest part about being a writer is. Nine times out of ten, they say promoting or marketing a book. There is just so much stuff out there these days that publishing feels a lot like screaming into the void. It doesn’t help that most promoting avenues are oversaturated. So what’s an author to do?
Keep writing. Avoid getting pulled into the soul-sucking trap of promotional-tunnel vision.
Easier said than done. Nothing is worse than putting your creation out into the world only for it to be ignored. Still, there are no fast and easy tricks. If there were, the world would have scores more writers able to live solely off their writing (spoiler: very very few writers can do this).
That being said, some tactics yield results better than others. Okay, okay, just tell us the best options already, right? Well, I’m not going to go into multiple avenues this time around. Instead, I’ll focus on the one that most successful writers recommend but few of us newbies actually do, and that’s building a readership via an author newsletter.
Why Have an Author Newsletter?
Not so glamorous sounding, is it? But it does seem to work, albeit slowly.
I read how useful it is to have an author newsletter over and over again but dragged my feet on it. I wish I had worked on it sooner because all the advice about its importance was spot on. Authors of all stages, even those still writing their first novel, ought to consider starting on a newsletter now.
Why? It builds your readership, and that can take many many years to yield meaningful results. Who cares about the readership? Every author should. If you’re an indie author, you are one in a veritable hoard. Look up how many books get published on Amazon every day. Be mildly depressed. Then shrug it off and move on. Your best bet for getting noticed as an indie author is to build a community of followers.
If you’re going the traditional route, you still need to foster a relationship with your potential readers. You’d be shocked at how little work the big publishers actually do for book promotion and marketing. This was honestly why I gave up on the traditional route myself. Get a head start and work on building your readership now. Having a cohort of readers also makes you more attractive to literary agents.
How to Make an Author Newsletter?
So what’s involved?
- An author website (optional?)
Ideally, you have an author website that acts as your hub. Social media accounts are fine and good, but those aren’t necessarily permanent. Your website is, as long as you pay for the domain. I won’t lie, making an author website was a huge pain for me. I’m not the most tech-savvy person, but I’m not the worst either. That being said, it was 100% worth the effort. You don’t need to have anything published to have an author website. To start with, it just needs a home page, an about page, and a contact page. The key is to have a newsletter signup on your website, perhaps on your about page.
- A webmail service (optional)
It’s worlds easier to use a webmail service provider for managing a mailing list rather than doing it manually. I went with Mailerlite. You can research the options and decide which is best. In any case, the service makes it easier to mass email your subscribers and import new subscribers. If you don’t want to use a webmail service, you can manually create a mailing list in something like Gmail, but you would want to make sure you don’t send emails where your subscribers can see the email addresses of the others. There are workarounds for this, but they are a bit of a pain (bcc will be your friend).
How to Get Subscribers?
Say you have an author website, and you put a signup for your newsletter on there. Crickets greet you. I mean, no one will join your newsletter if a) they don’t know about it and b) you don’t offer any incentives.
This is where the magic happens. Enter the beauty of reader magnets! These are free samples that you offer readers in exchange for a newsletter signup. You could do a portion of your novel (if you have a complete one), but I wouldn’t recommend this for a two reasons.
- If you’re going the traditional publishing route, you want to avoid putting your material out there. There are lots of weird rules with publishing, so you could be shooting yourself in the foot by making even a part of your work freely available.
- Why do readers care? Yes, perhaps the beginning of your novel is baller and you reel in potential readers, but how frustrating is that for them? If your novel is incomplete or being queried, you’re talking about years until it’s actually published (if at all). Give the readers a complete tale—a short story. They will be much more satisfied.
So opt for giving away a free short story. If you have a novel you want to encourage them to read (if out) or get excited about (if pending), then you can always craft a story set in the same world/with the same characters as your novel. This is what I did for Nytho. Oh, you liked my short story? Well, it happens to have been inspired by a full-length novel. Maybe you want to check that out?
Where/how do I do reader magnets? There are two main platforms for this that I know of—StoryOrigin and BookFunnel. I prefer BookFunnel. Both require a subscription, so keep that in mind. Some suggestions for your reader magnets: Write a decent blurb, think of a catchy tagline, and whip up an interesting cover for it (I use Canva for that). You’ll be much more likely to get downloads this way.
How to Get Reader Magnet Downloads?
But just posting your short story reader magnet isn’t enough. Maybe you get a couple of downloads, but to really build your mailing list, you need to do one last thing—group promos/author swaps.
These are again built into StoryOrigin and BookFunnel. In short, you join a group promo or author swap, share the information on those in your newsletter, the other participants do the same, and voila, the subscribers start rolling in.
A word of caution, vet your author swaps. Check out the pieces those authors have to make sure the quality is up to your standards. I’m a bit of a snob when it comes to my speculative fiction, so I would hate for my work to be seen as on par with some of the stuff out there. Remember, there are no quality checks on these platforms. Do your due diligence. Don’t recommend low-effort/low-quality writing to your subscribers because it may make them less inclined to stay subscribed.
That’s the short and sweet of it. Feel free to ask me for more information on the various steps in a comment.
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