If you’re an author who has already started building an email list, read these stats and then pat yourself on the back!

If you haven’t started building your essential email list yet, prepare to be motivated. Here are three important email marketing statistics you can’t overlook.

1. Email is 40 times more effective at acquiring customers than Facebook and Twitter combined.

McKinsey & Company, the source of that statistic, adds that email is only the start of the author’s relationship with the reader. In addition to being thoughtful about what goes into each email message, authors should also about where the link in that message sends the reader. “Landing pages” — website pages with no links that take people off the page — customized to your email message can increase sales by 25 percent.

2. Email offers a 4,300 percent return on investment, according to the Direct Marketing Association.

What’s more, Email Expert reports that every $1 spent on email marketing generates $44.25 on average.

3. 95 percent of those who opt into email messages from brands say the messages are somewhat or very useful.

This statistic from the 2014 Mobile Behavior Report is a good reminder to make sure the content you send to your email list is focused on the recipient — your fans — not the sender — you.

You can’t avoid email any longer

If you still aren’t convinced, read Joan Stewart’s 10 reasons why authors should start building an email list.  Don’t wait any longer to start building your list — you won’t regret it.

What do you like about the email newsletters you receive now? What appeals to you?

Tip of the Month

I always share a “Tip of the Month,” a free resource or tool for authors, on the last Wednesday of the month.

Today it’s one of my own gifts to you.

Download a free copy of my e-book, Author Email Newsletter Samples. It’s 64 pages of actual author email newsletters generously provided by 15 authors who are using email marketing right now to build and nurture their fan base.

Use these examples to get you thinking about what will work best for your newsletter. Make note of what you like and what you don’t like as you scroll through the file.

You can get your copy of Author Email Newsletter Samples here.

10 rock-solid reasons why authors should build an email list

By Joan Stewart, The Publicity Hound

Two weeks before launching her book, the frantic author calls, begging me to help her identify every possible reader who might be interested in her book, and brainstorm ways to reach them.

One of my first questions always is, “Do you have an email list?”

“Only a list of family and friends,” she says. “But they’re sick of hearing about my book.”

When that scene repeats itself every few weeks, my heart breaks.

Without an email list of people who have raised their hands and given you permission to market to them, you’re leaving thousands of dollars, as well as stacks of unsold books, on the table.

Email: A profitable power tool for authors

After building two email lists for more than 15 years – one with 7,000 names in my shopping cart and one with 6,300 names in AWeber, my email management program, I can’t think of a marketing tool that comes anywhere close to making money faster than email does.

Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Work Week, built a list of more than 250,000 fans but did nothing with it for three years. When he finally started emailing regularly, he realized that he had been “sitting on Fort Knox.”

Your list doesn’t have to be as big as his, or even as big as mine. A small list of just a few hundred fans can reap dividends if you mail interesting content on a regular schedule. Don’t start building a list but delay mailing because you “don’t have enough names.” I started with only one.

If you haven’t written your book yet, you’re in a much better position than the author above who’s launching in two weeks. You have time to build your list and give readers a chance to know, like, and trust you.

Here are 10 rock-solid reasons why you should start building a list now, regardless of your genre and whether you write fiction or nonfiction.

1. Email can be your secret weapon.

At least nine out of 10 authors don’t market with email. Maybe it’s because so many authors are introverts and just want to be left alone to write books.

That means huge potential to attract a solid list of fans who are interested in your topic and hungry for your content. Why? Because so few authors are providing it.

2. It’s inexpensive.

Don’t believe what you hear about needing a big email list. A small list of several hundred loyal fans who love you can be much more valuable than a list of 50,000, most of whom might not bother opening your emails.

My AWeber program costs only $69 a month to email as often as I wish to about 6,300 people who subscribe to my free email tips on publicity. I also clean my list regularly, which means I remove people who don’t open my emails within six months. Why pay to mail to someone who isn’t interested?

