I’ve been working with authors for 15 years, and in that time I’ve seen a lot of marketing fads come and go. When I first started, Twitter and Facebook were the new hotness. In fact, I got my start speaking by giving talks on how to use social media to build a platform. 

Now, Twitter and Facebook are terrible places to grow a platform. Then authors went to TikTok and Instagram, but on those platforms, only a tiny fraction of authors get all the attention. The vast majority of authors have fewer than 1000 followers and their efforts have no impact. 

During the last 15 years, one tactic has remained a solid performer. Email. 

Email is the primary way savvy publishers measure an author’s platform. If an author can’t convert social media followers into email subscribers, how can she convert them into customers? It doesn’t matter how many social media followers you have, if they won’t trust you with their email address, they won’t trust you with their money. 

When I was the marketing director for a publishing company, we found that email converted about 100 times better than social media in generating book sales, and back then the algorithms were friendlier to authors than they are today. 

Indie authors also know that the email list is what drives sales, especially in the critical early days of a book’s launch. 

But why? Why is email so important?

Email is special for 7 reasons. 

Email is:

1 Universal

Not every reader has a Facebook account but everyone online has access to email. 

2 Ubiquitous

Email works on all kinds of devices from watches to phones to computers to TVs. 

3 Compatible 

Anyone with access to email can email anyone else. This seems obvious but it is not true with most things online. You can’t message someone on Twitter from your Facebook account. In a world of walled gardens, email is the public park. 

4 Commercial

People get receipts, and bills via email. They are used to making purchasing decisions after receiving emails. This is unlike social media where most of the interactions are non-commercial. 

5 Time Tested

The first email was sent in 1971. That was over 50 years ago and 18 years before the World Wide Web and 32 years before Facebook. Email remains the most popular use of the internet. 

6 Word Based

Writers are good at writing and they thrive at word-based mediums. Writing an email is a much more similar skill to writing a book than creating a TikTok video, for instance. 

7 Viral

The forward button is still magic for getting ideas to spread like a virus. 

So that is why email is so powerful, but how do you get it to work for you? In the following sessions, you will learn how to get email subscribers and how to send emails they want to read. I think you will find email marketing to be a lot easier than you might think.