Blogger: Mary Keeley
Lately, I’ve been encouraging writers to add a newsletter to their audience-building ventures because publishers have come to realize the email list they generate is a more authentic indicator of genuine readers than social media numbers, which can be artificially inflated. It’s a convincing argument, but it’s one more to-do item and learning curve to master on their already-long list. I just want to write my book. But a monthly email newsletter doesn’t have to consume a lot of time, and the benefits are worth the effort.
BENEFITS TO YOU, THE WRITER
Besides the email list that is developed, a newsletter provides:
- A personal connection with subscribers that will grow loyal readers. Subscribers would be delighted to receive a follow-up email response to their comment or question regarding the content. The relationship building opportunities are innumerable.
- Growth of a community truly interested in what you write. Your newsletter content must be written in your author voice and relate somehow to the books you write to give you the most ongoing benefit for your effort. Invite subscribers to pass the word around to others.
- A way to identify influencers. As you grow author-reader relationships organically through responses to your content, you’ll see which subscribers interact consistently. They’re your most promising influencers.
APPRECIATE YOUR SUBSCRIBERS
Because subscribers are giving you their email address and obliging you by adding your email address to their address books to prevent your newsletters from going to their spam folders, you’re going to want to give them something back in every newsletter. In other words, you’re going to want to offer them value for signing up.
- Include an interview with an author, available only to your subscribers.
- Share news about a common interest or cause related to your brand and what you write in some way.
- Write a short story and gift it to your subscribers.
- Offer regular contests and giveaways.
- Give short updates on your next book. Insert photos of your research trips and interesting facts about the topic or setting.
- Maintain an archive of your newsletters that subscribers can access. It multiplies the value for them.
HOW-TOs
These tips will help you:
- Make signing up as easy as possible. Offer the opportunity on each page of your website and on social media. Email marketing software such as Mail Chimp or Constant Contact has a signup form that not only makes it easy for you and subscribers, but it also gives a professional appearance. MailChimp offers “Best Practices” tips for building an email list here.
- NEVER add people to your newsletter mailing list without their permission.
- Use a confirmed opt-in process for subscribers to verify they want to subscribe.
- Create a designed template that reinforces your brand.
- Always deliver content that has value for subscribers. Keep a file of interesting ideas during the month and make necessary arrangements for guest interviews a month in advance.
- Send your newsletter at the same time every month.
- Include a privacy statement assuring subscribers that email responses shared individually will be kept private.
What is your experience with your email newsletter? What type of content generates the most interaction or new subscribers? As a subscriber to another author’s newsletter, what type of content would interest you most?
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Peter
I do have an enewsletter but i keep it short, punchy and topical. No chit chat. My audience is too busy for more. I am not saying that is a model but knowing audience needs is s vital principle. Never write for yourself and always add real value else dont bother. I might devote ten lines with a graphic, per topic. It really helps to keep me connected with my clients. They often phone me spontaneously.
Mary Keeley
Peter, good advice for writers to first learn about the readers they’re attracting and then adapt the format, content, and length of the newsletter accordingly to serve them well.
Jackie Layton
Hi Mary,
How soon in the writing journey does an author need to start the newsletter? Before they get an agent? Before they are published? Or after they get their first contract?
Thanks for these great tips on writing newsletters. DiAnn Mills always has a nice newsletter.
Mary Keeley
Good question, Jackie. Writers need to show agents and editors they have a significant and growing audience at the time they submit a proposal. Since it takes time to build up an email list, the optimum time to start it as soon as possible, that is, as soon as you know your author voice, the genre in which you’re going to write, and a sense of your author brand and type of books you are going to write.
Jackie Layton
Thanks, Mary. I’ll be thinking the best way to do this. I don’t want my first newsletters to flounder and then my audience never read them.
Becky M
I just launched my new, more professional and author-like blog and am working on building my email list.
Since many people follow my blog to follow my life story, I’ve decided to put the family updates in the newsletter and keep the blog for my writing since I don’t want to be a family or mommy blogger.
I’d love to hear how other people use theirs.
Andrew Budek-Schmeisser
I’m working on the development of a monthly newsletter now, probably six months before I launch it (well, I’m an optimist!).
* Having as much as possible of the content available for, say, four months in advance, will make it a lot easier to keep a consistent tone and quality. I can’t imagine how hard it would be to do everything on the fly, from month to month. The air is to get ahead, and stay there, with a cushion for emergencies.
* Obviously some things can’t be addressed that way, so the needs-to-be-current stuff will be in easily-importable modules.
* As it stands now, it will have several sections – writing news, appearance news (maybe TOO optimistic), short story (embedded or downloadable), best book read this month, best movie seen this month, and odds and ends like “When The Service Dog Had A Meltdown”.
