Are Professional Newsletter Services Worth it for Anchored Authors

Sooner or later, as a published author, you’ll be guilted into running a newsletter in some form or another.  The PR and marketing experts will keep thrusting it down your throat that you can’t afford to stay out of contact with your regular readers and fans, and a newsletter is the only elegant way to reach them over and over again.

Unfortunately, they’re dead right.

While blogs are brilliant for reaching masses of people on an informal basis, and for reaching many, many more people once-off, newsletters are the only way I’ve yet to discover for bringing news to a set group of people on a regular schedule.

But that regular schedule, and the form of transport you use to deliver the newsletter, provides its own set of problems, thanks to the headaches of email. I suppose you could use snail mail if you really wanted to.  I’ve toyed with the idea myself from time to time, but it’s expensive, slow and by the time you get it out the door, the news is already dated.  I don’t think anyone is doing snail mail newsletters anymore…except maybe the odd newsletter to bookstores.  For readers, email is the standard.  And email comes with problems.

I eluded to some of the problems in my earlier post, “Stories Rule! is dead…Long Live Stories Rule!“, but didn’t get into details.  In that post I mentioned that:

“I considered going back to iContact and doing the pay-through-the-nose professional newsletter route, but … I always felt like I was being ripped off and manipulated for a number of reasons”

Here’s some of the minor headaches you may have to face, if you’re not already juggling them.  This is the footnote I have at the bottom of my sign-up page, on my website.

“I agonized over how to do the newsletter. Which sounds odd, as I’ve been doing a newsletter for at least ten years, so why the hand-wringing?

Allow me to explain.

You as a reader probably don’t realize what an angst-filled exercise just sending out a monthly newsletter is for most authors. It looks pretty simple on the surface of it. Just write it and send it out. Simple, eh?

But when your readership list gets a bit bigger you can’t do it yourself, if you’re not terribly technically minded. (Although I am — “geek” is my other second name.) So, I can hear you say: “Use Yahoo Groups.”

However, every promotions and marketing person worth their salt just shuddered at your words. Yahoo and other free list and group email managers have a number of drawbacks for authors, including exposing their readers’ email addresses to hackers and other privacy issues, and the author to potential litigation.

There are professional solutions that cost anywhere from about $30 a month up to “oy vey!” depending on how many addresses are on your list and how many times you email a month…plus you have to use their emailing templates and program interfaces, and a whole lot of other rules and by-laws. Put together with a number of other reasons, I declined to renew my contract after a year. These are the services that the promoters and PR people insist that authors should be using if they are to look like “professional” authors. Despite declining to use the service, I still consider myself a professional author.

For a while I tried switching my newsletter over to a blog — the very short lived Stories Rule. I prefer the more intimate, closed circuit readership of readers who want to hear my news, not the odd reader who stumbles over my blog when they’re bored and looking for distracting entertainment.

So my final decision is…I’m going to run my newsletter myself. All me, myself and I, with no professional, expensive mediators or middlemen telling me how my newsletter will look, when it will go out, or how often I can afford to send it. Which is why all I’m asking you to send me is a simple email with your first name.”

So, as promised, here’s my objections to professional email distribution services – the reasons why I felt ripped off and manipulated:

• They forced me to rent a very expensive mail box, as they put my address on every email I sent out, and I wasn’t about to put my street address on my newsletters. This was non-negotiable, as far as they were concerned – part of the Can-Spam act – and it didn’t matter that I was in Canada. The whole time I was renting that mailbox I didn’t get a single piece of mail.
• The more interesting part of this mailbox/street address problem was the complete lack of empathy offered when I first set up the account. They never once suggested the mailbox when I expressed my horror at having my personal address exposed at the bottom of my newsletters. They just shrugged and quoted the “Act.” I was the one who suggested the mailbox, and they were the ones who agreed the mailbox would be acceptable.
• I could only use their templates and WYSIWYG editor (which was clunky at best).
• The size and number of graphics I could use were limited (unless I wanted to pay more, of course).
• Trying to arrange and read the subscriber database was a pain in the butt. The interface wasn’t user-friendly or intuitive. It was slow to respond, and difficult to get an overall look at the data. It was almost like they didn’t want you to get a good look at the whole file. This was where the feeling of being manipulated started to creep in, for me. Give me a goddam Excel spreadsheet or Word table, any day, please. I can get a better overview with one of those in sixty seconds, than an hour of waiting for another stodgy view to rearrange itself on my browser.
• The interface for readers, when they signed up, was too impersonal. This sounds odd, but bear with me. I actually went through the process and signed myself up using one of my other email addresses, just to try it out – I recommend you try this for yourself if you ever use third party services. I had already tailored the sign-up process and forms as much as the limited options had allowed me to, but despite that, the process felt dishearteningly like I was being cattle-herded. To start with, there was about 12 information fields each subscriber was asked for: first and last name, and etc., and more, that I didn’t have the option to switch off. Many of the fields were optional for the subscriber to fill in, but some weren’t. This one really raised my hackles. The whole subscription process was a four-part series of screens. Ugh. Despite my best tailoring it still felt dreadfully over the top and pretentious. I was embarrassed.

In summary, I believe that professional newsletter and email contact services like iContact and Constant Contact work marvellously for on-line marketing businesses whose lifeblood are their subscribers, and who spend their days milking their subscription base via email newsletters.  For them, the protection offered by the double-opt-in formalities and processes of these professional services are worth every penny.  All the extra services that come along with the fees are something these sorts of professionals can use.

But these services just aren’t suited for an anchored author.  Actually, I don’t think they’re a good fit for fiction authors at all…even the full time author needs a more dedicated, tailored newsletter with a friendlier face than that offered by the marketing interfaces provided by the newsletter services.  And full time authors can afford to have their own services built.

As publishing continues to fracture and change like a kaleidoscope, authors will find themselves more and more in control of a micro-niche of just one author: themselves.  You’ll be talking directly to readers, and readers will be talking directly back to you, and what you’ll write will be shaped by that dialogue.  So the channels of communication between you and your readers will need to be flexible and friendly in order to encourage that communication so readers will feel like they have a stake in what you’re writing.  Then they’ll want to stick around and buy what you write.   Newsletters will be a major piece of that communication pie.

For all these reasons, I dumped iContact as my newsletter service.  Then there was the money.

• It was costing me $480 in US dollars for iContact.
• Then there was conversion costs to Canadian, which add up over a year.
• Then there was $175 Canadian dollars for the useless post office box – about $153US
• As far as I can tell, I’m spending slightly less time doing it myself than I was friggin’ around with iContact’s clunky and slow interface.

This was for just over 1,500 subscribers, sending once a month.  If I had been assiduous in collecting subscribers, the fee would have gone up.  In the two years I used iContact, my subscriber based dropped slightly.  I’m not going to be dramatic and say it was iContact that was the problem, because it could have been a number of things, including the fact that my publishing schedule slipped.  But I suspect that iContact’s interface didn’t help any, because now that I’ve shifted to doing it my own way, the flood of emails I’m getting from readers is astonishing – lots of them saying how nice it is to “have me back.”

Doing newsletters my “own way” (see “Stories Rule! is dead…Long Live Stories Rule!” for a breakdown) means I save at least $633 a year – let’s say $650 even to include conversion costs, and the fact that my subscriber base has already increased since I changed to doing it myself.

So if you’re not already doing a newsletter, or you already are, have a (re)think about how you’re sending it out.

Time for a revamp?

First appeared on Anchored Authors in April/May, 2009

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Tracy Cooper-Posey © 2009. Cannot be copied or distributed without permission.