Your Author Website ~ Week Three

Week 3: Email Marketing

If and when you decide to invest in a website, it is one of THE most important things you will do to build your presence online. Why? Because with a website, you have complete control over the content, and you can customize it to fit your readers’ needs. Your social media platforms could disappear tomorrow, and all those followers would be lost. But with a current, attractive website, you control your content. Forever.

Not only will you have a user-friendly location with all your books in one place, you will also have a place to generate an email list of readers from signups on your website that will also never go away. (And may prove to be pivotal in increasing sales.) Email is exponentially better than social media in selling books. With email, the visibility is better, the reader has trust in it because they have personally elected to receive the updates, and they can hang onto the email versus losing the post in the mass of social media posts.

Social media is the cocktail party where you meet your readers. Email lists are the people hanging out at your house. In the ten years that I’ve been building mine, using only organic growth, I’ve reached over 12,000 subscribers—people who want to hear from me. When a book comes out, I’ve got 12,000 people who want to know about it.

Email Storage

One thing’s for sure, I’m definitely not hand-emailing my entire list of subscribers! My list is generated through Squarespace, which is the company I used to build my website. There are other email list providers. You can do a search for “Email Marketing Service” and compare services and pricing. A few of them are: Mailchimp, MailerLite, and Authoremail. Some of these are free at lower numbers of subscribers and then they charge as you build your list.

What to Send

Author Emails Should Not Be

Text-heavy

Long and drawn out

Pushy

Salesy

Author Emails Should

Be image-heavy

Be quick and to the point

Be pertinent to you as an author and your books

Offer little things that the reader can’t get elsewhere

(like sneak peeks, excerpts, and free reading material)

Be sent about once a month

Be friendly and full of your personality

Timing

I like to email my list when the following events are happening: (This is not an all-inclusive list.)

Pre-order of a new book

Sales of a backlist title

Giveaways

Launch of a new book

Author events

Newsletter swaps with other authors (Don’t spam them with too many of these.)

Content

In the emails that I send, they usually include a header image with my name and photo an image with an embedded link to the retailer, a little bit of text, explaining, a button that leads to the retailer, maybe my social media links, a return address (Legally, you need one; I use a P.O. Box.).

Here’s a snippet of one I sent for the pre-order of The Magic of Sea Glass.