IRRITATED RANT INCOMING
I just got one of my trad publishers’ for-the-authors newsletter arrived and one of their topics is “how to grow your newsletter organically!”
You know what the #1 best way to grow it would be?
The NUMBER ONE BEST WAY to grow it would be for THE TRAD PUBLISHERS to let us put OUR NEWSLETTER LINKS into THEIR EBOOKS
But they don’t want to do that. Not because it’s hard, because it isn’t: they could just put it into the About The Author at the end, or on the Also By page. It would be SOME work, yes, a small extra step, and it would add up across many books, but that’s not the real reason.
The real reason is that they want to put links to THEIR newsletters into the books, if they put any in at all. They want readers to sign up for THEIR newsletters, not ours. They want the ability to sell MANY THINGS directly to the readers, which: I get. That’s fair.
But what isn’t fair is then trying to put the onus of reaching our readers ENTIRELY ON US. “Do all this nonsense that frankly will not actually work in any meaningful way, while we chokehold the one thing that WOULD potentially drive significant numbers of subscribers to your newsletter!”
This particular time they had a reader feedback survey in the newsletter and I responded to yell about this, because honestly, it’s a huge frustration to me. :grumpy face:
Anyway, yes, the link up at the top is to sign up for my newsletter, as if you’re not already signed up, and I’ll put the link here again because I do understand that I would be rather Missing The Point if I didn’t right now. :p