Mark J. Dawson - Mastering Simple Facebook Ads For Authors

Why You Should Have a Mailing List

A mailing list is the most powerful marketing tool that any creative professional has at his or her disposal for several reasons.

Lets look at the case of a writer. When Amazon, Nook, Apple, or Barnes & Noble sell one of your books, they have the email address of the customer who bought it. Unfortunately, that information isnt available to us, the writers, and so we have no way of reaching out to that customer directly if we want to let them know of a new release or special offer or anything else. Instead, we have to rely on the retailers to do it for us. Not ideal, right?

Now, imagine for a moment what would happen if Amazon were to suddenly decide that they no longer wanted to sell books. Highly unlikely, of course, but what would happen to that master list of all the customers who had bought a copy of your book from them in the past? How would you, the author, reach those customers to let them know that your stories are still available on other platforms, or from your own website?

You guessed it: without their email addresses, you couldnt.

But with a mailing list of your own, even in the unlikely event that Amazon folded tomorrow morning, youd have no problem at all driving each and every one of those customers to your own website.

Another very compelling reason to have a mailing list is the impact it can have on your book launches. My most recent release reached the top 60 on Amazon.com and the top 25 on Amazon.co.uk, selling over 3,000 copies and generating revenue in the region of 15,000 in the first twenty-four hours. This was solely as a result of using my mailing list to its maximum effect. I first used it to recruit advance readers, to make sure that my book had early reviews (more on this in a minute), and then I broadcast news of the release far and wide.

Using a mailing list this way makes successful launches possible. In my particular case, the knock-on effect of that strong launch was that the book was catapulted onto several best-seller lists. Better yet, due to the way Amazons algorithm works, my book continued to rank highly and garner strong sales for the next thirty days and beyond!

Early reviews, which I mentioned a moment ago, are an essential element in my launch strategy, and having a mailing list means that I can soft-launch my book to a section of my list prior to the hard launch, when I announce that the book is available to everyone else. For my most recent book, this meant that by the time that I publicised the release, the book already had over 100 reviews on Amazon. These reviews are crucial as social proof, and can be influential in converting wavering browsers into readers.

These are just some of the reasons why having a mailing list is so important. It puts you in the drivers seat in terms of communicating your product to your audience and as such it can make an incalculable difference to your career as an author.