My Battle between Building an Author’s Email List
Or finishing Fiddling with Death
Since my first novel, My Splendid Concubine, came out in December 2007, I’ve done almost everything legal to promote my books. Still, there’s one promotion method I haven’t tried, creating an author’s email list that includes free reader magnets.
“An author’s email list is a collection of email addresses from readers who have opted-in to receive updates and news from the author, allowing them to directly communicate with their audience about new book releases, promotions, and other relevant information; while a ‘reader magnet’ is a free piece of content, like a short story excerpt, bonus chapter, or character art, that an author offers to potential readers in exchange for their email address, essentially enticing them to join the email list and learn more about the author’s work.”
I tried and failed repeatedly over two to three years to build one of these email lists offering free reader magnets. I enrolled in an online course from a trusted provider, but the videos included were outdated and did not align with the interfaces of Book Funnel and Mailer-lite. Then I turned to Book Funnel and Mailer-lite how-to-videos, but they threw too much information too fast in short, confusing videos that also didn’t match their own dashboards, so I stopped to save my sanity.
Still, I did use a system comparable to email lists and reader magnets. That was my first blog launched in 2010, to support My Splendid Concubine. The thousands of blog posts I wrote and published on iLook China over a period of about five years did the same thing reader magnets offer. They attracted readers interested in China and not all of them subscribed, but many bought the novel. That blog still has 627 subscribers, who signed up to receive notices of blog posts about China.
Between 2010 and 2015, when I was blogging regularly, over 46,000 copies of my first novel were sold. Since I stopped publishing new blog posts regularly in 2015, sales dropped dramatically, but still added another 3,386 sales over the last nine years, in addition to 666,022 KU page reads, adding up to another 624 books.
I have one unpublished reader magnet that was written to support my Josh Kavanagh Thrillers (the box set costs less than buying all three individually), with another reader magnet in the works. No more waiting. I’ve published what I already have and write more reader magnets that I will publish on these two blogs:
https://wordpress.com/view/lloydlofthouse.org
https://www.lloydlofthouse.com/search/label/Blog
I haven’t given up on the idea of building an author’s email list. That also doesn’t mean I will. What I did was stop squandering time and money, and went on to complete the third book in my thriller series instead.
Fiddling with Death is scheduled to be out on February 10, 2025.
Never for Glory, the second thriller, was delivered June 2023.
The first thriller in the series, with 305 ratings on Amazon and a 4.3 average, The Patriot Oath, came out June 2021.
Donald Trump loyalists hate The Patriot Oath!
As I write this post, over 84% of reader ratings are positive. Please read the 16% that aren’t. Most of them are from Donald Trump loyalists. This thriller focuses on the US Constitutional oath Josh Kavanagh, the main character, took to defend the US Constitution against all enemies domestic and foreign when he joined the US Marines. I took the same oath when I became a US Marine before being sent to Vietnam. George Washington took the same oath when he became president in 1789. In fact, every US president took that same oath.
No other US president throughout US history demands loyalty over the US Constitution like Donald Trump has and still does. Trump also became a traitor on January 6, 2021, by inciting a failed violent coup attempt to grab power and keep it. That was the same day Donald Trump broke the oath he took in January 2017 to defend the U.S. Constitution.
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