Forest for the Trees

Building a Mailing List with Book Promos

The Barnes Foundation

Can't see the forest for the trees? If you don't understand the larger situation or bigger problem because you're caught up with the minutia, you're considering only a few parts of it. However, there are times when you need to break things into smaller pieces to accomplish the goal of getting readers for your books. The old way of having a publisher do this for you seems long gone. You need to have your own fanbase; if you are the introverted type, this is no easy task. The absolute minimum is a mailing list, so this must become a priority item. I discussed magnets and building a mailing by using BookFunnel, in prior posts.

This post is about my experience with Group Promos, one reason I joined Bookfunnel. After creating my novella, Hitman’s Honey, it made more sense to get an email address and control my destiny than to charge ninety-nine cents and share the money with Amazon. Eventually, this may change, but I need the contact more.

Bookfunnel makes distributing your book and collecting an email painless. You can download and add it to your mailing list yourself (the less costly way). BookFunnel can also integrate the email collection process with your existing mail service for an additional $50.00 more added to the midlevel plan cost. I went the cheap way.

Bookfunnel lists all promos under Group Promos, and each promo has its own eligibility requirements. Some have very few, and others have many. Some might require a high reputation score. If you are new to this, you won’t have a reputation score yet. However, there are many that don’t require one and if this is your first promo, most people are generous about allowing you to take part in their promo without one.

How do you earn a reputation score? If you have two hundred readers on your mailing list and a hundred people, click on your email on your first promo, your reputation score is 100. When you join the promo, they assign your book a special link. When you send your newsletter, you use that link. When someone clicks on it, you get credit for participating. This means the more engaged your mailing list is, the better.

Some promos require a reputation score of over 35, others over 100. Suppose you’ve done two promos, and in your first promo, you had a mailing list of 75, and 55 clicked. In the second promo, you have 185, and in that one, 150 clicked. In that case, you have a reputation score of 102. You add 55 and 150 together and divide by the number of promos 2/ = reputation score. Make sure to send your email out when you say you’re going to. If you don’t, they can pull you from the promo and not let you back into others.

Other eligibility requirements are also in play, so read carefully. Some say no erotica. Some say no excerpts, complete books only. Some say no “suggestive covers.” I’m not sure what they mean by that one, especially after I looked at some of the covers. Some say mailing lists over 2000. Yes, really, maybe someday.

My experience: The first group promo I participated in got 49 clicks. Considering I only sent out 42 emails, I was more than happy. Some people forwarded it to friends. I also posted on social media. 169 other people from other authors lists, downloaded my book, Hitman’s Honey. This means 169 people signed up to join my email list. This promo ran for one month and had a hundred and fifty other books offered.

My second promo, ran for eight days, had twenty authors and focused on suspense and crime romance. This one had stiffer requirements to get into, and I had fewer gains in my mailing list. I had 37 clicks, which is much lower engagement, even though I emailed 254 contacts. (I was not too fond of the art they furnished for the promo). I felt the art was too dark and the image unrecognizable. I had way fewer claims in my book, as well, only 20. Overall, this was the poorest-performing promo.

I did much better on my third promo, which started December 15 and ends January 15. I mailed 197 emails and got 177 clicks with 141 claims of Hitman’s Honey.

I try to look for different promo’s where I am not with the same author’s. This way I’m swimming in a diffent pond of readers.

I’m interested to see if these readers stay long term. I’ve lost between three and seven people with every newsletter I’ve sent. However, I feel this is part of building a mailing list, and I’m thankful something like Bookfunnel and MailChimp exist to make growing a mailing list possible. I’m currently using Mailchimp to handle my mailing list and newsletter creation, but I’ve heard from other authors that mailerlite is really good. Realize you can probably use the free versions of both of these for a month or two, but at some point, switch to the paid version to get more out of these programs.

I also plan to cull my mailing list every six months to get rid of those who don’t open my email over a six month period. You don’t want to spam people who don’t want to receive email from you.

If you don’t want to give your book away and want to sell it, Bookfunnel also has promos for that. There are many other programs on BookFunnel that I’m still exploring.

Please comment on your experience, good, bad, or blah, on Bookfunnel.

Stay well peeps, because I am not. This is my second week with that coughing, respiratory thing that never seems to end. If I don’t stop coughing soon, I might have to move to another house because everyone is tired of hearing me.