Tl;dr yes
If you are online and building a business around writing and being an author, eventually you’re gonna hear about newsletters and email lists.
Here it is. This is that moment.
But what’s the point? Email is dead, and no one reads those.
Actually no, people do, but only ones they want are giving them valuable content.
What is valuable depends on who your audience is, if you correctly identified them, and what they define as valuable.
That is very, very important.
If you’re a writer, then you should know your genre and who your perfect reader is. When you know this, you can start building out your mailing list with a reader magnet or loss leader.
Email lists, lead magnets, and marketing probably aren’t things you thought you’d need when you decided to be an author. For indie authors, these things are keys to your long-term success.
An email is the difference between releasing a new book and launching a new book to an audience of ready readers — and buyers.
You should start marketing a book before it’s released. Studios don’t just drop a new movie in the theatres and hope it sells out. They start months in advance and spend THOUSANDS. (The exception is if you’re like Beyoncé and she does Black Is King because you know…Beyoncé.)
You don’t have a movie studio budget or Beyoncé-level notoriety, but you don’t need it.
You need E-Mail.
Email marketing is not dead, don’t let them (people who want you to buy ads and incidentally have a course on creating ads, what a coincidence) tell you otherwise.
But the way people do email, like sending “buy my stuff” all the time and Paragraphs of text? Yeah, no, stop. That’s not what people want from you.
“But I have Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Reddit, etc,” you say. “I don’t need email,” you say.
Listen.
We all know that social media is not a constant and that we can lose our followers at any time — by getting hacked, getting kicked off, or a glitch. Or they just crash for a few hours.
Also, the platforms show our stuff to less than 10% of our followers, and the algorithm is constantly changing. There are many ways to lose access to our people.
You can’t lose your email list. Unless you delete it. Don’t do that.
Social media is all well and good as a tool, and using all the avenues is great, but the value of your list is greater. You ultimately want to use social media as a tool to funnel people to your email list. You want them where you can easily reach out to them.
And not just any random people, but your perfect readers. Your people.
It’s best to use all marketing avenues available, in my opinion, as many as you’re able to do consistently. Even if not consistent, have a presence on them.
But the purpose of social media and marketing is to generate leads, then convert them to your email list and nurture them to real fans.
Rather than rely on only one social media, you can use a system where they all feed into each other. I learned this system from my coach, Martha Krejci, and she’s basically a Systems Savant. The system she’s created is brilliant and effective, and if you want more info about that, let me know.
Have you started an email list yet? The best time to start building one is yesterday. If you want to learn more strategies and get support on your author journey, you can join The Introverted Writers Club.
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