How to Grow Your Author Platform: The Power of Building an Email List

Email marketing isn’t dead - in fact, it might just be your most valuable tool as an indie author. In this episode, Ricci and Ferol break down why building and nurturing your email list is still one of the smartest and most effective ways to connect with readers and sell more books.

You’ll Learn:

• Why email offers a stronger ROI than social or paid ads
• The difference between “owned” and “rented” marketing channels
• What makes email more personal and reliable than other platforms
• How to get started with email marketing (and what to say in your emails)
• Tips for building a list of readers who actually want to hear from you

For more tips, tools, and strategies to grow your author career, visit writtenwordmedia.com.

If you enjoyed today’s episode, share it with a fellow author and leave us a review. It helps more writers find the show.
The Written Word Podcast is produced by Walk West.
© 2025 Written Word Media, Inc. All rights reserved.

Creators and Guests

Host

Ferol Vernon

Founder and COO of Written Word Media

Host

Ricci Wolman

Founder & CEO at Written Word Media

What is The Written Word Podcast?

A podcast for authors who want to build successful writing careers. Each episode explores the business and craft of being an author, with practical strategies for selling more books, growing your audience, and navigating the publishing world. Presented by Written Word Media.

Ricci Wolman: [00:00:00] Every year people say email is dead.
Ferol Vernon: Welcome to the Written Word Podcast. For authors who want to build successful writing careers, I'm Ferol Vernon and here with Ricci Wolman. This is the written word, media Pod. Okay. Today we are diving into one of the most powerful, most overlooked and occasionally feared.
Author, marketing Tools, email. Is it still worth it? Where do you even start? And what do you say once someone joins your list? We've got your answers today. Welcome to the written Word Media podcast. I am Faroh one of the founders of Written Word Media With me, as always, is Ricci, founder of Written Word Media.
Ricci, how are you doing?
Ricci Wolman: I am doing great. How are you doing, Ferol?
Ferol Vernon: I am terrific as always. Today we are tackling a question that is near and dear to both of our hearts, which is email and specifically email marketing for authors. Now, email is so [00:01:00] important to us and so near and dear to our heart because written word media at its core, its primary product is an email.
Marketing product that delivers books to readers. So we've been doing this for 10 years. We've sent well over a billion emails, and we know about this thing called email marketing, and we're excited to share with you today.
Ricci Wolman: Yeah, I'm really psyched to be talking about this today. I have been doing email marketing since it was a thing, um, 'cause I've been in digital marketing oof, 15 plus years now.
And so when email was in its infancy, we, I was, I was already, you know, playing with it and, and using it. And as you said, Ferol without email marketing written word media. May or may not be here today because that is what we started with as our first product and what we have found to be so effective at providing a return to authors and helping them sell books and find fans and get reviews and [00:02:00] all of the things.
So, uh, you mentioned we've sent over a billion. Emails. That's kind of a staggering statistic. You know, the way that we send emails here are highly personalized. So although we're sending a ton of emails, each person is getting a very differentiated email. Every reader gets a very differentiated email, which is why we have such high engagement.
But where are we today? Like how many emails are we sending, do you think? We'll send in 2025 between all the five Ringwood media brands.
Ferol Vernon: Yeah, so written War Media will send somewhere between 230 to 240 million emails this year. As you said, all of those are targeted, you know, directly to readers based on genre and all that.
It is a incredible effort that goes into getting those emails to the right people every day, and that is something that we feel really strongly is the best way to communicate with. Potential readers. You know, and I, I was looking up some numbers before the show and something I thought that was really interesting is the volume of email that's sent [00:03:00] worldwide on a daily basis.
What number do you think that is, Ricci?
Ricci Wolman: I don't know, 500 million.
Ferol Vernon: So it's, it's, you're, you're way off. So it's 340 billion emails are sent every day.
Ricci Wolman: Wow.
Ferol Vernon: Yeah. So it's, it's, it's just an enormous volume of communications. You compare that to some social media platforms that are all in the tens of millions.
So there's, you know, tens of millions of Facebook posts today, tens of millions of Instagram stories, TikTok, da da, da. But you add them all up and it's still, you know. 1% of the volume of email and people check their email every single day, multiple times a day. So I, I'm excited to talk about this. This is our sort of, you know, the bread and butter of digital marketing, as you mentioned, and it's been around forever.
One more statistic that I'll share with the audience before we get into the meat of the show. The very first spam message ever sent on email. It was actually sent in 1978, so email was invented 1971, but it took seven [00:04:00] years before some aggressive marketer sent out a spam email and it was only sent to hundreds of users.
So anyway, just a little trivia for you. First spam message, 1978.
Ricci Wolman: Wow. That goes way further back than I would've imagined.
Ferol Vernon: Yeah. Okay. Alright, so let's get into what we're here to talk about, which is not spam, right? The opposite of spam. How do you send good emails? How do you use it to get readers? So one of the things that I really want to talk about, and I think that there's a little bit of maybe misinformation out there, and we've touched on it already, is what makes email different from platforms that we hear about in the news, like Instagram or TikTok.
