I wanted to see which would sell more books, so I ran a test. I promoted the book on the Twitter feed and then promoted the book to the email list and then tracked the sales separately. Here's what I found: For every one book I could sell via Twitter, I could sell six via the email list. That means someone that signs up for the author's email list is 24 times more likely to purchase a book than someone that follows the author on Twitter.This isn't an outlier. I've repeatedly tested the effectiveness of blogs, social media, podcasts, forums, webinars, speaking and pretty much any other way of promoting a book, and nothing works as well or as consistently as an email list.My hope for you is that you won't just be a someone that wrote a book once. Instead, you'll be an author that successfully writes and publishes multiple books because you know, before you pen the first word, you have thousands of fans on an email list ready to buy.
If you want to get your author platform moving and start building your email list, here's the steps to take.I once met an author that was literally copy and pasting email addresses into Outlook every time he wanted to send an email to his fans. Don't do this. Besides breaking the law, it's extremely inefficient. The service I recommend is MailChimp. It's free for up to 2000 subscribers and has great features and support.MailChimp has a ton of great resources to learn the best ways to take advantage their platform. Yes, it will take time to learn but remember,Some song requests for Tool as band'es backa
this is your #1 marketing tool. Take the time to learn how to do it right.
Don't get fancy with the emails you send out. Keep them simple. Graphics don't work well. They scream "marketing" when people open it. Use a simple text template that is optimized for mobile. You want it to look like an email from a friend, not a marketing department. Click here to download the one we use and click here to learn how to upload it to your MailChimp account.I send at least one a week. I know authors that send several emails every week. The bare minimum is once a month. You want to stay connected and top-of-mind so make sure your fans regularly hear from you.The #1 goal of your website should be to get people on your email list. Make your sign up front-and-center. Use contrasting colors to make it stand out. Put it at the top of the page, don't bury it in the sidebar. Use a popup. Make it really hard for people that come to your site to not sign up for your email list.