Authors Electric

 Image Credit:  Images created in Book Brush using Pixabay photos. Do you have an author newsletter? It took me a while to see their usefulness but I’m glad I have now got on board here. I use the free Mailchimp plan which is enough for my needs. I use my monthly newsletter to share news, writing tips I’ve found useful, links to my on-line stories, my blog, plus I will share the odd giveaway (where I’ll put in some of my stories not found elsewhere). I enjoy putting the newsletter together and think this is crucial to the longer term success of such things, no matter how you define success. I don’t define success by subscriber numbers funnily enough. It will be ages before I would have to upgrade to a paid plan on Mailchimp but what is encouraging is in having a consistently good open rate.  I subscribe to author newsletters too. I love finding out what my favourite writers are up to, which was the key reason to finally decide to have a newsletter myself.  If I ha...

c/o John Webber|Wikimedia Commons I’m old enough to remember a time when newsletters arrived in the post – the old-fashioned post, that is, as delivered by a postman. You know, post that was actually written down or printed out on paper and stuffed into an envelope. Post that took a few days, rather than a few nanoseconds, to arrive. How a few short years can change things, eh? The sight of the postman trudging up to the gate at the crack of dawn is becoming ever more of a rarity. It’s not yet quite extinct, since many organisations and businesses seem curiously reluctant to embrace the internet age. (I’m thinking here of some of the utility companies I’ve been forced to deal with recently, most of which seem to have a positive aversion to that newfangled techno-internet thingy, though strangely enough they have absolutely no problem bothering you with pointless telephone calls about five times a day. But I digress...) Just a few years ago, the idea of running your own...

I get mail. A lot of mail. Every day. I ask for it. In total I am subscribed to twenty-five (yes, 25) daily e-book mail lists. In addition, I'm also subscribed to a similar number, no, let's say maybe fifty author and publisher mail lists from which I receive maybe two or three e-mails a day. I like getting e-mails. However, I don't buy a lot of e-books, maybe one or two a month. But there is method in my madness. I'm studying mail lists. Yesterday I was reading a thread in the Writers' Cafe on kboards.com and the topic was Veterans, share your pro-tips! What's something you wish you'd known sooner? This topic or similar comes up frequently in on-line self-published author communities. A lot of great advice can be gleaned by mining these threads, with the caveat that your mileage may vary i.e. all things don't work equally well for everyone. One perennial gem in such threads is build your mailing list. As soon as you get into this self-published or...