What are the differences there? Ricci?
Ricci Wolman: Yeah, so, well, the first thing I, I, I just wanna preface this with is, every year people say email is dead. And that is no different. In 2025, actually in 2025 this year, we're seeing a pretty big resurgence of, uh, newsletters and email marketing. And for every person out there touting the effectiveness and how well [00:05:00] it's doing for them, there's another person that says, oh, there's too much email in the world.
Email is dead. It's not as an effective channel. I will tell you, I've been hearing that for 15 years. I don't believe it. I do still think email marketing is one of the most powerful marketing, if not the most powerful marketing channel that's out there. And the reason is it's one of the direct lines, or I'll say direct ish lines that you have to your readers.
Probably the most direct line you could have to, to somebody is. Is like USPS mail, right? Where you can actually send something to an address and make sure that, that, you know, a hundred percent that that's gonna be delivered. Email is kind of second to that because when you, when you get somebody's email address and you send them an email, that email is landing in their inbox.
There are. Going to see it and the vast majority of people are gonna open it. That is very different from, say, Facebook or TikTok, where every time you post something, you're at the whim of the algorithm to show it. Even if you have an audience, you know, back in the day on [00:06:00] Facebook, if you had a bunch of fans, every time you posted, they would see your content.
We are far, far away from that world. Today. The world is all algorithmic and when you post something, the algorithm decides who should see it. Even people who've raised their hand and said, I wanna see it sometimes don't see it. That is not really true for email. When you send an email, it does land in the inbox of the person who opted in.
The other thing that's really powerful about email is you do have the person's email address, and you can use that for other things as well. You could take an email address and you can get a match to someone's mailing address. You can take an email address and you can upload it to Facebook or Google and then do directed ads towards that.
So you have a piece of what, what's called first party data, really, really powerful data that you now own. And so, you know, own versus renting. Whereas, you know, on some of these other social media platforms, you're really just on rented land and the landlord can and does change the rules all the time. The other reason, which you alluded to that email's so powerful is [00:07:00] it's just a daily habit that everybody does.
If you're lucky, you're checking email once a day. If you're like me, you're checking it, you know, probably 20, 20 times a day. Um, and, and even though there was a lot of volume of email coming in, people are still very curious to see who's emailing them and what's coming in. Yeah. It's content that they like.
They open that email, so I get a ton of email, but the people that I care about hearing from, I read and I open those emails on the regular. So that's part of the reason why email marketing is so effective. The reason that it's so, it has such a good return on investment is it is also very low cost compared to other channels.
So you do need an ESP, which we'll talk about what that is, and you do need to pay them. But compared to, say, running Facebook. Or other types of digital ads or actually ads that are out there in the world where you, when you look at the return for every dollar you spend on email versus any other channel, it kind of blows everybody else out of the water.
Ferol Vernon: And Ricci, yeah. Before we get into that, just maybe break [00:08:00] that down for us. 'cause I'm not sure everybody, you know, return on investment, that might be a term. Not everybody is familiar with exactly what you mean when you say that. So break it down for me. When you say return on investment over email and you're comparing that to Facebook, like, what does that mean for an author?
Ricci Wolman: Yeah, so return on investment is just saying for every resource spent, which can either be dollars or time, how much are you getting back? And so for authors, the way to usually think about it is for every, you know, dollar you're spending or hours that you're spending, how much are you getting back in, in sales and revenue on your book?
If you build up an email list of people who have opted in who say, I wanna hear from you, I'm interested in your content, what you will find is that over time, every time you send an email, you will see a spike in sales. That's actually exactly how our platform works, right? When you buy promo with us, what's happening, we're sending an email.
To tens or hundreds of thousands of people, and you sit there and you look at your retail dashboards and you see a big spike. So you can basically, it becomes a dependable source [00:09:00] of revenue. Whereas if you run, say, if you spend money on Facebook or ads or Amazon ads, which a lot of authors have tried.
Sometimes you don't sell any box at all. Sometimes you are upside down. You've actually spent more than you've brought in. When you look at how much you're actually spending, and I know it is a monthly cost for the ESP, but compared to what is coming in, in return, email tends to have the highest return or sales.
Divided by the total cost.
Ferol Vernon: Yeah, I think that's really important for authors to understand. It doesn't mean you shouldn't be advertising on Facebook or Amazon. It just means that when you email your list, you're spending a little time to compose that letter. Hit send and you're gonna get sales from that.
