My Newsletter, how it's changed over the years.

My latest monthly newsletter, exclusively sent to my email subscribers, was published today.

I think that the newsletter is vastly underrated. It’s an important part of any author’s marketing efforts. It keeps me in touch with a group of readers who are interested in my work.

Most importantly, I don’t have to rely on anyone else (like a social media site) to be able to speak directly to them.

Even though my first novel, Freefall, was published in May 2013, I don’t consider that I was an author until August 2015, when I retired from my real job and devoted more of my time to writing.

My second novel, Ribbonworld, came out in November of that year, which makes it just about ten years since I became a full-time author.

Right from the start, people told me that I should build a subscriber list and publish a regular newsletter. The thing was, with only two novels, I had nothing to offer as an inducement for them to sign up.

With that in mind, I wrote a short story, specifically to offer as a freebie. It featured a piece of worldbuilding that I had already used in Ribbonworld and was set to be a part of several other novels. I’m referring to the Farm in Space. I set this farm on a space station and called the story, The Orbital Livestock Company.

When I’d finished it, I saw that it could be the start of a novel, maybe one day it will.

My first subscribers got this story when they signed up.

You can find the story here.

The Farm of the Future. Cows, in space!

I’ve often talked about the idea of a farm in space. A long while ago, I wrote a short story, called The Orbital Livestock Company. I thought that you might like to read it. So, here it is.

Once I had the story, I set up an account with an email service and an onboarding sequence. I advertised the letter on Social media and this blog and soon had quite a few names on my list.

My first newsletter was sent in June 2016.

By the end of 2017, I was becoming bored with the idea of writing a letter every six weeks or so. I was getting little or no feedback on the free story, or on my letters in general. I tried offering other reader magnets, but that did little to improve the number of interested people I attracted.

So, I stopped sending regular letters. Instead, I just told the people on my list when I had a new book out, or a story that they might like to beta-read for me. While that worked, it seemed like a waste of the potential, especially when I knew that others were having success with their letters.

Some sort of new approach was needed to revive my newsletter.

I studied the letters I was subscribed to and looked for marketing advice. As well as reading a lot of books and articles about the art of newsletter writing, I discovered a website and service called BookFunnel.

It offered a way to distribute content and engage in marketing my newsletter (and free offering) to a wider audience via newsletter swaps and group promotions.

Armed with this new knowledge, I resurrected the newsletter in 2019. I wrote these in the format my research had suggested, giving general writing news, offers, reviews and a section on my life away from the keyboard.

This new look letter offered a novella, The Lost Princess, as a reader magnet. This was the prequel to my second novel, Ribbonworld.

With various tweaks and a new novella, My Sister Alex, on offer since January this year, it’s been going ever since.

I now have getting on for 1500 subscribers and a healthy open and click rate on my letters.

So I must be doing something right.

If you’re interested, you can join up by heading here.