Do You Subscribe to Newsletters?

[renegadefolkhero]

Newsletters tend to be held up as a gold standard of book promo because they're dirt cheap (often even free), they're portable (and a safety net if you get deplatformed), and it's a direct pipeline to people who want to read your books (in theory... that depends on how you attract subscribers).

There a few schools of thought on this but one is casting as wide a net as possible, by offering free books and participating in swaps to attract "cold" readers unfamiliar with your work, and another is focusing on attracting warm readers who already read your books and keeping them engaged.

EVERY SIX MONTHS I say, "I'm gonna take the advice I've been given, and do some newsletter swaps." And every damn time I open Bookfunnel and Storyorigin and scroll through the promos and swaps, I end of just sort of... quietly dying on the floor.

I just can't do it. Generally speaking, I hate newsletters as a reader. I've joined newsletters for authors who had elaborate funnels and lots of "engagement" stuff like polls and whatnot, and I hated the hustle vibes. I felt like I was constantly being pitched to. I hate it when I get a NL that says hey check out these AMAZING books! And I know the author didn't read them, it's just a swap with comps to get more subs.

My main problem is I'm not the audience for NLs, obviously, so I don't have a good gauge for what works for most people. I don't like the feeling I'm constantly shilling books, and I don't like to bother people if I don't have something important to announce, so I only send like 3 or 4 a year. But as a result, my NLs are fairly small, and growth has been really slow going.

I was given the advice you can't go on your personal gut on this sort of thing, because you're not the audience, and lots of readers love that kind of stuff. Fair enough.

Do you subscribe to author newsletters? Do you have an opinion on this stuff?

Comments

[vriddy]

I subscribe to author newsletters, though I don't think I'm the typical use case either... My context is: I'm not on any social media but I desperately want to hear when an author I liked has a new book coming out -- please, author, do tell me when a new book is coming out. Ideally, tell me more than once for authors that send a lot of newsletters so I don't miss it, but otherwise just the occasional email works for me.

I'm more ambivalent on authors who stick to e.g. the weekly newsletter no matter what, but I understand many readers like to get a few insights into author lives or extras, which I'm usually less into (or in small doses). I feel like the perspective is different when you're a writer with insights into how the sauce is made though, whether on the writing side or the newsletter building activities etc on the publishing side.

[anneapocalypse]

Unfortunately I am in your camp: not a newsletter person. I don't even read newsletters when I signed up thinking I wanted to read them. :')