And you've spent at that $0 to hit the send button. Maybe you pay a little bit of a monthly fee to the service that's sending that email. But unlike the ad platforms where you're spending every single day to get return, your email address, once you've spent it, that that's owned land, right? That email list that you have, you [00:10:00] have it forever and you can move it around.
You can do things with it. It's, it's yours to keep. And I think that's a really key point for all of authors to to understand.
Ricci Wolman: Yeah, absolutely. So let's talk a little bit about, I mentioned an ESP. I wanna just go over the absolute basics of how email marketing works. And when we say email marketing, email marketing is just a fancy way of saying you're sending an email message to somebody's inbox who has opted in with some kind of, you know, plan.
Or message or goal in mind. So when you send your mom or your sister or your kid an email, that's not email marketing, that's just emailing 'cause you're just communicating. What makes it marketing is that you actually have some kind of business goal in mind when you send that email, whether it's to create a relationship with a potential buyer, whether it's to sell books, to get pre-orders, to get reviews.
So the marketing piece just means that you have some kind of goal that you're trying to achieve when you send that. Email itself
Ferol Vernon: something, something I think is really important just [00:11:00] for us to touch on briefly, that you said is it's permission based, right? Yeah. And so, and so when you do email marketing and you send an email to your readers, they've all opted in and said, I wanna see that.
Right. So it's, it's permission based marketing, you know, a reader's on TikTok. TikTok is gonna show them stuff that they maybe haven't opted into. You know what I mean? And so they're much less engaged and I think it's a really important distinction that the email list you have, those are your readers that have said, Hey, like.
I wanna read what you're writing, like quite literally. And so, uh, it's a great community of people to, to keep warm and to communicate with. And, uh, you know, some authors get a little like unsure about marketing and I think it's important to remember the people that are on your list have said, I both agree and want to get marketing from you.
And so, you know, it's a really safe place for you to, to be yourself and, and to talk about what you're doing.
Ricci Wolman: That's a great point. I mean, these are your fans. These are your champions. These are your friendlies. Exactly. So you know, you should feel the most confident and [00:12:00] calm when speaking to this audience because they have raised their hand and say, Hey, I like you.
I wanna hear what you have to say, which is a really cool thing.
Ferol Vernon: So Ricci, we've talked a little bit about like this ESP. We've mentioned it a few times already. Let's get into it like what is an ESP? How should an author use one and pick one? Let's chop it up.
Ricci Wolman: Yeah, sure. So when it comes to email marketing, you have two parties, right?
You have the sender and you have the recipient. So the author in this case is the sender, and in order to send. Marketing emails, which are bulk, where you're sending it to hundreds or thousands of people at a time. You need to do that through something that's called an ESP, which stands for email service provider.
So you can't just go to Gmail and put in a hundred email addresses and then send a marketing email. I actually think you can, but at, at some point you'll, you'll get dinged for that. Once the list gets too big, what you really need to do is have the software called an ESP, that helps you have a signup [00:13:00] page where people can sign up and then allows you to send these bulk emails to the user.
Now, the user, the recipient, the subscriber, those are different names for somebody who signs up. They receive the email through something that's called an email client. So an email client is what? We know as Gmail, Yahoo, apple Mail, outlook. Those are all email clients. So just to recap, you have your ESP, your email service provider.
That's where you as the marketer, the author, send the emails from, and then NA pushes the emails into the inbox, which is owned by the email client, which is the Gmail, the Yahoo, the Apple mail.
Ferol Vernon: Got it. Okay. So that's a great breakdown. And then what, what are some ESPs, uh, that, that are out there that would work for authors?
Ricci Wolman: Yeah, so we actually do an annual author survey every year, and we ask authors what ESPs they're using so we can have really relevant [00:14:00] information for authors as you know, an industry and a group and what they're preferring. In the author survey that we did in the winter of 2024, I'm just looking it up right now.
The top used ESP was mailer light, followed by MailChimp, but then there were also honorable mentions for sand fox Substack. Wix and email octopus. So sometimes if you have a website platform like Wix, it actually comes with built-in email and this is becoming more of a trend. WordPress, I think, just announced that they're gonna have a, a built-in ESP.
So we are seeing some kind of consolidation around instead of an ESP being a standalone piece of software, it now being brought into the ecosystem of other marketing tools. But for the most part, I think Mailer life has been the past few years. One of the favorites. I am seeing Substack really rising in popularity.
I was playing [00:15:00] with Substack a couple weeks ago, and I will say it is extremely easy to get set up and it does, uh, lend itself to discoverability and a lot of rider are on that platform. It tends to be not as. Sales driven, say as some of the other ESPs. Most people in Substack are not making money by selling books necessarily, but by charging for subscriptions.
Yeah, but I do think it's an interesting one to look at. We also have a blog post that we've put up with a grid of the different ESPs that are out there. As of, you know, spring of 2025 and uh, some of the pricing models, you can always go and check that out as well.
