Newsletter Marketing at Worldcon
Image by Andrys Stienstra from Pixabay
One of the panels I attended at Worldcon in Seattle was about newsletter marketing, and I wound up with an absolute TON of notes from this panel. The panelists shared a lot of great advice, so I’m going to recap some of what I learned about newsletters there!
One of the early things the panelists mentioned is that if you want to sell books, you need to have a good product, a source of readers, and a newsletter to tell people about your books. They mentioned that newsletters are particularly useful because they outlast social media platforms and trends. They also work particularly well for authors because we already know how to tell a story. The trick with a newsletter is telling your subscribers a non-fiction story that’s about you and your fiction writing.
The panelists also talked about the wide variety of places you can include a link to sign up for your newsletter, including the backmatter of your books (particularly when you’re self-published, but also if you can get your publisher to include that information), on your website, and in any bio you have across the internet (Amazon, social media, etc.). There are also options to get “cold” leads through newsletter swaps (where you invite your subscribers to subscribe to another author’s newsletter and vice versa) or Book Funnel. But you can also mention your newsletter if someone DMs you on a social media platform or stops by a table where you have a physical sign-up sheet. The trick, of course, is to make sure that people opt in to your newsletter–adding people to your newsletter subscribers without their permission is NEVER a good idea.
They also had a bunch of ideas of what sort of things you can include in your newsletter. And while the obvious idea is to sell books, it’s better to not make every newsletter just an advertisement to buy your book–it needs more to it than that. But you can write your newsletter to appeal to buyers by explaining why they might care about your book and giving them an incentive to make the leap to purchase NOW rather than some other time. In addition, they talked about how to handle your newsletter if you need to take a long break and also how to engage your readers by offering them what they might want in terms of content. For the latter, they suggested thinking about the kinds of things you would want in a newsletter from your favorite author or signing up for other authors’ newsletters to see what they do that you like or dislike.
There was so much good information in this panel that I’m sure I missed some things, but I hope my notes here are helpful!
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