Those who know me know I’ve been on the 'build your email list' bandwagon for
some time now. As the market becomes
more cluttered with indie writers writing more and more books, the marketing of
our books is going to get harder and harder. Our mailing lists of go-to readers is what can
keep us in the game. As I discovered
over the past few years, building this potent list is not easy. It won’t happen overnight. I’ve been at it for over a year now and my
list is still quite small. My mailing list, however, is like the little engine that
could.
I think I can,
I think I can,
I know I can,
I KNOW I can!
My mailing list is not very deep, but it is
powerful. Here’s a recent story that demonstrates the power of my list. I’d been
posting chapters of my latest WIP, The Memory Giver, on Wattpad all
summer long. In early September, to my delightful
surprise, the book was featured by Wattpad and (like with Amazon) I noticed I
had a ranking. Just like with Amazon,
the lower your ranking the more visible your book becomes to new readers. The goal, like on Amazon, is to get to #1. The
day my book appeared on the list it ranked just above #500 in horror. Because
of the feature, the ranking began to drop. One day it got as low as #18.
With Amazon your ranking is based on sales, but
since Wattpad is free, I couldn’t determine what affected my ranking. I did
some research and discovered to improve your ranking readers must “star” the
chapters they read if they like them.
The more stars you can get in a short period of time, the lower your
ranking becomes.
After the first two weeks of my feature my ranking
began to climb. It was still pretty good, hovering just under 100, but I
wondered if my fans on my mailing list could help get the ranking down and keep
it down a little longer. So on Sunday
October 19th, I emailed my frans on my list and told them I was looking
for beta readers for my latest work and what I needed them to do to become one--read the chapters on Wattpad and star the ones they enjoyed. They acted swiftly. On October 21st The
Memory Giver dropped to #14 on the list. Today, two days later, it’s still #15.
I have a regular mailing list with 100s of names,
but it’s just a list because I didn't realize how important my list could be
when I started it. A little over a year ago I started another list, my special list. I only have a handful of
followers on my special list, but look at the power they pack. Imagine if I had hundreds or thousands of
these types of followers. I’ve now
rededicated myself to adding quality names to my special list. Eventually, I’ll phase out the other list. Imagine
if we each had 10,000 loyal followers who bought everything we wrote; we’d be
doing pretty well, wouldn't we? Getting
there is not going to happen overnight.
You need to build a list of frans (friend + fan = fran) who listen when you talk to them. You do this one name (one fran) at a time.
By the way, I sent a similar email to those on my
regular list. Two people (out of 400)
responded. That list will definitely be phased out. We don’t just want names on
our mailing lists, we want friends who we can talk to. Like I said, building this list won’t
be easy, but in a year or two, it will be worth it. So start now to build your mailing list of
special frans one name at a time.
In a future post I’ll tell you how I'm going about
building my special list. In the meantime,
if you’d like to read chapters of the (as of today) #15 horror novel on
Wattpad, The Memory Giver (it’s free) Go here: THE MEMORY GIVER. If you do stop by, please remember to “star”
the chapters you enjoyed. Thank you.
Keep Reading-Keep Writing!
No comments:
Post a Comment