My First Real Mailing List Signup (Ever)

I published my first novel, Once in a Blue Moon, in 2016--nine years ago, and today I just landed my first organic mailing list subscriber.

They say that publishing is a long game, but this long? This must mean that by the time I turn 157 years old, I'm going to be a bestselling author! 

It's true that nine years ago, I neither had a website nor any inkling that author newsletters were a thing. (Are they really a thing? I mean, a viable thing?) All I had was a self-published ebook that a total of three people managed to find. Hey, every author has to start somewhere! Pretty damn good without doing a lick of promotion, which I also didn't know was a thing.

Sometime in the last couple of years I learned that "every author needs a newsletter", but if I was going to send a newsletter, having subscribers would be helpful. I might have Googled "how to get subscribers", which wasn't very informative. Yes, I found that one can actually pay someone on Fiverr to gather them for you, but that's as useless as paying for book promos. Why would I want newsletter subscribers who didn't give a damn about my work? What would be the benefit in that? Plus, doing it that way seemed "icky". 

One of the promo sites, can't remember which, came up with a new idea--a 20-book giveaway in which entrants could earn extra chances to win by subscribing to the authors' newsletters. Hey! I could include one of my novels and not feel guilty--at least I was offering something in return for someone's email address. Only problem--the site had a few genres an author could choose from, but not mine. Undeterred, I asked them where my women's fiction novel would fit, and they confidently told me, literary fiction. 🤣

Spoiler Alert: Women's fiction and literary fiction do not mix. 

But I trusted them, so I slapped my money on the table and went for it. And I got a ton--perhaps a hundred or more--subscribers. At that point I was forced to compose a newsletter.

It did not go well. I found that I had absolutely nothing to say, and even if I did, literary fiction readers were not interested. I think I wrote something about one of my books and I tried being "friendly and approachable" by commenting on the season, or something else inane. Something to the effect of, "winter's here and it's time to enjoy cozying up to the fire and..." Nothing my real self would ever write.

The "unsubscribes" trickled in, and my open rate was pitiful. The nice people probably moved my missive to their spam folder, rather than unsubscribing. I could hardly blame either group. I truly hated writing a newsletter, but I forced myself to do it every month...for a while. I tried various approaches--giveaways, quizzes, writing about the setting of one of my books; everything people claim an author should include. It was cringeworthy. Those people didn't want to hear from me in the first place, and even if one or two of them did, I had nothing to say.

It all became too mortifying, so I stopped. If I was going to put myself through hell, I needed subscribers who actually cared about my books. This would be a heavy lift, since hardly anyone bought any of my books. But I dutifully added a signup link to the back matter of every subsequent book, secretly hoping no one would subscribe. (No one did.)

Next, I was informed that an author needed to entice signups by offering a reader magnet. Okay, sure, why not? A reader magnet is generally a short story or a novella, and while I don't waste my time writing short stories, I had eight novellas that barely saw the light of day, so I just picked one to offer, The Diner Girl. Its cover (homemade, naturally) gives off a "novella" vibe--nothing to be taken quite seriously; just a little story, but it got a couple of good reviews. I dutifully added a "Free Book" page to my website that no one except Chinese and Nigerian women's fiction fans visits.

Recently I got the idea to offer new subscribers a choice between The Diner Girl and a free MP3 download of one of my band's songs. Shoot, I figured maybe someone might want that. Thus, I updated my signup page.

Well, a miracle just happened--I scored my first ever organic newsletter subscriber. At first I thought the notification could be some sort of scam. After all, those are the only emails I seem to get, but I checked my Mailerlite account, and sure enough. Then I checked my website analytics. I still can't identify where the random visitor originated from, but it's either from Blogger (which tells me nothing; I have a few Blogger sites) or from LinkedIn. 

Nevertheless, I got one! Now do I need to send out another newsletter? 🤯 

I'm probably the only author on earth who had to wait nine years to get a newsletter subscriber. Apparently the long game is longer for some than for others. 

 

POSTSCRIPT: My new subscriber never responded to my query about which free gift he/she would like, so I'm thinking I got fooled once again.