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    Newsletter Ninja: How to Become an Author Mailing List Expert
    Newsletter Ninja: How to Become an Author Mailing List Expert
    Newsletter Ninja: How to Become an Author Mailing List Expert
    Ebook125 pages2 hours

    Newsletter Ninja: How to Become an Author Mailing List Expert

    By Tammi L Labrecque

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Are you struggling with email? Newsletter numbers getting you down? Fewer people opening your messages? No real reaction when you launch a book?

    There's another way--a better way.

    Imagine having a large list of happy readers who devoured every email you sent. Or launching a book and activating an army of fans who did the selling for you. You could be that person, with the help of Newsletter Ninja.

    Newsletter Ninja is a comprehensive resource designed to teach you how to build and maintain a strongly engaged email list--one full of actual fans willing to pay for the books you write, rather than free-seekers who will forget your name and never open your emails.

    * Learn new ways to think about your email list
    * Re-energize your existing subscribers
    * Embrace not just the basics, but next level methods
    * Improve engagement and watch those open/click rates soar
    * Build a happy list of passionate readers
    * Launch your books into the charts

    You'll get a handle on open rates, click rates, and engagement--while also learning about yourself, your readers, and what you're really selling when you send an email. (Spoiler: it's not your books.)

    Whether you're building a mailing list, want to grow an existing one, or simply want to raise your email game, Newsletter Ninja has solutions that will work for you.

    LanguageEnglish
    Publisherlarks and katydids
    Release dateAug 9, 2018
    ISBN9781386529620
    Newsletter Ninja: How to Become an Author Mailing List Expert

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    4.5/5

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    • 5/5
      Super informative and delightfully entertaining! This book is a must read for any author trying to build, maintain, grow, or re-engage their audience. The advice can also be applied to other creative entrepreneurs. Read and absorb this book!
    • 5/5
      I loved this book! So informative. I keep referencing it when I get in trouble with my newsletter.

    Book preview

    Newsletter Ninja - Tammi L Labrecque

    One

    Who Am I (And Who Are You)?

    1 - Who Am I (And Who Are You)?

    The first part of that question is easy (for me, anyway). My name is Tammi Labrecque, and I’m an indie author, editor, and publisher. I write and publish my own books under a couple of pen names, and freelance in what feels like every related field, from plot doctoring to editing to ads management. I’ve been writing since I was a tween, was traditionally published in the olden days (the 90s), and I’ve been doing this indie publishing thing since 2014. You might have seen me on the Self-Publishing Podcast, met me at the Smarter Artist Summit or 20 Books to 50K Vegas, worked with me when I was employed at Sterling & Stone, or heard about me from clients like Chris Fox, Wayne Stinnett, or David Gaughran.

    I’ve done just about every job there is in the indie publishing space, but—apart from writing—newsletters are my favorite thing. They’re my jam, as the kids say. (I have no idea if the kids still say that, or if they ever did, but let’s not go down that rabbit hole just now.)

    Now for the second part: Who are you?

    We can assume you’re an author, or maybe an author assistant. Either way, you’ve got an email issue. Generally, people come to me with one of three problems:

    •They want to start a list but aren’t sure where to begin, or

    •They’ve got a list but it’s not as big as they would like, or

    •They’ve got a list that’s big enough, but not engaged.

    No matter which of those statements applies to you—or even if you’re a hybrid of those things, or stuck somewhere between two of them—I can help. I maintain my own mailing lists as well as several lists for other authors, I helped with the vast email enterprise that is Sterling & Stone, and I’ve been running month-long sessions of a class called Newsletter Ninja for almost a year now, testing out these techniques with students across the entire gamut of genres, mailing list sizes, and approaches. The stuff I teach works—and, more than that, it will make talking to your list fun instead of a chore you have to check off around release day.

    Let me pause for just a moment and make one thing clear: I am definitely not going to walk you step-by-step through the actual button-pushing of creating a list, making a signup form, or what queries to run to tell who’s opening emails or how many unsubscribes you got or anything like that. There are dozens of email marketing providers (Mailchimp, Active Campaign, and the like), and it wouldn’t be remotely practical of me to try to cover all the technical steps required to get each of them up and running—to say nothing of ongoing maintenance. So you will have to work through that part yourself.

