Marketing 101: Mailing Lists & Newsletters

Screenwriting Tricks for Authors

The New Year seems to be the time that authors get frantic — I mean serious — about doing something —anything!— about marketing.

I’ve been having the “What marketing really works?” conversation with my publishers; my webmistress; and a bunch of established authors, traditionally published and hybrid. I’ve decided that I should both prompt myself to do what I need to do and possibly help any of you who want to do that too — by taking a few weeks to write and collect some posts on the business of writing.

But first things first.

The first thing is that yes, the US is in the middle of a continuing coup, and I urge everyone to keep calling senators and reps to protest —

Well, where to even start?

But getting rid of the ketamine-addled billionaire who is as we speak happily, illegally, and unconstitutionally accessing our private personal data with the help of a team of un-vetted teenage tech bro hackers (with online handles like “Big Balls” and the one who just had to quit the henchman team because he was - of course - making white supremacist posts online) —seems like a priority to me.

• Call your senator

• Call your representative

• It takes just a few minutes to contact your representatives using 5 Calls: http://www.5calls.org

But we also have to KEEP WRITING. What we really don’t need is for the supporters of the racist rapist felon to be getting all the book deals while the rest of us slowly or not so slowly go mad. So—

If you don’t want to take time from your writing to focus on business right now, and need to keep working through Story Structure:

• I’ve now worked my way through the Story Structure of a book or film Act by Act, Sequence by Sequence - again! - and all those posts and videos are available in the archives.

• If you don’t know where to start, most of the essential posts are listed and linked here.

• Of course the Screenwriting Tricks for Authors workbooks go through all of this story structure in an order that I know has worked for hundreds and thousands of writers over the years:

  —Stealing Hollywood

  —Writing Love

• There are also 15 minute (and shorter!) videos on Story Structure on the Screenwriting Tricks for Authors YouTube channel.

That should do you for Story Structure for a couple of weeks, and I’m always here to answer questions.

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So now - let’s talk Marketing.

I’m currently, simultaneously having the “What marketing really works?” conversation with my publishers and a lot of established authors, traditionally published and hybrid — and the same conversation with my brilliant webmistress as we do a long-overdue overhaul of my author website (and yes, updating your website needs to be on your Marketing To Do list).

One of those conversations is always about mailing lists and newsletters.

Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash

(Yes, authors used to have to send out actual letters, with actual stamps. So let’s count that blessing….)

Do you have one? Do you need one? Do you need to be sending it out every month, quarterly, what? How much is too much? And what’s the best platform to house it on?Well…

1. Yes, you need a mailing list!

You need a direct mailing list of emails that are under YOUR control, not subject to the whims of the unelected ketamine-addled Nazi billionaire.

Unfortunately, you have no record of your own of all those followers you’ve amassed on Twitter and Meta, and the algorithm does not work in your favor. And a lot of your friends and followers aren’t your readers, anyway.

You need to be collecting emails from your readers that you control yourself.

As I’ve said here before, I strongly believe in the “1000 True Fans” theory of how to make a living in publishing (in conjunction with many other strategies, of course). That is:

A core of 1000 True Fans will do enough in word of mouth to sell enough of your books to keep you in business as a writer.

And you want those 1000 True Fans on your mailing list, where you will keep them serviced and loyal to you with periodic, unspammy newsletters of new book announcements, travel pics, cat videos, giveaways, and fun or scandalous personal information (that you choose to divulge, rather than having it stolen by the above mentioned ketamine-addled billionaire and his little gang of Nazi tech bro teenagers.)

2. What platform should I be using?

The platforms authors seem to use most often to collect email addresses are MailChimp, Constant Contact, BookFunnel, ConvertKit & MailerLite - but there are lots of others.

And - you can also use Substack for your mailing list.

Substack is free, no matter how many subscribers you have. It’s incredibly user-friendly. You might already have a newsletter that’s making some money for you, or might be thinking of monetizing yours, which Substack also makes incredibly easy to do. And you’re already ON Substack, aren’t you? So it’s worth thinking about.

Or better yet, just create your own Substack right now and start experimenting. No time like the present, and did I mention it’s free?

There is a LOT to unpack about Substack, but let me start with the basics today.