Ferol Vernon: And I think there's, there's kind of two flavors of ESP out there.
There's these ESPs, like Substack, like beehive, like ConvertKit, that have like a lot of stuff built in that allow you to, they have like little mini ad networks and discoverability stuff in them. And then, you know, mailer Lite, which was our top email provider for authors this past year. It's very inexpensive.
It's very cheap, and it has the basic tools you need to send marketing emails to [00:16:00] authors and have a basic signup page. And I think that's. Part of the reason why a lot of you know, solopreneur independent authors are using it. 'cause it's really inexpensive and it's a great place to start. And so there's sort of a million of these ESPs out there.
We mentioned a few of them that are popular in the author community, but there's just so many. I think, you know, how should an author go about like picking one of these, like let's say I have an email list, but it's just on a spreadsheet, like I did a book signing, or I have a handful of email addresses and I go to sign up.
Like there's so many things out there. How do I pick one? How do I get started?
Ricci Wolman: The most important thing is to just pick one. So I, I know that it can be overwhelming and there are a ton out there and the truth is you can always switch. It's not, you know, it's a little bit of work to switch 'cause you are getting everything set up, but actually more of the work is doing it the first time and figuring out what your welcome email is gonna say and what your signup page is gonna say.
And so once you have that set up, if you wanted to then move over to another ESP, 'cause you maybe made the wrong choice. Or there's no right or wrong choice. Maybe you outgrow that ESP. Sure. [00:17:00] That's okay. I mean, even at written word, the ESP that we started with when we, you know, first started 10 years ago, and the ESP we're using today are different, and we did have to go through that migration because we have one and a half million subscribers.
And who we started off with initially couldn't support that kind of volume anymore. And it was also price prohibitive. So for most authors signing up, I would say just pick one. You know, mailer, light, the other one you convert, kit, which is now called Kit, is very popular. The mailer, light ConvertKit Send Fox.
I would just pick one of those and set up an account. So you go in, you set up an account, as Ferol said, most of them have, you know, the first at least 1000 subscribers are free. So you can do the free plan. Some of them are gonna charge if you want to have more bells and whistles and features. And I think it's important to not be put off by, by that pricing.
Like once you get your email list going and you start, you do start seeing revenue coming in, you'll feel a lot more comfortable investing in, [00:18:00] you know, a 50 or a hundred dollars a month subscription. But yeah, just pick one. Don't, don't obsess. If you have somebody, a friend or an author friend who, who has an email list and you wanna just ask them and go with what they're using 'cause then they can help you troubleshoot.
That's completely okay. There's no like, really right answer here and there are very few wrong answers. I think Any anybody who's on the list that we have mentioned or that is on our blog post, these are reputable senders and, and you should be good, good with them. So that would be step one, select the ESP and create an account.
And then the first step is you have to set up your signup page. So in order for readers or subscribers to raise their hand and say, I wanna hear from you, they need a way to do that. And most of these ESPs are going to want your subscribers to sign up on a signup page that is connected directly to the ESP.
So they will allow you to import your lists. So if you have gone to a signing and you have a bunch of, you know. Email addresses, people [00:19:00] wrote down, or if you have an Excel spreadsheet somewhere, you can to begin with, import those readers. But you are gonna want to sign up page that automates that process that you know, in your back matter.
And when you're out there marketing, you sending people to that signup page, that those people automatically go onto your list and then automatically get a welcome email, which we'll talk about in a minute.
Ferol Vernon: Yeah. Okay. So sign up for one, you get the signup page and you know, maybe we'll do another pod with, with a little bit more instructions on how to do that.
But, but generally, like if you're, if you're Googling things, you're using any of these AI services to say, Hey, how do I set up my welcome page? Like, or my signup page? You'll be able to figure this out. This is not super, super difficult. And I think something that Ricci said that's really, really important is don't stress if it's not perfect.
Get it up, right, get, you know, you have a landing page and you're like, oh, I dunno if it says the right thing or something doesn't look right, or I can't figure out how to make it say this. Like, don't worry about it, just get it up. The truth is [00:20:00] most people are not gonna see the details that you see. The most important thing is to get started.
And then once you have that, you're off to the races because you can, uh, share that signup page everywhere you go in your back, matter of your book, that last page after the reader finishes it. All those kinds of things. And so you can start centralizing your marketing on your email list, which is really powerful.
Ricci Wolman: Yeah, and you know, growing an email list and building your email list, it's, it's kind of like a compound interest you always wish you had started earlier. So it's just, it's most important to start collecting those email addresses, start getting the habit of sending and not have perfectly the enemy of good here.
Whatever you choose will be fine, and whatever your signup page is will be fine as well. Um, so just. Just do it.
