Authors Electric

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...

So, tell me what you want, what you really, really want. As a reader of electric books and the like, what do you really, really want? Why am I asking? Because me and my little publishing house, we give things away. Why would Marble City Publishing do that? To maximise readership for our authors and to reward readers for staying with us. This is nothing new, of course. Mail lists have been a mainstay of marketing ever since Baldrick started pushing Mrs Miggins' pies through letterboxes (ref. Blackadder for non-cognoscenti). Staying in touch with people is essential for a new book release. The virtual cafés of the writing world are abuzz with methods to successfully build a mail list. Independent authors with prodigious output are presenting subscribers with such offerings as starter libraries of free novels. Phrases such as Reader Magnets abound. Online courses are being sold for hundreds of bucks to share the secret sauce of building an author's list. In this mod...