Building Author Income: Email Lists
Many successful and newer authors will strive to build a social media footprint for a number of reasons. Gaining market insight, meeting potential readers and building communities are all great reasons to get onto communication channels such as Twitter, Facebook and Google+. The question that authors come up against is how to translate all that overhead activity into income in order to make it all worthwhile.
After all, the majority of us are not investing time and energy into social media marketing of our books for the good of mankind or even to change the world. Although they are noble aims, there is one underlying issue that needs to be addressed – we all need to make an income to live.
Here’s an approach that will fulfil that need that you might not be aware of:
If you have an author website, it’s essential that you have a contact-details-capture feature where your visitors can leave their email address. A subscriber list will make it possible to send a blog post each time you publish one, and also make it possible to send other emails. Staying in the minds of your contacts is very important so that you can promote further works to them and build a relationship with them.
These other emails will give you a chance to not only communicate more about yourself and your works, but by focusing on building these up, you can then introduce a way to make an income.
You can introduce offers. These don’t even have to be books. You can introduce offers that are related to your field and relevant to your works. Over time, you can develop this into a sustainable business. Find more email subscribers, offer more special deals and all along your people will get to know you better and trust you more. Credibility is absolutely key when selling anything, even more so online. Repeated engagement is one way to build credibility and trust.
Offers can be in the form of paid advertisements, or they may be products that you have put together yourself, for example, training workshops, trips to the venues of your books and more.
There are a number of ways to turn your list into an income building machine. It just takes some thought and tweaking to get this right. Many authors have found a way to build a regular income from offers that go beyond their books. By applying these approaches, you can too.