Ferol Vernon: Just do it. Right. Okay. So now I'm an author. I've signed up for my ESP. I have a signup page that's set up. Maybe it's not perfect, but it's there. Now I've got a handful of people on my list. Okay, what on earth do I say to them?
Because I've been, I've talked to lots of authors in person, and [00:21:00] this is a question that we get all the time, right? Like, what do I say? And I'm like, didn't you write 10 books that are, you know, 80,000 words each? And they're like, yeah. And I was like, and you can't figure out what to say on an email to your readers.
And they're like, no, I can't do that. So for the author who is uh, amazing at writing their books, but struggles with writing their emails, what should they do? What should they say?
Ricci Wolman: Yeah, so it is true that for some reason it is scarier to draft the email copy to your readers than it is to draft an entire novel and put it out there in the world.
I get it. It's also part of the magic that makes email marketing so special, right? You kind of feel like you're putting yourself out there in a way. You, every week or every month your name is on the thing, and, um, you're really unsure as to what you should be talking about and sharing. So this is a universal fear and we, we can talk about how to, how to get through it.
What I do wanna circle back to is we, we'll talk about what the content should be and then let's come back to the welcome email. 'cause the welcome email is a really good place to set the stage for your [00:22:00] reader. So once you decide what you are gonna send you, tell them in the welcome email, Hey, this is what you can expect from me, how often you're gonna get, get the emails, and then what are the things I'm gonna talk about?
So when it comes to what you, you should talk about, the best advice I can give is talk about the things that come easily and come naturally and your. Emails. Let's just assume you're gonna do a monthly email, okay. To, to make it simple. You want your emails to be a really nice balance of sharing and talking to your reader.
And then with a little bit of marketing and sales sprinkled in, the biggest mistake I see is that authors set up an email list and then all they do is send emails that are, you know, hard sell hard sell, hard sell.
Ferol Vernon: Yeah. Buy my book, buy my book, buy my book,
Ricci Wolman: buy my book. Pre-order, buy my book. And that is gonna be a turn off.
For readers, they, they signed up yes, to hear about your books, but they also signed up to hear about you. And [00:23:00] so this is your place to actually share more about you, your journey, your life, the things that you are comfortable talking about, and that's gonna be different for everybody. So here is, I'm gonna just list a bunch of things that.
Could be options for what you can talk about in your email. You can talk about your writing process, right? You can say, this is how much I actually wrote this week. This is what I'm working on. This is what I am writing. This is where I got stuck. This is the protagonist that I'm absolutely in love with, and I was trying to pick out her or his outfit for this particular scene.
So there's a lot that is going on in your head and that you're experiencing day-to-day as a writer that people who are not writers think are really cool, right? Yes. I'm not a writer and I love to hear authors talk about their process. I even like to hear about when they get stuck and then how do they break through or where do they go to write and what do, what do they see out in the world that then inspired some scene or character or pet, you know, in, in one of their books.
So. [00:24:00] Just talking about your inspiration, your process. That is something that's super interesting to people who are not writers themselves. You can also share anything just related to your life like you're a human that your readers admire. They kind of look up to in a way, right? 'cause they're like, whoa. I get, I know an author, I know someone with a published book.
And so they're interested and curious about the things that you're interested and curious about. So you can share things like, you know, what cool meal did you make? You know, funny thing that your kid or your pet did that week that made you laugh. Some, you know, TikTok or Instagram that you found really humorous or relatable.
Ferol Vernon: And I think, you know, something that's really important about these is they can be as personal or unpersonal as you want them to be, right? And so authors sometimes, and I think this is an important thing to talk about, like have a pen name, right? So when they wanna talk to their readers and they say, I, it's like, well, this pen name is kind of me, but this other pen name is [00:25:00] also me and I.
Or maybe I have two pen names and I'm a person and nobody knows who I am. And I think readers don't care. They care about your pen name. And so when you are talking, uh, from your pen name and talking about your inspiration or your writing journey or what you're doing, it's okay to just use, say, I did this, even if it's not really you.
Right? And you can talk about. All the things that are going on with you and your books. And sometimes I think you're like, well, nothing really happened this, this month. I, you know, I didn't write that much, or whatever. And it's like, you know, look at your backlist. Pick a book and be like, you know, I was thinking about this book this month and, and why I wrote it.
Right. And then you're talking about a book that you wrote that was your inspiration. Even if you got nothing done all month on your actual new book that you're working on, that's okay. Write about something that happened in the past. Like, these are just stories that you're telling, right? So like you're telling this big, broad story with your novel and in your email you're telling a little mini story about that big story, right?