* No recipes, for which y’all should be thankful.
* I am thinking of including a ‘Reader of the Month’, so that someone else can tell the world why she thinks I’m the greatest writer since Rembrandt…well, no, really just to tell a story, or whatever, an open mike…make even share poetry. (And I was just kidding; I know that Rembrandt was a sculptor.)
* (A Red Heeler having a meltdown because she thinks I tried to write for too long is NOT a pretty sight, or sound. When I stopped, took the needed morphine and lit up a cigar, she went right to sleep. Ready to instantly pounce if I moved, though.)
Jeanne Takenaka
Andrew, you have a lot of great ideas for your newsletter! 🙂 And I had to grin reading about your red heeler’s way of watching over you. 🙂
Mary Keeley
Excellent strategy. And I enjoy your ever present, subtle, sometimes not so subtle, wit, Andrew. Give an appreciative pat to the Red Heeler for all of us.
Andrew Budek-Schmeisser
Felicitations delivered, Mary – Ladron says thanks!
* Anyone wanting to see what The ServiceDog In Chief looks like, her picture appreared with my guest post on Norma Brumbaugh’s blog earlier this week –
http://www.nlbrumbaugh.com/dying-and-surviving/
* I’m thinking that Ladron really needs to do a blog from the perspective of a Caregiving Canine…perhaps called (with apologies to we-all-know-who) “Tales From the Red Heeler’s Head”.
Jennifer Zarifeh Major
Awww, I will gladly share with Ladron.
Andrew Budek-Schmeisser
Ladron thanks you!
Andrew Budek-Schmeisser
Could I make a request of those who include photos in their newsletters?
* Please NEVER have your body text over a picture; I damaged my left eye a couple of weeks ago, and while it’s healing it’s badly astigmatic (I got to see seven blood moons for the price of one). Anyway, clicked a text-over-photo page, and got an instant and very severe headache last night.
* There was no warning; my eyes tried to process it before I consciously tried reading, and the reaction was not good. Back to wearing an eye patch full-time.
* I realize this is a bit of an outlier as a potential issue, but it can happen – and you don’t want to unwittingly drive people away.
Jeanne Takenaka
Can I be honest and say I’m kind of dreading starting a newsletter right now? Mostly because I’m a little overwhelmed at coming up with quality content and that fear of, “Will anybody want to read what I spend time writing?!”
*Mary, your post is so practical and helpful. The direction you offer did a lot to ease my fears about beginning this avenue of the writing journey. I am aiming to begin one in January (that gives me time to finish up my current project).
*A couple questions: 1) I have followers on my blog, but I’m fairly certain many of them don’t read my posts with any degree of consistency (and some not at all). How do I put out the request to see if my blog followers want to receive my newsletters?
2) I know a number of authors who send quarterly newsletters. Do unpublished writers need to send monthly newsletters, or can they also send quarterly newsletters?
*I think I had another question but I forgot it (boys talking Star Wars is slightly distracting. 😉 )
*Thanks so much for sharing this post, Mary. I truly feel more equipped to begin a newsletter. 🙂
Andrew Budek-Schmeisser
Jeanne, I can’t imagine anyone not wanting to read what you’ve written! Your writing is so lucid and luminous, and you have a gift for weaving together the threads of family, parenting, the writer’ journey, and faith. I suspect most people will wait eagerly for your newsletter – it will be a red-letter day, in more ways than one, when it arrives in their inbox.
* I’m choosing to go monthly for a couple of reasons –
1) It makes for more timely engagement; there can be more continuity of content, since readers will probably remember more of what you wrote on a monthly interval.
2) It can be more current; for example, an October newsletter can cover the ACFW conference, and it’ll be timely. Describing a September event in a December newsletter will be a bit of ‘ancient history’, at least in terms of this digital life. Also, you’ll have three months’ worth of current events, which will mean that some useful content will have to be shortened of left out altogether, to keep the newsletter at a readable length.
3) If you’re describing things like seasonal changes in the world around you in a temperate climate, as you might, Jeanne, using your photographs, the monthly format will let you document these in a more engaging way – and again, you’ll be able to devote more space to the that if they were only described quarterly.
* Mary, (2) above does beg a question – I am assuming that there’s an ideal length for newsletter, that both a quarterly and monthly newsletter will be of much the same size, to hold a reader’s interest. Is this a valid assumption?
* I think that there’s a way to determine whether your emails announcing a blog post are being opened; this would give a useful bit of data regarding subscribers vs. actual readers. Does anyone out there know hot to do this?
