Today, I spent most of my day doing administrative stuff. Cleaning up and updating my website was the first thing. Then came getting my first ever newsletter (click here to sign up) sent out, including an excerpt from HIS VELVET TOUCH, the new story I have in the Taming The Alpha boxed set. (Totally excited about this–I’m in it with over 20 other awesome authors).
However, the whole process of creating a newsletter was horribly nerve-wracking, and why, I’m not sure, exactly. Maybe it had something to do with wanting to make a perfectly pretty newsletter. Or wondering what I would put in a newsletter.
I set up an account with Mail Chimp a while back, and started building a list, but I had hesitated to send one out, because, well, I just didn’t know what to put in them.
(And yes, Mail Chimp is very easy to use and set up. You gotta play with it a little bit to get it like you like, but it’s not overly hard. So simple in certain aspects, that I wanted to smack myself upside the head when I figured out how to do what it was I was trying to do)
I find the idea of a newsletter amazing and wonderful and fabulous, but I also find myself wondering why people would sign up for one. Then I look in my inbox, and see the number of newsletters I get. Some I read every day without fail. Others I just kind of delete and ignore. And I don’t want to be someone who sends out an email that gets deleted and ignored.
It’s inevitable, I know it is, and maybe that’s why I was so hesitant to start one. That rejection…
(Can we say I’m thinking a little too much about this?)
Yeah. I worried way too much about this. I spent two weeks trying to figure out what to put in it. When I finally got it put together, I realized I’m a nimrod and I just sent it out.
Will people delete without reading? Sure. It’s going to happen.
But it’s also one of the most valuable marketing tools a writer has in his/her arsenal. It’s people who ASK TO KNOW when your stuff is coming out. Not “want to know when they think about you,” but actually PHYSICALLY PUT THEIR EMAIL IN and then CONFIRM IT. They do it because they WANT TO. Not because they are auto signing up, so they can read an article, (OMG total pet peeve that so many websites do), or someone else is doing without asking them.
Newsletter subscriptions are the coolest thing. It means people WANT TO KNOW what I’ve got going on. Do I have a lot of subscribers yet? No, but that’ll always build. Do I appreciate those few I have already? Absolutely.
Because that translates to… psst… FANS. 🙂 :::Happy dance:::
If you’re a writer, do you have a newsletter? Why or why not?