One of the best ways to promote your books and related services is through a newsletter.
A regularly published newsletter helps keep your name, books and services in front of your target audience. It provides information that your target audience finds useful in accomplishing their goals, so they’ll read it and see promotions for your books and services. Lastly, it establishes you as an expert on the topic you write about, increasing the chances that they’ll purchase your books or do business with you.
Newsletters do come with a couple of disadvantages. Though not difficult to create, they can require a chunk of your time, at least for the few issues until you get comfortable with putting one together. And you also must put one out regularly, no less than once a month but usually once a week, and on a specific day and time. People come to look forward to seeing your newsletter, and if you don’t get it to them when they’ve come to expect it, you lose prestige.
Before committing to a newsletter, determine what its topic will be and if there will be enough content to fill it. The first part – what the topic will be – is easy enough; it should be narrowly focused on your book’s subject matter or the services you provide. The second part – if there is enough content to fill it – is a little more difficult to determine, so you’ll want to research it. For the most part, there is plenty of material online on just about every topic, but if you get too niche, that isn’t always the case. And if you can’t find news items or other published materials about your niche topic, that means you will need to be a reporter who comes up with it. You may not want to commit the amount of time necessary to come up with content. Even if you are willing to put in the effort, it may not be a good return on investment as you instead could be writing your next book.
Lastly, your newsletter should be delivered online and not on paper. The latter is far too expensive. The former is virtually free and allows readers to access your newsletter in any number of ways – by mobile phone, by email, by downloading it from an email or website, via social media links, and more – maximizing your potential reach.
In future entries, we’ll examine newsletter formats, how to obtain content, how to design your newsletter, and how to use it as a promotional/marketing tool.
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My name is Rob Bignell. I’m an affordable, professional editor who runs Inventing Reality Editing Service, which meets the manuscript needs of writers both new and published. I also offer a variety of self-publishing services. During the past decade, I’ve helped more than 300 novelists and nonfiction authors obtain their publishing dreams at reasonable prices. I’m also the author of the 7 Minutes a Day… writing guidebooks, four nonfiction hiking guidebook series, and the literary novel Windmill. Several of my short stories in the literary and science fiction genres also have been published.