The Most Powerful Tool For Self-Published Authors

If you spend any time researching what successful (not necessarily famous) self-published authors did to get where they are, the one nearly universal tool they use is email.

When I started my indie author journey, I wrote a book, edited it, had a cover made, and published it to Amazon.

I might have sold ten copies in that first year.

This is because no one knew who I was, especially because I use a pen name. In an effort to keep my day-to-day life separate, I didn't even promote it to my friends on Facebook. 

Several years later, I decided to try publishing again. This time I was part of a program that was aimed at helping me succeed. One of the biggest takeaways I got from that program was the need for an email list.

Don't underestimate the power of the list.

When you put your whole author platform (how you sell your books), in the hands of someone else, you are at the mercy of their decisions.

An example of this is when TikTok was banned in the United States. It went offline for fourteen hours, and leading up to that people were freaking out because the majority of their income came from that platform. As of this writing, the fate of TikTok in the U.S. is still unknown. Similarly, when Zuckerberg and his minions change the algorithm on Facebook and Instagram, people see a drop in their views and engagement, impacting their reach and income.

This is not what happens when you have an email list. 

No one can take it away from you. Though email providers such as Gmail have changed where emails land in someone's inbox, if you craft good emails and develop real relationships with readers, you can impact deliverability. And the beautiful thing about an email list is that it is more intimate than social media. This is great for writers, who are often introverts, but also for readers.

Think about it this way. Have you ever wanted to comment on something someone wrote on social media, but you were afraid to open yourself up publicly? I know I have been. I censure myself all the time. 

But if I saw the same text in an email, I would know that my response would be between me and the person who wrote it. The intended audience would see it, and I wouldn't experience pushback or exposure of my personal feelings/thoughts in the public eye. 

In other words, my relationship with that person would be more authentic.

Email is one of the biggest reasons I have any book sales at all. I'm still a relatively unknown fiction author. But when I send something to my 3,000+ subscribers, they respond. And my list enables me to promote other authors' work in exchange for them promoting my work. In this way I find more readers without doing much extra work.

I've recently been making some changes to my list that is upping my email game, increasing my open and click rates. I'll be exploring that soon in an article so you can do the same.

In the meantime, if you don't have an email list start one today. Make sure it is branded with your author name, and it's managed through an email management system like Mailerlite. That's what I use and I highly recommend you do the same.