Selfpublishing thoughts: Building a newsletter

I have read several articles that hammers three things: Backlist, backmatter and newsletter.  I am working on the backlist part, and backmatter is something that I try to regularly update.  But my newsletter, is something that has been forgotten in the last year since I have been focus on on revising Daughter of the Dark.

Anyway, last year I did an unintended newsletter drive when I participated in Night Owl Reviews scavenger hunt.  This year, I decided to do an more organized drive, since I am planning on releasing a book soon. I have an instafreebie account, and I knew that they have a Mailchimp integration for the paid version, so I decided to try it for a month.

Since Exile is tied in to the upcoming releases I decided to give it away, and make opt-in compulsary.  I had very low expectations, but to my surprise 30 people have signed up so far, which is more than I expected. ( the low expectations stemmed from the last time I tried to give away copies of Exile.)

The only thing that I regret, is that I didn’t do it closer to Octocon/Eurocon.  Oh well. I haven’t ordered any swag anyway.  Cause I have been a bit scatterbrained trying to finish this book.  Which explains why I have a long to do list with e-mails to send.

I think next time, I will try ask my friends to do a coordinated promo. Cause those looks fun. Anyway. This was a fun promo experiment that worked out really well.