That's all it is, right? [00:26:00] Hey, like, uh, this week was, this month was productive, this month wasn't productive. Whatever. It doesn't matter, but. Do you all like you? You are naturally if you're an author and you're listening to this, like you are a storyteller and probably a good one. So just tell a story about something and then I think the sales interwoven into that will come naturally once you've built an emotional connection with your reader.
And I don't think this has to be as deep and as poignant as your book necessarily. Like Ricci mentioned, this can be something with your pet that made you think this can be something about interaction with a cashier at the grocery store. Really, anything that you run into, you can build a little story around and, you know, uh, it doesn't have to be that long.
I don't know, Ricci, if you have any thoughts on like how long or how short. These emails need to be, but I think, you know, it can really vary quite a bit between authors and, and what kind of author they are.
Ricci Wolman: Yeah, I, once again, there's no right answer here, right? So some authors have a lot to say and they can write really long [00:27:00] emails, and some authors are like, I don't have that much to say, and it can be short.
What's most important is that you get in the habit of sending, and your readers get in the habit of. Standing when your email's gonna come so they start looking forward to it. So, you know, I have some emails that I subscribe to of authors or you know, people in spaces that are interesting to me and they always send an email on a Friday, and I look forward to that.
I'm like, oh, on Friday afternoon I'm gonna sit down and I'm gonna get to read these two emails and hear what, you know, these people think about the things that they put in their email. So, you know, a simple structure for an email would be to just. You know, have a very brief intro, like, Hey, great to be here.
Happy Friday, or happy first of the month. Whatever your ha habitual schedule's gonna be. Um, then do a little bit on, you know, something engaging, which again, I would lean into what's easy here. So if it's easy for you to talk about your writing process, then talk about that. If it's easy for you to talk about the travel that you did or something in your daily life, [00:28:00] talk about that.
If you know, if it's easier for you to share a book or a quote that you saw that week, do that. If it's not easy, you're not gonna do it. I think in the beginning at least, you're gonna have to experiment with what feels easy and what doesn't. But then once you find things that come to you and like you, that was really easy, you know, stick to that and write it down and be like, okay, it's easy for me to talk about X.
It's really difficult for me to talk about Y. So don't have y be a section in your, your email. Just stick with X. Whatever comes and flows and is easy to talk about. Then you can have a little section that which is your sales section, which is like, Hey, I'm working on book four of this series, or I've got a, you know, a new book coming out that's a pre-order.
Or you could even share a review of a book that came in, whether it be good or bad. Sharing reviews and how they make you feel is an amazing way to connect with your audience. Yeah. While also promoting the book. Right? Because when you read the review, you're talking about the book, and I think it was Willow Winters.
She did an amazing [00:29:00] job of this back in the day where she would actually do videos, I think Instagram? Yeah, where she would read. Her worst reviews that would actually make her cry because people can be so mean. And she would literally read the reviews and cry and say how bad they made her feel. But what this did is make the people watching this really empathetic for her experience, and we've had this before and really mad at those bad reviewers.
Like there's no reason that you have to be so mean. Right. Um, and now you feel like, oh, I'm on Willow's side. I'm gonna go support her. I'm gonna write her book. I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna buy her book and I'm gonna write her an amazing review. And on the flip side, you can read a review that just made you maybe tear up because it was so amazing and you reached somebody that you were hoping to reach when you set off to on this author journey to begin with.
So that's another way to kind of soft. Sell is to talk about reviews of your book, talk about awards that your book ha has received, or accolades. So you can have a little section on that cover. Reveals
Ferol Vernon: are another one. Cover reveals are huge. Yeah. You know, maybe your book's not done yet, but you have the [00:30:00] cover and you're happy with it.
You can share, you can kind of share something like that just with your email list, but not with, you know, the rest of the world. All those kinds of things. I think like it doesn't have to be so earth shattering and like, I think. When I talk to authors, one of the traps that they often fall into is like, well, I only write, you know, one or two books a year.
So like, what am I gonna say in between? And it's like, there's so much to say in between, and I think those of us who are both marketers, but, but honestly, readers like. It's so fun to hear like what writers are doing and what they're going through. So, you know, I think it's really, there's so much you can say and, and don't be too precious about it.
People do want to hear from you. And just to kinda recap kind of some of the things that Ricci said that I think are really, really critical, like there's essentially three or four sections you want in your newsletter, right, that you send to readers. The intro, Hey, I'm whoever this is a newsletter about whatever.
Then little story vignette, something that happened, a book Mention a cell or a view, anything there, and [00:31:00] then an outro, like a sign off like, Hey, you know, that's it for me. Thanks you so much for reading, blah, blah, blah. And I think like what that feels like to the reader is a letter. And like we don't get letters anymore.