Jeanne Takenaka
Andrew, thank you for your kind words. And for your suggestions. I like the idea of offering maybe a choice of photographs. And, thank you for sharing good reasons to consider a monthly newsletter. I’m definitely taking it under advisement, and praying about it. You, as always, bring up well-reasoned thoughts. I appreciate your perspective!
Andrew Budek-Schmeisser
Jeanne, a thought for you – many bloggers who publish newsletters offer a free gift for subscribing. Maybe you could put together an ebook of your photographs, with the lyrical descriptions for which you’re so rightly renowned, and offer that?
Sylvia M.
Jeanne, thank you for letting us know about your blog. I just went and added it to my Feedly blog reader. Here’s a question for you or anybody else. If I follow a blog in Feedly, does the blog author know it? Do your Feedly followers get counted in your blog followers?
Becky M
Sylvia, I’ve been wondering the same thing.
Jeanne Takenaka
Sylvia, I’m sorry I’m just now getting back to you. When the kids are home, things take longer to do. 😉
I just checked my followers on my stats page. It doesn’t show you following. I’ve never used Feedly, so I’m not sure how it works. I hope that helps.
*And thanks for your support. 🙂
Linda J. White
Jeanne, I think there’s a danger in being too “present,” in tiring out your newsletter readers before your book comes out. I send out a fairly successful “occasional” newsletter, quarterly, but a little more frequently around the time of a book release. I mix up the content of the main article, using interesting stuff from research I’m doing, locations I’m visiting for signings, and sometimes news from my writing life. I have Events consistently in a sidebar, as well as my book covers, links to Facebook and Twitter, etc. MailChimp, which I use, tells you the percentage of “opens” and clicks. It was a little daunting to figure out the MailChimp program at first, but now I’m pretty quick. I can get a newsletter out in a couple of hours. Keep it short, snappy, upbeat, and informative (not just “buy my book! buy my book!”) and you’ll do great!
Jeanne Takenaka
Linda, thanks so much for chiming in! I appreciate your thoughts and you sharing what you do for your newsletter. I plan to study how others format theirs, what they include and see what feels right for my brand. I’m definitely planning to look yours up. 🙂
Mary Keeley
Jeanne, position a signup button prominently on your blog with a welcoming invitation and a few offerings you’ll have for subscribers in your newsletters.
Jennifer Zarifeh Major (AT HOME!!!)
Thank you, Mary.
This is something I need to get moving on.
Andrew Budek-Schmeisser
Not being able to have you drop in for a visit every month, Jennifer, a newsletter’s the next best thing.
Jennifer Zarifeh Major
I wish I could!!
But, your family is right here, cheering you on, praying you forward.
Andrew Budek-Schmeisser
One way to convince blog readers to subscribe to a newsletter would be to use a teaser sidebar, giving the content of the current newsletter content, perhaps with a clickable link to one of its features.
Nancy Moser
I was always told not to talk too much about a book until it was available (for instance, don’t show the book cover until there’s a link to a buy-site). The reasoning was that it would frustrate readers to get excited about a book they couldn’t get yet. Is that still true?
Mary Keeley
Nancy, you’re right that you shouldn’t talk about the book or show the cover too early. Not only could it frustrate readers who can’t yet get it, but by the time the book releases, they might feel like it’s old news. However, you can write something newsworthy or share interesting information that relates in some way. For example, tidbits about the location that is the setting of your book, or information about the culture during the time your story takes place. Or share what you learned in your research about how American settlers made wagon wheels because it relates to your Western historical romance novel.
Nancy Moser
Thanks, Mary. Another question… can I/should I mentioned the title of the not-released book? Or just talk about the era/location/history in generalities?
Mary Keeley
Nancy, wait to mention the title until the cover and pre-order option appear on Amazon and the publisher’s website, and save your big splash until close to the release date.
Sarah Forgrave
Great tips, Mary! I remember when you first recommended developing an email newsletter, it took me a while to wrap my brain around the idea.
Now I send newsletters once a
quarter and am in the process of writing my second e-short for subscribers. It’s been a blast has and helped me find readers I wouldn’t have found otherwise, while also deepening connections with readers I’d met on social media first.
Despite my initial hesitance, I’m now a believer! 🙂
Sarah Forgrave
Oy vey, apologies for the typos. Lesson learned: Don’t attempt to type blog comments on your phone. ?
Mary Keeley
Sarah, yours is a great testimonial. You have a superb newsletter.
Anita Mae Draper
Great post, Mary! And timely, too. I have to admit that the only reason I haven’t an email newsletter ready to roll out yet is plain old fear that I haven’t got it right – that it doesn’t reflect what I’m trying to convey. ugh. Working on it.
Mary Keeley
Anita, you always have interesting, newsworthy information to share that you can draw from, not to mention your collection of photos.
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