Newsletters

Newsletters are the second key element of your author platform.

With social media sites you may have followers and fans. Yay! But the site itself (such as Facebook) owns that data, and monetises it in various ways. If you had a million followers on what-was-Twitter and leave the platform, you don’t have direct contact details for those million people (nor permission to contact them – just as important!) … you have nothing. They’re not transferrable. It’s one of the ways social media sites keep you chained to their systems, since you feel you’ve put in so much work to create a following that you can’t bear to lose it and start all over again.

That’s the key advantage of a newsletter. People provide their email addresses and permission to send them emails, so you can inform them when you have a new book out, or anything else that might interest them. Instead of the contact details being hidden from you, you have them. Even if you change newsletter provider, any decent one lets you export the email addresses and names and take them with you, to import into the new service provider. So, unlike social media where you’re squatting in someone else’s playhouse and subject to their rules, with your newsletter you actually have a contacts list of interested people that you can build over time.