So it's, it's cool, it's interesting, it's special and it doesn't have to be earth shattering it to move a reader somewhat emotionally. And once you've built an emotional connection with a reader, you've got them. And, and they'll, they'll buy your stuff. They'll be your reader for life. And I think that's the thing that an email newsletter really can do is, is build that habit using that sort of very simple structure.
Ricci Wolman: I think that's, uh, perfectly recapped. One other trick that you can use for content is to include your readers in whatever it is that you're thinking about or doing by putting a poll into the newsletter. And so if you have a poll one month, then the following month you report back on the poll. So it's uh, it's content that's like a double whammy.
You know, you can basically be like, Hey, I'm thinking about naming my, this. Character, these are the things I'm thinking about or title or the cover. Pick your favorite. And then [00:32:00] in the following month you can be like, Hey, this is what the winner was and this is what I decided, did I decide to use it or not use it?
And so now the, the readers are with you on part of this journey and it's content that starts to create itself through the email itself. So I really love that as kind of a hack as well.
Ferol Vernon: That's amazing. Yeah. Okay, so, alright, so we've talked about like how to get your email set up, how to get an ESP. What to write.
We touched on this briefly, but I think we just spend a few minutes on how often to send. So we've been talking about once a month and you know, we often see some of the most popular newsletters are on a, a weekly basis. How does an author figure out like what's the right cadence for them and like what, what, how often they should send?
Ricci Wolman: Yeah, so once again, this is gonna be highly personal, but there are some parameters here that I would consider. I would say at the very least, you wanna send once a month. So once a month. And that's perfectly fine to send it once a month, which is 12 issues, uh, a year. [00:33:00] And, uh, that will get. Get you into the habit of doing it.
I don't think you wanna be sending much more than once a week. So you wanna be somewhere between once a week and once a month. So that could mean a weekly email. It can mean a, an email every two weeks, or it can mean an email every month. You definitely don't wanna send every day because you're gonna, it's called burning your audience.
If you send something every single day, that's a lot of content. Unless of course you're into like breaking news or you're a sports, you know, into sports, or there's actually a lot to talk about on a daily basis. I wouldn't recommend daily. So I'd pick, I think your three options here is weekly, every two weeks or every month, and I would pick one of those and then just stick to that schedule.
If you're on monthly and then you wanna come down to every two weeks or weekly, that's totally fine. If you wanna go weekly to monthly, that's okay too. You just wanna communicate with your audience when you change. The habit. Yeah. Um, and you can just do that in email and say, Hey, I usually send weekly, [00:34:00] but the summer is coming up and I'm traveling.
So during the summer you'll only get an email from me every month. And then I'll be back to my weekly schedule. And that's totally fine. Again, that actually works in your advantage 'cause your audience feels like they have a little bit of an inner glimpse into your world and your reality. The other thing I would say is about.
Your schedule is tell people upfront in your welcome email how often you'll be sending and when they can expect that, because then that primes your readers to know, okay, I'm gonna get the email every Friday and might inbox, or, you know, every month on the first Monday or the first of the month, or whatever it might be.
So it's good to actually communicate that and mention it. Um, it also helps to keep you accountable because now you know there's people out there who are expecting that that email, because you've told them it's coming.
Ferol Vernon: Amazing. Okay. Something important that we haven't gotten into in depth yet is this welcome email, right?
And so this is the email that is automatically triggered when somebody signs up for your list. It's an introduction to who you are and what you're gonna send. So [00:35:00] Ricci, what are some things that authors should think about when they're creating a welcome email and, you know, what is the actual essence of, of what that email should be?
Ricci Wolman: Yeah, so the welcome email is really critical and your ESP will every ESP will have this. Feature available to you where after you've set up your signup page, they'll prompt you or there'll be a section to say, set up your welcome email. Um, and as Ferol alluded to, when someone signs up within five minutes of signup, this welcome email will automatically send.
So it's something you don't have to do. Manually, it's something that'll automatically go. And why the welcome email is so important is it's your first touchpoint with the reader and it reminds them that, hey, they have opted in, they did sign up. And it also sets expectations so they know what to expect from you.
So the welcome email again, can be very, very simple. Um, you wanna stop by saying thank you, right? So start on like a really positive note and just be like, thank you so much for signing up for my list. You know, it really means a lot to me. I'm so happy that [00:36:00] you're here. Introduce yourself, you know, to say, I am, this is my name.
I'm an author of, you know, talk about your genre. I'm an author of romance books or thriller books. Again, share as little or as much as you want. You can say, I live in, you know, the south and the west in the uk and I have, you know, a pet dog, horse, whatever. You know, it's just something personal about who you are.
