Marketing For Writers Who Hate Marketing: The No-Stress Way to Sell Books Without Losing Your Mind by James Scott Bell

Author:James Scott Bell [Bell, James Scott]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Compendium Press
Published: 2017-03-08T05:00:00+00:00

Create an Account with an Email Service

First thing you need to do is set up an account with an email management service like MailChimp, Constant Contact, or Vertical Response. There are others, but these three get high marks. Once your account is live, you will filter all sign-ups for your email list through the service (which will provide you code for the form that you can use on your website). You include a sign-up link in the back of your books.

A word about pop-ups. When you land on a writer’s blog or website, it’s likely you’ll be hit with a pop-up asking for your email address. This may come with an offer for a freebie the author is giving away. Pop-ups are controversial. Do they work? Or do they annoy just as many people as they attract?

Are the people who sign up for a freebie as valuable as those who sign up because they like something you’ve written?

I’m not going to try to settle the debate. As I write this, I am not using pop-ups because I personally find them annoying. Just one man’s opinion. But certainly you can feel free to do your own research on the matter.

So let’s talk about gathering those email addresses. The rule here is the same as we’ve established for all writers who hate marketing: Do only those things that do not affect the quality of your writing, either through physical or emotional stress.

If you have a website form and links in your books, that’s enough. Because you want to focus on making “true fans,” not just farming email addresses. The quality of your signups is directly related to their desire to follow you. Sending out emails to ten thousand people who barely know you is not nearly as effective as one thousand with whom you have a value relationship.

In an influential blog post titled “1,000 True Fans,” Kevin Kelly states:

A thousand customers is a whole lot more feasible to aim for than a million fans. Millions of paying fans is not a realistic goal to shoot for, especially when you are starting out. But a thousand fans is doable. You might even be able to remember a thousand names. If you added one new true fan per day, it’d only take a few years to gain a thousand.

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