Note: This post gets a little into how the sausage is made. If you’re just here as a reader, you may want to skip this one. Or stick around for some insight into the exciting world of independent marketing.
The only thing harder than writing a book is selling a book. I enjoy reading what I wrote, and I think others will too. But helping people to find it in the crowded world of independent publishing? Tricky.
Spend any time on r/selfpublish and someone will inevitably tell you that you should have a mailing list.
Real Quick: Why?
Spend any more time on Reddit and someone will tell you that becoming a writer is a marathon, not a sprint. This is obviously true from a ‘mastering your craft’ perspective; the more time you spend writing, the better you will get at writing.
It is less obviously true from an economic perspective. The more books you have published, the more each new reader can support you. If they like what you write, you’ll get extra sales as they work through your back catalog. When you’ve just published book 1, the most a reader can give you is $3.99. After you finish a killer seven-book series? Each committed reader brings you substantial support.
But what about the readers who checked you out back when you wrote book 1? How do you make sure they know about your new stuff? That’s where the mailing list comes in. Your mailing list tells those people when the next book is out. It also reminds all your readers that you exist, and may have more books that they might enjoy.
On a less mercenary note, a mailing list is your chance to give back to your superfans. Yes, it’s great for promoting your next book. But it’s also great for giving back to the people who support you and are most interested in your work. It’s a place to send out bonus scenes/short stories/insights into your writing process to people who want to hear it. I write because I want to entertain people. A mailing list presents one of the purest opportunities to do so.
You convinced me. One mailing list, please.
Sadly, mailing lists are (not quite) something you just pick up off the shelf. You’ll have to pick a provider and do a fair amount of setup. You also may need some form of online presence to convince the mailing list vendor that you’re not just a spammer.
There are loads of companies that sell mailing list software. Many of them offer a pared-down version for free. The free tier is where you should focus while you’re getting off the ground. Once you have gobs of subscribers you can worry about the best option for keeping in touch with your army of fans. Until then the game is not bleeding money. Also, your list of emails is portable. You can always take your subscribers to a different provider later if it makes financial sense.
Broadly, companies offer two kinds of free tiers: a reduced product with limitations on how much you can use it (freemium), or the full product with limitations on how long you can use it (trial). I’m only considering freemium providers here. Unless you are some kind of marketing Jesus, it will take you more than a 30-day trial to build a robust mailing list.
Freemium accounts typically limit total subscribers and emails sent per month. They also lock down most of the fancy stuff that, frankly, you don’t care about. The one exception is automation – that’s good stuff you’ll want early. Don’t know what it means? Let’s cover some jargon.
Subscribers and monthly emails
This is the “mailing list” part of the mailing list. Subscribers are people who have signed up to receive emails from you. Emails are… those missives you send off to tell people about the great stuff you’ve been up to.
Almost every free tier will cap the number of subscribers you can have; generally somewhere between 300 and 2,500. Most providers also limit the total number of emails you can send in a month, but usually at a reasonable multiple of the max subscribers (say, 6). As an author, you’re probably not mailing your readers several times a week. This means the subscriber limit is almost always going to be the thing that kicks you out of the free tier.
Automation
Don’t worry, your mailing list is not going to take your job – leave that to GPT-3! Automation here just means sending an email in response to an event. And there’s one event you really want to react to: a new reader subscribing to your list.
As an author, you have probably heard about the concept of a “reader magnet.” This is a free piece of writing, typically something like a novella, that serves as the carrot to entice readers to sign up. Having automation built-in allows you to automatically send out your reader magnet to new subscribers, delivering on your promise ASAP. It also saves you the stress of manually sending them out/making sure you didn’t miss anybody.
A quick note on types of mailing lists
There are two flavors of mailing lists: Mailing lists that sell a product, and mailing lists that are the product.
As an author, you are probably trying to promote your book. But you’re also a good writer, and you may instead be trying to sell your funny/insightful/heartbreaking weekly prose.
This article focuses on the book-selling kind of mailing list. If you want to be a professional mailing list writer (and yes that’s a thing), you should probably start on Substack, then consider heading to Revue or Buttondown if/when you outgrow it.
Providers
Okay, we know what we want, let’s see who’s got it!
Mailchimp
Let’s start with the 800-pound gorilla (I’m sorry, I couldn’t not) – the big boy in the field is Mailchimp. If you listen to Podcasts, you have heard about Mailchimp. But unless you already have experience with them, my advice is to pick someone else. Their tools have a reputation for being bloated and clunky, and their biggest advantage is they have a great API. Do you know what an API is? No? You don’t need it.