    If that’s daunting, there are resources to help you. Many virtual assistants will handle email for you. Author friends can give you tips. The email marketing services themselves have help and support documents, and varying levels of customer service to help you answer your unique questions about your own circumstance. I, and many other people, offer classes or consultation that can address your individual situation. But if you were looking for a book that would deal in those kinds of specifics, you should definitely return this book. That’s not the value proposition here, and I have a near-phobia about not delivering value.

    This book is intended to be about a mailing list philosophy, a new way for you to approach the problem of email and make it easier and more fun for both you and your subscribers. This book will give you the foundation to seek out those more specific answers, because you’ll know what questions to ask. And yes, we will talk about every step of the process, but always in terms of how to approach the topic, ways you might do things differently, things you might not have thought of, pitfalls to avoid, and fun stuff like that.

    But we have a couple of things to address before we get to any of the fun stuff.

    Now, before you nod off—or skip to something that looks more interesting—know that this technique is one you’ll be using a lot, to great effect, when it’s time to start your new approach to your email list, so you might as well learn it. It’s called answering the reader’s objections.

    Wait a minute! you're probably saying. (If not, you can go ahead and say it now, if only to make me feel better.) How can I have any objections? We haven’t even begun.

    Okay, that’s a fair point. But the thing about answering objections is that it’s ten times more powerful if you answer them before they even arise. So let me answer yours, even though you might not have developed them yet or known you had them.

    I’ve been teaching a class on this for a while now, and I’ve seen the objections that arise as students go through mindset shifts and learn new techniques and all that groovy stuff. Apart from the most common objection, which is something along the lines of "But I don’t want to write an onboarding sequence," most people’s objections generally fall into two camps:

    •I would never subscribe to (or stay on) a list like the one you’re describing, and

    •I’m just an indie author; people aren’t interested in what I have to say.

    If you don’t actually have either of those objections, bear with me while I treat them as a rhetorical device. If you do feel that way, though, and you’ve been letting those thoughts stand in the way of your newsletter success, get ready—because I’m about to tell you that both of those statements are bollocks. Let’s turn the page and talk about why.

    Two

    You Are Not Your Reader, But You Are a Rock Star

    2 - You Are Not Your Reader, But You Are a Rock Star

    You Are Not Your Reader

    It happens every time I run a class, and in every consulting session I do about email. It happens when I’m just sitting around with my indie author pals and put forth some tenet of newsletter philosophy I believe in (we indie authors are a real blast to hang out with, as you see). I’ll suggest something that seems pretty tame to me, something like Email monthly or include cat pictures, and someone is sure to say That would turn me off, or that would make me unsubscribe, or No way would that work on me.

    Well, good for you, you newsletter-hating edgelord. And what have you got against cats?

    My response to this is something I say to students so often that I’m thinking I might get a tattoo, or at the very least have a rubber stamp made: Do not make business decisions based on your own consumer behavior.

    One more time, for you clowns in the back throwing pencils and passing notes:

    Do not make business decisions based on your own consumer behavior.

    This is a huge mistake, and I see so many people make it.

    So what do you do instead? You make decisions based on how your readers respond to things you try—by getting reader feedback and by looking at measurable results (open rates, click rates, unsubscribe rates, conversion), not by guessing or defaulting to behavior that accommodates your own biases.

    Because there’s good news, and the good news is this: You are not your reader. I cannot stress that enough. Even if you read widely in your genre, even if you subscribe to author newsletters, you are not your reader. You are an author, and you view author newsletters through your own prism. Things that are intolerable to you as a consumer are not necessarily intolerable to your readers—and, in fact, may be things your readers like!

    All those things that turn you off, that would make you mash the unsubscribe button? I’ll give you ten to one, the majority of the reader audience you’re trying to tempt onto (or keep on) your mailing list simply loves those things. And I can prove it to you—but, even better, you can prove it to yourself. Because everything I will tell you to do is something you can test and split-test and test again, letting your own list tell you what they do and don’t like. (Split-testing, what some people call A/B testing, is the process of offering consumers two different things and tracking which gets a better response. We’ll talk about it more a bit later.)

    And all you have to do to make this work is to be open—open to trying new things, open to the idea that not everyone shares your disdain for autoresponders or polls or cover reveals or cats, open to the possibility of finally having the mailing list you want/need/deserve/whatever. All you have to do is make a pact with yourself that you will be guided by actual metrics instead of feelings.

    Easy-peasy.

    But You Are a Rock Star

    My response to the second objection—I’m just an indie author; no one cares what I have to say—is something along the lines of Baloney (mainly because I already used

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