If you did have a lead magnet for signup, if you had promised something, if you said, if you sign up for my email address, you'll get a free ebook. You need to have that in the welcome email. So you say, as promised, here's the link to the free ebook, or here's the link to the novella. So make sure that's in your welcome email.
And then the last thing is to ask, uh, basic question and then ask your subscribers to reply with an answer. And this is just a deliverability. Trick because part of what's happening as well, when people sign up and you send your welcome email is those email clients we talked about, Gmail, Yahoo Outlook.
They're trying to decide if you're a good sender or if [00:37:00] you're a spammy sender. And one of the signals is if you send something to someone and they respond, then they know this is not spam because the recipient actually interacted with the sender. Now what we've learned is if you ask a question that requires people to think, they don't really like to respond, so just make it super simple.
Just be like, Hey, in order to make sure my emails, make it into your inbox. Please reply with, Hey there, please reply with your favorite color. Like, just make it something super simple so people can hit the reply button, and then you get that kind of deliverability connection, and then sign your name and your, you're all done.
Ferol Vernon: And I think something that authors really need to know that was really surprising to me, but that we see all the time is they're like, well, is anybody really gonna reply? And, and the answer is yes. Like people do reply. It's so cool. And so you're sending this newsletter and you know, maybe even if you ask, uh, for reply or you don't, but like people will write back to you directly and I think.
One of the things about it that's [00:38:00] so pure and so wonderful is that communication is one-to-one, right? And so if somebody has something sort of negative to say, or if they have a problem with something you said, they say it to you, they don't broadcast it out loud, right? So unlike social media where things can get real toxic real fast, when people pile on and things, there's a lot of negativity.
The conversational tone about email back and forth with your reader is like one of the really great things. And like people will tell you if, if what you're doing is good or not good, they'll be like, Hey, you know, I really loved your newsletter this week. And you're just like, oh thanks. And it's crazy how simple interactions like that.
Yes, they'll help your deliverability, but really what they help you with is this relationship with your reader. And it's just really, I've always been really surprised and, and we here at written Word Media. You heard, we send, you know, hundreds of millions of emails. We get replies every day and we, and we respond to them.
And that was something that I just was so shocked about how people are just really willing to engage with you and it's, it's a really cool thing.
Ricci Wolman: And it's really amazing, you know, when we get those emails, which we do get quite a lot of them [00:39:00] now, people tell stories, you know? Yeah. They, they thank us for the, the book recommendations of that day.
They tell stories about how they grabbed a children's book and they read it to their grandchild or they talk about, you know, how they were, they were bored. And finding, you know, books through our service has changed their life. I mean, it's really heartwarming once you start connecting with the audience and hearing their stories and, you know, email allows that, and it's a really powerful thing.
Ferol Vernon: Yeah. Okay, great. So just to wrap, we've got a few things that we've talked about today, but let's, let's just sum them up for the audience. So we have talked about email and how important it's. How it's this incredible way to connect with your readers. We've talked about technically how to do it. That's picking an ESP, getting it set up, picking a signup form in that ESP, making sure that's set up and getting your welcome email there, right?
So those, those are kind of the three tactical steps. And then, you know, in terms of like what to write. Write about things that come easy to you. Pick a schedule and stick to it and just commit to sending that email on [00:40:00] that schedule. And once you've done those things, like you are off to the races, you are email marketing, right?
So it's those five things and I think it's just really important for our authors to get started. And the other thing that we'll say is you can always write in to ask questions. Even though written word media does not send emails for you, we are not an ESP for authors. We're happy to help. If you have trouble with this, if you can't figure out what to say, you write into our inbox at [e-mail] and the nice people that work that work with us will will respond to you.
Ricci Wolman: I mean, I could talk about email all day long. This is, this is, you know, super fun. What I would say is your email list is gonna be by far your most valuable asset as you're building your business. So just, just do it, set it up, start building it slowly. Then there are, when you start getting into email marketing, there's gonna be a lot of chatter about a lot of other things.
So we'll do additional episodes on that, right? So stuff like, uh, deliverability, we'll do an episode about how to think about that and what you should or shouldn't worry about. And, um. [00:41:00] A couple of other topics, and if you write in, we'll, actually we'll do some pods on the topics that you ask about, but you know, don't buy the hype.
Don't believe that email marketing's dead. This is going to be something that you'll be so glad that you did. So hopefully we were able to help a little bit today by guiding you in the right direction.
Ferol Vernon: That is it for this podcast, this edition of the Written Word Media Podcast. I am feral and this is Ricci.
As always, thank you all for listening and we will talk to you next time.
Ricci Wolman: Bye.