If you do want to go with Mailchimp anyway, it can work. You’re limited to 500 subscribers, and a total of 2,500 emails sent per month. Not great, but enough to get started. Once you hit the limits though, it will get expensive fast.
MailerLite
I recommend starting with MailerLite. You get 1,000 subscribers and 12,000 monthly email sends. If you hit that limit, you’re doing amazing. They also give you enough automation at the free tier to send your reader magnet, which for me is super important. I don’t want to leave an interested reader hanging, and I also don’t want to be constantly distracted dishing out the goods to new subscribers. For the record, MailerLite doesn’t pay me or anything. They just came out on top from my research.
Also worth noting: I’m not sure about the others, but MailerLite requires your “business” to have some existing online presence. If you don’t have a website or Twitter or Facebook, they won’t let you start mailing people. Keep that in mind as another hurdle you’ll need to clear to start building a mailing list.
Others
You can look at others, but I’m trying to save you time. If you insist, here are some other free tiers I’m aware of with high subscriber limits: Sendinblue (no subscriber limit, 300 emails/day, yes automation), EmailOctopus (2,500 subscribers, 10k emails/month, yes automation), ZoHo Campaigns (2k subscribers, 6k emails/month, no automation).
Wait. I’m like really technical and run stuff in the cloud all the time
That’s great. You can self-host your mailing list and save a lot of money. Once you get out of the free tier. Which won’t be for a while.
But real quick, since we’re already talking about it, you still need to be concerned about email deliverability. It is a pain in the butt to run your own email server and not have everything it sends get flagged as spam. I highly recommend against fully hosting a mailing list service. Instead, host the application logic, and use something like Sendy to take care of the actual sending of emails. They charge literally pennies. I guarantee you your time is worth way more than what you will pay them to not have to worry about deliverability.
Okay, I signed up. What does all this stuff mean?
I’m going to be using MailerLite’s terminology for the rest of this article. These are pretty standard industry terms and are likely the same even if you’re a maverick and went with some other provider.
Once you’ve picked your provider, it has two jobs: Collecting subscriptions, and sending emails. I’ll hit the vocab of each for you.
Collecting Subscriptions
At some point, you need to show a little box to a potential subscriber that they can put their email address in.
Signup Form If you already have a website, you’ll want to put that magic box on it. Probably somewhere at the top of the page, if not the very top. If you head over to iangmcdowell.com you’ll see a signup form offering my reader magnet, The Boreas Gap. I sell that sucker for $.99 on Amazon, it’s a good offer.
If you run a blog on your website, you may also want to put a signup form popup on it. You’ve probably seen these surfing the web; you’re halfway through an article when a little nag pops up asking you to subscribe. You could be that asshole.
Landing Page Even if you don’t have a website, you can still collect signups. Services like MailerLite allow you to create a “Landing Page” that tells potential subscribers about your mailing list and holds that all-important signup form. They provide sweet templates for making it look good, and even take care of the hosting. All you have to do is figure out how to get people to go look at it.
Subscriber Groups You can group your subscribers for fine-grained email sending. As an author, you are unlikely to need this. Stick to one group until you have a good reason to do otherwise.
Mailing Subscribers
Your emails will fall into one of two broad groups. Proactive mailing via campaigns (e.g. announcing a new book), and reactive mailing via automation (e.g. sending your reader magnet when someone subscribes).
Campaign A Campaign here just means “an email.” You can use the provided templates to build something slick announcing your book. Then you decide which of your subscribers you want to get it (all of them), and when you want them to get it (probably 9AM or 2PM, on a Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday). If you have loads of subscribers you could consider sending it to different folks at different times to see what works best.
Automation I have already said this a billion times, but the #1 thing you’re going to want to do is send your reader magnet when the user signs up for your list. Automation is the way.
Automations have a ‘Trigger’, and an associated email. For a reader magnet, you’ll use either the “When subscriber joins a group” trigger or “When subscriber completes a form.”
Next, you’ll add an ‘Email’ to the workflow. Build a simple email that thanks your reader for joining the list, gets them excited about the reader magnet, and includes a link to download the reader magnet. You’re done. You just automated something
Wrap up
Whew. That’s a big info dump on mailing lists. I hope I’ve provided you with the basics to get started. Have a question I didn’t address? Catch a funny typo? Want to send me a crisp $100 bill? Send me an email! [email protected]