Why You Absolutely, Positively Need an Author’s Newsletter

That was then…

First, we heard Authors must have websites! and Authors must have blogs! …so writers everywhere scurried to set up their author websites and start blogging.

Then the cry became, Authors must be active on social media! …and we threw ourselves willy-nilly into Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and Instagram.

As time went on, some of us began to question these maxims. Who’s making these pronouncements, anyhow? What if you’re an author who hates blogging or Twitter or Pinterest or whatever? Some of us started to figure out that the “rules” weren’t actually set in stone.

This is now…

The current refrain-of-the-hour seems to be, Authors must have author newsletters! I admit, it’s tempting to dismiss this latest bit of advice as just another passing Thing Authors Must Do. If that’s the case, we can ignore it, right?

Well–no. It turns out that this piece of social media and marketing advice actually makes a lot of sense. In fact, I think that creating some sort of email newsletter–and, more importantly, an email mailing list–is the single most valuable thing we can do as authors.

Want to build your author platform? An email newsletter is
the single component you absolutely, positively can’t do without.

Why You Need an Author Newsletter

I’ve put together this fancy infographic to show what you get from an email newsletter vs what you get from other social media forums:

It’s not rocket science: building your email list allows you to assemble–over time–a list of people who are interested in what you have to say–and, therefore, might be potential customers now or in the future.

Of course, if you treat your email list as a way to SELL-SELL-SELL things to people, you won’t have many subscribers. So how do you coax people into signing up for your list and offer them enough genuine value that they want to stick around?

That’s what I plan to blog about for the next month or so. I’ll also be covering the step-by-step basics of how to set up an email list, signup forms, newsletters, and more. Why? Because those topics have been top of MY mind for the past few months. I (finally!) launched my own author newsletter in May, so–although I’m not an email newsletter expert by any means–I do know exactly the kinds of questions and road bumps you may hit (or may have already hit!) on the way to launching your own author newsletter.

If you’re setting up an email newsletter–or if you’re looking to improve your current process–you won’t want to miss the resource list and how-to checklist I’m creating only for newsletter subscribers. Sign up now!