In this series on author newsletters, we’ve covered quite a bit of ground. If you go back to episode #4 of the Kidlit Marketing Made Easy(er) podcast, you’ll see that we’ve looked at starting an author newsletter, nurturing a mindset for writing an author newsletter, what to talk about and the best voice and tone for your newsletter, how often you should send it out, and how to create an opt-in and a freebie for your newsletter.
So, finally today, we’re going to talk about something a lot of you ask me about: how to grow your author newsletter. Basically, that just means that we’re going to explore ten different ways to get more subscribers to that newsletter you’ve worked so hard at creating. Whether you have five subscribers made up mostly of your family and friends, or whether you have a list of a thousand subscribers or more, you can use some of the tips we’ll look at today to give your list some traction.
In fact, you can use some of the tips repeatedly, gaining more subscribers each time, or you can use them just once and then move on to the next tip. You also don’t have to try all these tips. I recommend you pick the ones you’re comfortable with and leave the others if they don’t appeal to you. It’s up to you!
Tip #1: Measure awareness
You know you have a newsletter but does everyone else know you have one? There’s so much noise on social media and people are so busy in their everyday lives that you can’t just assume people are aware of what you have to offer. Post a poll on social media asking your followers if they know you have a newsletter. If the results show that a lot of people didn’t know, then make sure to let them know what your newsletter is about and where they can find a link to subscribe.
Tip #2: Optimize your social media profile
Make sure that you have an easy-to-see link on your social media profiles that people can use to subscribe to your author newsletter. Don’t hide it in a Linktree along with a lot of other interesting links. Doing that leads to link fatigue. If there’s too much to click on, people will either be pulled away from your newsletter link by other links they find interesting and never come back or they’ll simply move on.
Tip #3: Use pinned post features
A lot of social media platforms allow you to pin a post at the top of your feed. Use it to speak about your newsletter, so that people visiting your feed see it immediately. You want information about your newsletter to be the first thing they see when they come to your page. You may be thinking, “My newsletter isn’t that important. I have a lot of other stuff going on!” But here’s the thing: remember that social media followers don’t belong to you but your email subscribers do. You can’t ever be sure that your followers will see something you post online but you can be sure that they’ll receive a newsletter if they’ve signed up to get them from you. Your email list is your most important marketing tool! Treat it that way by giving it top priority on your social media platforms.
Tip #4: Promote your newsletter
Make it a habit to promote your newsletter at least twice a year. What does this mean? Spend a week talking about nothing else but your newsletter, what you give to subscribers, any freebies you offer, what subscribers can expect from you, and why your newsletter is interesting. Go on! You can do that twice a year, can’t you? Just prepare some social media posts in advance and publish one a day for a week.
Tip #5: Promote your newsletter topic before you publish it
If you will be telling your subscribers something interesting in the next issue of your newsletter, create a little suspense on social media before you send your newsletter out. That way, anyone who’s interested in what you’ll be talking about can sign up in time to receive it.
Tip #6: Share the impact of your newsletter
If you have a newsletter that gives information people can use to reach a goal, share their success stories on social media. In my newsletter, The Kidlitter Letter, I have a section in which I always share a writing or publishing opportunity for children’s authors. Those opportunities can be contests or calls to submissions. I sometimes receive emails from subscribers telling me they sent in a manuscript and either placed in a contest or managed to sell a story. If you do something similar in your newsletter, don’t forget to tell everyone about this great thing one of your subscribers did. Not only does congratulating others inspire people to sign up to your newsletter but it creates a wealth of feel-goodness that we need more of on social media platforms!
Tip #7: Do a newsletter swap
You may write middle-grade historical fiction and one of your critique partners may write nonfiction picture books. While your genres are not the same, you both write for children. If you both have newsletters, some people in your audience may be interested in what your critique partner writes about and vice versa. So, speak about your partner’s newsletter in an issue of yours and provide a link for your subscribers to sign up to their newsletter if they want to, and allow them to do the same for you. That way, you both get some new subscribers.
Tip #8: Update your email signature
As soon as you create your newsletter, think about updating your email signature to include a link to sign up. Whoever you send everyday emails to will see that sign-up link and might be curious to find out what your newsletter is about. It’s a simple thing to do, so do it today!
Tip #9: Update your business card
Some authors have business cards they like to have on hand at writing or library conferences, or at school visits and book fairs. If you have a business card, don’t forget to pop a simple sign-up link to your newsletter onto it. Just be sure that your link is easy to copy into an Internet browser as people who would like to sign up will have to write it out instead of copying and pasting it.
Tip #10: Include a sign-up link at the end of your book
If you’re a self-publishing author, make use of the space at the end of your book to leave your website and newsletter links. This is prime real estate that only self-publishing authors get, so be sure to use it. But, as with your business card, make the link simple as people will have to write it into an Internet browser instead of being able to copy and paste. Of course, if you have a Kindle version, you can include a link but that won’t be available to everyone.
Short but effective
This is a short, but effective, list of things you can do today to create more awareness of your newsletter and what it has to offer. I’ve used all of them before, and they have all worked to grow my email list, sometimes by just a few new subscribers and other times up to a few hundred! I’ll bet you want to know which one got me a few hundred? The newsletter swap! A lovely person who has a email list of more than 10,000 subscribers shared my newsletter link with her authors for adults and what do you know… a whole lot of them also want to write for children!
I’ve only given you ten tips to try but there are a whole lot more out there. Start with these and let me know if they’ve worked for you, or whether you’ve tried something else that I didn’t talk about but that worked wonders for growing your email list. If I get at least five more, I’ll make another podcast episode to share them with everyone.
That’s it for the month of August. Send me an email if you’d like me to talk about something in particular to do with author newsletters and, if not, just tune in for the end of September for episode #12 of Kidlit Marketing Made Easy(er).