If you don’t have a budget, you can use the free version of easy-to-use MailChimp, until your list grows and you need the paid version. Or you can switch to AWeber which has an A+ help desk with phone support.

3. You’ll have a ready-made list of fans in place before you launch — and you own the list.

Even with a list of only a few hundred, you can convince some of them to let their friends and followers know about your book.  The more valuable your content, the more eager they will be to help you.  Authors who don’t have email lists are at a huge disadvantage on launch day.

If you have a big following on Facebook, relying solely on social media can be dangerous because you don’t own the property. Do a Google search for “my Facebook fan page disappeared” and you’ll see how many people, some of them authors, have lost thousands of fans that took years to attract.

4. It’s the fastest, most efficient way to communicate with a big group of fans.

OK, so you’re on Facebook.  Not all your fans are, however. Same with Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, Google+, and other social media sites. Think about how much time you spend sharing one piece of content to multiple sites. And how little traction you build.

In less than 20 minutes, you can send one well-written email message about a special promotion you’re running and watch your Amazon numbers change.

If subscribers decide they don’t want to receive your emails, they can click the “unsubscribe” link without bothering you. If they do ask you to unsubscribe them, do it, and don’t try to change their minds.

5. You can send follow-up messages automatically to build the relationship.

If you want to see how this works, grab my free cheat sheet “10 Profitable Ways to Use Email to Create SuperFans Who Help You Sell Books.”  (Note from editor: That offer is no longer available, so we’ve removed the link.)

Over the next several days, you’ll receive a series of four email messages, asking you for feedback on my tips. The emails are so short and simple–without photos or fancy fonts–that  many authors thank me for responding. Some think I wrote the plain text emails only for them because they look exactly like the emails their family and friends send. Save the fancy templates for your newsletter.

6. You can separate your fans by what interests them. 

This means that if you’re using a decent email management program, you can place subscribers onto separate lists according to where they live, their occupation, products purchased, or other criteria. By doing this, you can email all your fans in, say, Boston, to let them know you’ll be doing a book signing at a Boston bookstore. You don’t have to pester the hundreds of other people on your list who don’t care about that event.

You can also send an entire series of follow-up messages to just one segment. Segmenting readers is a powerful tool if you’ve written books on unrelated topics.

7. You can convert casual observers on your list into a smaller circle of loyal fans, and those loyal fans into a smaller but more valuable circle of what I call SuperFans.

Kevin Kelly, the founding executive editor of Wired magazine, writes about the importance of SuperFans or what he calls “True Fans.” These are people who can’t stand to be without anything you produce.

Here’s an excerpt from the book The Curve: From Freeloaders Into Superfans by Nicholas Lovell.

“A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author–in other words, anyone producing works of art–needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living,” Kelly writes.

“They will drive 200 miles to see you sing. They will buy the super deluxe re-issue hi-res box set of your stuff even though they have the low-res version. They have a Google Alert set for your name. They bookmark the eBay page where your out-of-print editions show up.

“They come to your openings. They have you sign their copies. They buy the T-shirt and the mug, and the hat. They can’t wait till you issue your next work. They are true fans.”

And they make the cash register go ka-ching, ka-ching.

8. You can interest people in your topic, and give them time to know, like, and trust you before you ask them to buy anything.

If you follow the 80-20 rule of marketing – share 80 percent valuable or interesting content and 20 percent promotions – you can’t go wrong.

What’s valuable content? How-to tips, stories, information about emerging trends, helpful tools you love using, writing tips, and even step-by-step instructions on how to do something.

An author who writes horror novels can show people how to make a Halloween mask that resembles a character in the book.  A romance author can explain how singles can have fun on Valentine’s Day without a significant other. The author of poetry books can share a “Top 10” list of websites for readers who want to try their hand at writing poetry.

9. If you blog, you can send a “blog broadcast” to your email list whenever you publish a new post, or you can send a weekly wrap-up of links to your posts.

I don’t do this but some of my author clients do. I love the idea because it encourages them to blog on a regular basis. And they don’t have to rely only on the search engines to pull traffic to their blogs.

