A newsletter is an important promotion tool for an author, especially indie authors, because it’s your direct pipeline to your readers that no middleman can touch. With a newsletter you don’t have to worry about the Book of Face throttling your posts, or some bozo billionaire tanking another social media platform (or the government trying to shut down a SM platform, grr). As long as you have a list of genuine fans and readers you can email them directly about upcoming publications and sales, give them pertinent buy links to your Shopify store, show them adorable pictures of your cats, etc.

The trick is to build your newsletter list in such a way that it contains only the people who actually read your stuff. Yeah, a huge NL list is great, and there are all kinds of ways to boost your NL numbers through things like swaps and paid promos. But if 80% of your NL members come from those mechanisms, they probably signed up for a free book and aren’t really going to bother opening your newsletter when it hits their inbox. The word here is “organic.” You want people to sign up because they found you, think you’re interesting and your writing is fabulous, and they want to hear more.

Why am I rattling on about newsletters? Well, I’ve had three people sign up to my newsletter in the last month or so through the signup form here on my website. This freaking delights me because it means (at least, I hope it means) that these three subscribers are organic—they like my work and they want to hear about new releases. When I send out a newsletter next week with a pre-order link for A Court of Green Clover, I can pretty much guarantee that they’ll want to buy it or read it on KU (as an aside I’ll be releasing ACoGC on Amazon and KU first, then after the KU period expires I’ll be releasing it wide, so if you prefer to buy your books on Apple or Kobo you will be able to pick it up in three months).

Right now, my newsletter list is only a skosh over 500 members. I prune out the hard bounces and the unsubscribes without rancor because those are the people who wouldn’t have opened the NL anyway. The important thing is that even with pruning the member list is growing, slowly but surely. Or to quote Sall Field as Norma Rae, “You LIKE me, you really, really LIKE me!”