Like writing or marketing, newsletters are one of those topics where you are always learning new things and improving on what you already know. That’s why I started this blog post series, and that’s why I jumped at the chance to attend Tammi Labrecque’s session at the 20Books to 50k conference in Las Vegas earlier this month. I know a thing or two about newsletters, but she is the Newsletter Ninja. She has forgotten more than I have learned. Here … Read More »

Welcome to the latest installment in my blog post series on newsletters. In previous blog posts we have discussed why you should have one, how to get started setting up a mailing list and newsletter, how to get people to sign up, how to get readers to unsubscribe, and what to put in your newsletter. If you have been following along at home, you should now have a growing mailing list and should be sending out newsletters on a regular … Read More »

If there’s one problem that everyone with a mailing list shares, it’s not knowing why readers unsubscribe. While it is normal to lose a few subscribers every time you send a newsletter, I have been told (and can confirm from personal experience) that if you are losing more than a half of a percent of your mailing list after sending a newsletter, you have a problem. This is part five of a series about author newsletters. It might be that … Read More »

Did you ever wonder why a lot of author sites have a mailing list sign-up form at the top of the home page? Were you ever curious as to why some sites like Mark Dawson have only the sign-up form on the home page, and nothing else? The short answer is pretty simple: they want to maximize mailing list sign-ups. The long answer, however, is a little more complicated. This post will explain how to optimize your site to get … Read More »

I have been publishing my newsletter for about five years now, and in that time my biggest stumbling block has been content. The technical details were easy to iron out, graphics were a relatively simple problem that could be solved by Canva’s stock templates, and growing my mailing list wasn’t too hard, but figuring out what to put in my newsletter had me stumped. It got so bad that I even let three or four months go by in between … Read More »

You are reading the second post in a series on author newsletters. When I first published this series a couple years ago, I started with the idea that I would solve my problems one post at a time, and explain how I did it. But as I sat down to revise the series with all that I learned in the past couple years, I realized that I needed to also help authors start their mailing lists. So let’s start at … Read More »