Faking It (Newsletters)

Well, my single organic newsletter subscriber didn't pan out. It's not as if having one subscriber would suddenly change my life, but I'm still disappointed. For a minute there, I thought I was famous! 😋 Whoever he or she is, they didn't claim their free gift when I emailed them to ask their preference (I offer a choice of two gifts), so it was probably just someone goofing around. My track record holds!

But the episode did get me rethinking the whole newsletter marketing ploy. As you know, I hate newsletters; not necessarily other people's, but my own. I really have no opinion on other authors' communiques. Who knows? Their fans might love them. 

I haven't sent a newsletter to my wholly disinterested subscribers since Running From Herself was published on March 1, so really, would there be any harm in sending one now, five months later? After all, I've now got my professional book cover, which I could highlight. But the trick to it is marketing without blatantly marketing. 

Yesterday I signed into MailerLite and started composing one. On a related note, MailerLite might be fine for paying members, but with my free subscription, the only template I'm offered is a blank page, which I need to add "elements" to in order to come up with an acceptable layout. I'm sure the folks at the company think they're being quite innovative in their element choices, but a user like me finds them very frustrating. What I would prefer is an element called "text" and one called "image". Nope, not happening. Everything is over-stuffed with things I neither need nor want. 

And modifying text is wildly confusing. On a normal document, one can highlight text and modify it with various buttons for color, alignment, font size, etc. Nope! Everything on MailerLite has to be executed from the sidebar, which doesn't work most of the time and which forces the user to know if they are working with a header or a subheader or regular text or an array of other choices. How the hell would I know which it is? If you click on the wrong choice, you've now modified a different block of text than you intended. 

Google says:

"Common frustrations with Mailerlite's text formatting, particularly in the new drag-and-drop editor, include difficulty controlling padding and spacing, inconsistent formatting when pasting text, and limited customization options

."

Needless to say, I don't like working with it. Somehow, though, through trial and error and stubborn tenacity, I can usually design something that works. Trust me; if I felt a need to send newsletters (which I don't), but let's say that hypothetically I suddenly gained 10,000 subscribers, I would find a better (paid) option.

Frustrations aside, I got a whole new newsletter together, sent myself a test email--everything looked fine--then today I started rethinking it. It was pure and simple advertising. What one could generously label "engagement" was limited to one pitiful sentence about what I've been up to lately...which led to talking about my novel again.

I have nothing to say, and knowing that the recipients don't even want to hear from me makes me even more self-conscious. It's like when I'm talking to my spouse and he responds by changing the subject. He either didn't hear a word I said or it wasn't worth acknowledging.

I even went to AI for suggestions, which never works, because AI is so busy complimenting me that it never gets to the point. (No wonder some people develop romantic relationships with AI.) Then I thought back to the one author newsletter I subscribe to. I didn't subscribe as a fan--I've never read the author's work. I just wanted to know what a successful newsletter looked like, and hers was the first Google result for my genre. What this author tends to do is to start off with an anecdote about her life, which subtly ties into one of her books' themes. While I'm not into sharing my personal life with strangers, I could talk about universal themes, or more specifically a universal theme that would launch into me plugging my book (subtly, of course).

This reworking made it better. Not better as in, one of my "I keep forgetting to unsubscribe" followers is going to buy my book, but it did make it less cringeworthy for me.

I can't foresee ever sending out another issue after this, because I won't have any new books to "subtly" plug. And don't get me wrong; I still hate newsletters. I detest the artificiality of them. 

I've found that I'm really bad at faking it.