First, in the past, I’ve paid a newsletter service to collect my mailing list and send out newsletters (that I wrote). And even though someone else was designing and sending the newsletter for me, I had to work a lot harder than I do now by sending out my Substack newsletters myself.

I’ve also used MailChimp and found it a lot of work, not very artistically pleasing, and you have to pay for lists of over 3000 people.

To me, Substack blows all that out of the water.

I think it’s very worth mentioning that my brilliant webmistress, who designs and runs gorgeous websites for hundreds of crime and other genre authors, thinks that Substack has become so important for authors that she urged me to have my various Substacks on my home page and in a separate section with its own tab. (See more of Maddee’s and Ryan’s work here).

Another big plus for me is that Substack has become a hugely important and highly-trafficked hub of progressive and hard=hitting journalism, which should interest people joining the great X-odus and looking to get off Meta. BlueSky is relatively troll-less and great for breaking news — but its short form is no good for newsletters or monetizing your content. Threads also has the problem of being short form AND owned by Meta.

While the relatively new short form Notes and Chat sections of Substack have not really found their stride yet, those features are available, and there is potential for much more community interaction there. I’m only just starting to make use of it. The more of us novelists/screenwriters who use it, the faster we can build community far away from the reach of the Nazi octopus.

There’s also the built-in option of video here, although since I’ve got my story structure videos collated on YouTube I haven’t made use of it, so I can’t speak to that.

And there is a built-in podcast option - check out this one by my brilliant and hilarious British author/lawyer colleague Nadine Matheson: The Pivot.

You’re subscribed to this Substack newsletter, obviously, so you have at least some idea of how Substack works. Another thing you should know is that Substack allows you to easily create several different newsletters with their own mailing lists.

And if that idea has just given you a severe case of hives, let me assure you that I am just as social media-averse as the next person, but I find Substack so, so easy to set up, navigate, and maintain.

Some Substack features I especially love are:

• How easy it is to set up the option to buy a paid subscription - and how quickly people started paying for my content. (Although I must say - I give good content.)

• The extensive library of FREE stock photos through UnSplash that are super easy to insert into your posts/newsletters and are honestly a lot of fun to browse.

• The look of the newsletters in general I think is really high quality for how easy they are to create.

• Clear, simple data analysis pages to show you how many people are reading each newsletter and clicking on your links. If you want to get into that! No pressure!

• You can post on the Substack site without sending out the newsletter if you don’t want to, and you can send the newsletter out just to smaller, targeted segments of your mailing list.

• The open rate for emails is great. “The average open rates for most Substack newsletters is between 40-70% — a stark comparison to traditional brand newsletters that might see a 15-20% open rate.”

• If your newsletter is on Substack, you will pick up new subscribers FROM Substack! Substack is also a social media platform, and your emails get posted to the app. And Substack very much leans progressive— good news for most authors.

• The Social media assets. Instead of going through the whole Canva process to generate a shareable image with text to advertise your posts on other platforms, Substack makes them for you. Just one click, and you get something like the below, in various sizes to suit different platforms. You don’t have to do ANY work!

  

While this Screenwriting Tricks for Authors newsletter is the only one of mine that goes out every week, I also have my history and politics newsletter, After the Gold Rush, with fewer mailings but a larger range of subscribers:

And I’ve decided to move my author mailing list over to Substack, too. I haven’t launched it or brought on my mailing list yet, but you’re welcome to poke around and see how I’m building it!

I want to start posting more about my own thrillers there, and I think the best way to do that is to create a Section, like this one that I’m just starting to build:

With a Section, I can send more frequent newsletters just to people who sign up for THAT section.

I’ll report back on how that’s working for me once I launch it and have more data.

But that’s enough for now. The very best thing you can do to figure out if Substack is for you is to try it! I’m happy to answer questions as you work your way through it - your questions are the best way for me to learn how to make best use of this platform, too!

Ask away! And call, call, call your reps.

—Alex

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Get the workbooks:

• Stealing Hollywood ebook, $4.99, also available as print workbook

• Writing Love ebook, $2.99

Need some help? The Screenwriting Tricks for Authors workshop is available online, as a self-paced course with all the videos, assignments, movie breakdowns and personalized feedback you need to get that book written this year. In three parts, and you only pay for what you use.

One-on-one coaching also available in The Writers’ Room.

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All material ©Alexandra Sokoloff, Screenwriting Tricks for Authors