The Number ONE Reason Serious Authors NEED A Mailing List

In a nutshell, the most compelling reason for building a mailing list is …

In a world where even the ownership of your book can be in question there  are TWO Internet Properties you can own.

Mark Zuckerberg owns Facebook and Instagram and dozens of other social media networks.  YOU are  probably one of his billions of assets. He makes gazillions AND more importantly, HE CREATES THE RULES.  He can  (and does) change them at any time, without consulting you.

In 2007 Facebook introduced  Business Pages.  They were easy to grow and grow they did.  A few years later … they were no longer easy to grow and Business Page owners had to spend more and more  and MORE money to make their business pages profitable.

In October of 2022, Elton Musk acquired Twitter.  Things have been steadily changing ever since.  One of the more recent changes was killing  the cute tweety bird and replacing it with an ugly X.

The platform is already charging $$ for specific uses and you can probably “guess” these will only increase. Literally thousands of businesses that provided twitter services have gone out of business because of NO-warning prohibitive charges.  I actually used three of these services and had to find out different ways to “do” the tasks I used to purchase.  The change happened virtually over night.

Will the Twitter you know and use daily continue to be free?  No one but Elton knows for sure.

There are numerous examples of what everyone “thought” to be successful and stable Internet businesses who shut their doors with almost  NO warning.

One of those companies  was Squidoo, which was founded by the well-know author, Seth Godin. Squidoo encouraged  users to create webpages (known as “lenses” and promised income through advertising and revenue sharing.

Many of their users earned hundreds to thousands a month. A few years later and with very little warning Squidoo shut their doors and  told their users to move to HubPages.   Many Squidooers had hundreds of articles on  the Squidoo platform and basically NEVER recovered. HubPages had different rules,  and a no-win payment scheme.  Since the transfer of articles was NOT automatic,  many people (myself included) simply LOST articles they had unfortunately  NOT backed up elsewhere.

The bottom line is, while you “should” and can use social media platforms to promote your books …

The only TWO properties you OWN are

#1 your mailing list, and IF you are careful and smart … #2 your website.

Depending on YOUR plans for building your book nook or book empire,  your email list is a MUST and a website is either optional or your second must.

I have a LOT more to say about the importance of mailing lists and websites.  That will come later.  For NOW here’s MY bottom line >>>

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You don’t need a website in order to build a mailing list, so there are NO excuses about waiting for your website to be developed.

Many of the social media channels (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.) only show  a SMALL percentage of your messages to your followers.  Out of your 1000 followers  your message may be only shown to 100 or less.

While OWNERSHIP is a compelling bottom line, the even MORE compelling reason for having a mailing list is that when you send a message it is sent to ALL of your subscribers.  If you have 1000 subscribers, ALL of them get it. Your message might go into spam, it might not get read, but your message gets sent to ALL 1000 of your subscribers … NO social media algorithm deciding what SMALL percentage of your followers gets to take a look.

Do I open my EMAIL accounts?  Absolutely and not just once a day!   One of my email accounts has been in use for decades.  And even though I filter a lot of spam,  I still browse through a hundred or so messages a day to see if there is anything urgent or interesting to read.

Do I browse through ALL the  Facebook posts that show up in my feed? NO   Ditto with Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Pinterest. But I NEVER miss a day of checking out my email messages.

Most people WILL open their email regularly and IF they subscribe to your list … you have a reasonably good chance of being seen.  Even if they don’t open your emails for a year, something may eventually resonate with them and  there YOU are!

An example:  At one point in my life I had massive back challenges.  I went to a clinic which helped me get back on my feet within days and then helped me strengthen my back over a period of months.  I stopped going when my back was better. BUT every week I got an email from that clinic.  I didn’t unsubscribe … took a peek now and then.  THEN one day a friend told me about his back problems.  Within minutes I was able to locate all the information about the clinic and send it to him.   The clinic got another customer and my friend was thrilled.

THAT is the power of having a mailing list.

Have I convinced you yet?

If you don’t already have an email list provider, check out MailerLite and GET STARTED now!