NEWSLETTERS: An author’s must-have marketing tool

 The evidence has been scrutinized and vetted and the votes tallied, declaring newsletters to be a must-have marketing tool for authors. And successful authors, both traditional and independently published, agree.

“In my opinion, newsletters are one of the most important marketing tools available to authors.” says Hallee Bridgeman the USA TODAY bestselling, award-winning author whose sold nearly one million books.

The key to newsletter-gleaned success is that authors own their mailing list. Their direct-email marketing efforts land in subscribers’ inboxes, completely unimpacted by the complicated, ever-changing algorithms that afflict social media. An author’s quarterly newsletter cannot be “locked down” by the whims of power-wielding social media police who, in one fell swoop, can dismantle years of audience building with a stint in Facebook “jail.”

But knowing and believing that newsletters have earned such deserved accolades in the author’s marketing toolbox doesn’t automatically make creating engaging content and establishing an effective routine a piece of cake. Another fact that both trad and indie published authors affirm.

“I don’t know of one author who doesn’t have a love/hate relationship with newsletters,” admits author Tari Faris who’s been writing fiction for fifteen years but has been creating fiction in her head for as long as she can remember. “We love to connect with our readers, but we hate actually doing newsletters. We hate trying to build our lists. We hate facing the what-am-I-going-to-write-this-time blank page,” laments the multi-year ACFW Genesis finalist (2014 & 2016) and winner (2017). 

Faris who confesses she loathed writing a newsletter because it practically gave her hives, has changed her tune. In three years, she grew her subscriber list from 300 to nearly 7000.

“What if you could remove all that hate and just move to a love relationship with your newsletters? Love writing a newsletter? A foreign concept, I know. But it can happen, because it happened for me.” 

Drumroll, please. This newsletter conqueror will be the featured guest at Indiana ACFW’s October 1 meeting via Zoom. 

Are we lucky or what? Indeed we ARE! 

Watch for more details on our Facebook page as well as an invite via email.