Publishing Help

Newsletter Swaps

Do you have a newsletter? If not, you should. They're easy to set up with sites like MailChimp and Mailerlite. There are others too. You can google "newsletters" to find more.

After you get set up with a newsletter platform, you'll need a reader magnet. Something to give away for free to those who sign up for your newsletter. This helps encourage people to sign up. Your reader magnet can be whatever you want. A short story, a full-length novel, or a few short stories. You can use your newsletter platform to automatically send out reader magnets once they've signed up, or you can use sites like StoryOrigin to handle it for you. I can't give too many details about StoryOrigin, as I haven't yet used it, but MailChimp has done a fine job of handling this for me.

So, what is a "newsletter swap?" Simply put, it's when you and another author, one who writes books that are similar to yours, promote each other in your newsletters. You plug their book and they plug yours.

I've done a few of them now and it's a pretty simple process. I joined a few newsletter swap groups on Facebook and agreed to swap with a few of the romance authors there. You both agree on the times that your newsletters will go out. You send each other the book info, and that's pretty much it.

If you have a small mailing list, there are some authors out there that won't want to swap with you, but I've found they're upfront and honest about this from the beginning. Many authors out there are perfectly fine with swapping with an author who has a small list. I am currently sitting at 17 subscribers. It's pathetic, I know.

How should you promote the other person's book? Well, I don't think there's only one right way to do it, but I send out a regular newsletter with my usual news and updates, then at the bottom, I'll include a section for "Indie Author Spotlight" where I will post about the other book(s). I include the cover photo and I copy/paste the book description unless the author gives me other text they want me to include.

I so far have not had much luck with newsletter swaps, but every successful author I know of seems to recommend doing them. Plus, they're pretty easy and you really should have a newsletter anyway whether you choose to swap or not.

I've recently started selling paperbacks at the local farmer's market and I have a newsletter signup sheet at my table. All I need is an email address and so far people have been more than willing to sign up. I also make sure to share the link to my signup page on my Facebook author page and make sure to tell people that they get a free book just for signing up. Still, I'm only at 17 subs, so keep in mind that I think there are a lot of people out there that are wary of signing up for too many things. Everyone hates spam and those companies who sell email addresses have made people nervous about signing up for more things.

Speaking of spam, make sure to only send out newsletters every week or so. More often and people will feel like they're being spammed. Also, try not to make your email subject line sound too spammy or your email will end up in the spam folders of your recipients.

Anyway, it's late and I'm starting to ramble so I'll end here. As always, if you have any insights on this topic, feel free to comment below!


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