10. Fans who love you on social media, but see your content sporadically, can subscribe to your email list so they don’t miss a beat.

Content you publish to Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook can drop far down in someone’s feed within minutes. If they aren’t in front of their computers when you publish it, they can miss it. Email, on the other hand, stays in their inbox until they delete it.

Have I convinced you?

If you’re thinking about writing a book, or if you’ve already published, start building an email list now.

What questions do you have about email marketing? Do you use it? If so, what results have you seen? Share your questions and success stories in the comments.

We often forget, however, that we can get positive, powerful, and meaningful book reviews from just about anyone who loves books — including you and me. As the Association of Booksellers for Children reported in late 2010, more than half of the people it surveyed on book purchasing influences cited “books my friends and family recommended” as a major factor in their book buying decisions. The survey noted that just over one-third — 38 percent — of the respondents said they were influenced by book reviews in magazines and newspapers.

Goodreads.com is a powerhouse for authors

The largest source of those non-media reviewers — the people who love reading as much as we do — is Goodreads.com. With more that 7.3 million members, Goodreads.com gives book lovers a chance to create virtual bookshelves (with more than 260 million books!) that others can peruse. Those members not only share what they’re reading with their personal Goodreads networks, they also review and recommend those books, or create lists that announce what they want to read next.

The impact this site can have on your book’s success is astounding, so when I got an e-mail from “Publicity Hound” Joan Stewart telling me that she was going to host a webinar that explained how to use Goodreads and many other reader review sites effectively, I knew I had to be on it.

Because I’m one of Joan’s affiliates (I occasionally recommend products or programs of hers that I’ve used; I receive a small commission on resulting sales), Joan graciously gave me a complimentary pass to her program, “Where to Find Millions of Readers Online to Review, Recommend & Buy Your Books.” (This link and others to Joan’s program here use my affiliate link. It doesn’t cost you more to use it.)

I was blown away by the amount of helpful and very, very specific information Joan covered in 90 minutes. I took good notes so that I could share information here, but this report is no substitute for the webinar and Joan’s handouts, so you might want to consider purchasing the program and taking your own notes now that she has made the recording available.

Webinar tips 

The program covers ways to increase our exposure in four site categories:

1. Book review sites, forums, and discussion groups
2. Librarians
3. Bloggers and social media
4. Freelance writers and others

Here are some of my favorite revelations from the program, which covered a whopping 35 review sites:

• I see a lot of discussions in author forums about the wisdom (or necessity) of advertising on Goodreads.com. The good news is that you don’t need to spend money on advertising if you use the site appropriately for book promotion purposes. For example, did you know you can import your blog to your profile so that your posts show up on Goodreads, too, and that you can join local groups of book lovers on the site? Joan talked quite a bit about what you can do with Goodreads– too much for me to summarize here, unfortunately.
• You can purchase a review from Kirkus Reviews. If you don’t like it, the magazine won’t publish it. Self-published author Darcie Chan bought one, got a good review, and sold nearly a half million copies of her e-book.
• Never respond to negative reviews. Nothing good will come from it.
• If you write romance novels, you need to plug into RTBookReviews.com.
• Book review sites like books that are just about to be published, so look into early reviewer programs.
• If you write science fiction, you might be aware of Locus Magazine, but did you know that librarians are influenced by its reviews when considering science fiction purchases?

I learned about a lot of sites I had never heard of (but need to explore), but I also learned more about how to use those sites I was aware of already. I strongly recommend you consider this resource if you want to generate more online reviews for your book. You’ll get the webinar video file, an audio file, a PDF file of the PowerPoint slides you can refer back to regularly, and a PDF file listing very specific URLs for the 35 sites covered during the program (one thing I like about Joan is that she’s detail oriented, which means that you don’t get the generic home page URL for each of these sites — you get the exact URL you need to start making things happen for your book on these sites).

Have you had success generating reader or media reviews from online sites? Can you offer any tips?