I’ve been self-publishing since 2008, have put out 16 novels with another on the way, and lived VERY well on my book royalties for a number of years before my muse up and left for an extended vacation. If there’s one piece of advice I’d give aspiring authors, it would be to START A MAILING LIST ASAP AND NEVER STOP GROWING IT!

Let me tell you why.

By 2016, when my muse went bye-bye, I had over 80,000 followers on Twitter, 5,000 on Facebook, >7,000 on BookBub, and >7,000 on my mailing list. Granted, things were a LOT different then than now on social media, but looking back, I’d offer up a few observations:

Social media is a great place to connect with readers, but even when I had a lot of followers on Twitter and was very active on FB, that didn’t convert into many sales or downloads of loss-leaders. Some, yes, but not a ton for the time I invested on those platforms, and most were actually from other accounts spreading the word. Again, I’m not saying social media is a waste of time, but it’s not a great place to “sell books.” BookBub ads can be a fantastic way to help promote your books, especially the inexpensive new release emails to your existing followers there. However, building up that list can be extremely difficult and you don’t have a lot of control over engaging with them as a group, and some of the other paid ad options can get very pricey.While building up a good mailing list also takes a lot of time and effort, you can engage with your growing list of followers as you choose, when you choose. And when you put out a new release, this list (and the one on BookBub) is going to be your golden egg-laying goose.

I had a gap of 7 years from 2016 to 2023 when my muse was on vacation (she returned in July 2023), and after multiple failed attempts to kick-start my writing, I finally dropped any pretense of publishing more books and went back to my government day job. I was still making residual sales, but certainly not anything that would support us financially as it had the previous six years.

One casualty of all this was my mailing list. I’d gone through several iterations of my web site. Another thing you MUST NOT DO is radically revise your web site content; change the theme all you want, but don’t tear it down and rebuild it, let alone multiple times – big mistake!. Anyway, during those iterations I unplugged the newsletter service and thought I’d lost my subscriber list.

Such was my joy the other day when I stumbled across it, buried in one of my book-related folders! I’d started rebuilding a list from scratch earlier this year and had added 133 people over the last few months. Granted, I wasn’t focusing that hard on it; too many other things going on; I’m sure you could get quite a few more than that in the same amount of time if you did the right things.

But as soon as I found my old list, I combined that and the new subscribers, punched it into the Newsletter plugin for my WordPress site, and sent out an email to let folks know I was still alive, lol! Only half the list has been served as I write this (I’ve throttled the output to keep under the limit for our web host), but I’ve received a boatload of emails and comments on the site from folks who were happy to hear from me and eager for the next book I now have in editing (Quest For The One). And the best part is that I can keep those folks engaged with other content, like posts about our relocation to France or whatever else comes along that they might be interested in.

When the new book goes out, all those folks will get notifications and you can bet that most of the people who open that email are going to go right out and buy the book, because those folks are on my list specifically because they like what I write and want more.

Anyway, the moral of the story here is that, IMHO, the very best investment of your time and effort to market your books over the long haul is building that mailing list. Invest the time to learn how to do it smart and right (I need to refresh on a lot of things; I was never very good at this), then KEEP AT IT. You’ll be glad you did.

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