My Newsletter Experiment

About six months ago, I decided to sign up for a bunch of author newsletters. At the time, I wasn’t conducting an experiment; I just wanted to see what the newsletters of successful authors looked like, as models for my own newsletter.

Well I ran into a problem: I signed up for 10 newsletters and only received 1.5 back. I awarded 0.5 to Jonathan Franzen, who only sends out his own newsletter when a new book is published, but asked if I would like the general Harper Collins newsletter in between (I already get it.) The ONLY author where I got a letter within 10 minutes of signing up, an onboarding sequence, and continue to get the monthly newsletter like clockwork: Stephen King.

I had originally signed up for 10 newsletters: 5 cozy mysteries and five general or upmarket fiction, all quite successful authors, all authors I actually read. After a month or so, I had gotten two more from cozy mystery writers who had a book coming out, and one that I now get regularly from a well known publisher of cozies that represents a couple of authors on my list.

Yes, I understand Stephen King doesn’t write his newsletter himself, although he always writes a short article. Recently, it was a beautiful love letter saying goodbye to Holly Gibney, his main character in his past few books. It was lovely.

But many authors on my original list could pay someone to put together their newsletter. It’s a given that we indie authors have to do the work of the publisher because we are the publisher.

What I can’t figure out is that having a newsletter is both one of the cheapest and most effective ways to build an audience for your books, AND every author and publisher I’ve ever heard has said it’s the number one most important thing to do for your author career, why isn’t everyone doing it? If Charles Scribner and Stephen King think it’s important, it probably is.

I added names over time, and the numbers held. I received 1-2 newsletters for about every 10 I signed up for.

Happy to say the most recent newsletter I signed up for was our very own colleague, editor and author @Jayna Baas, who writes Christian historical fiction. I got a welcome letter within 2 minutes of signing up, and several lovely onboarding letters in the days following. WAY TO GO JAYNA!

Anyway, I just found it all very interesting and thought you all might too.