State of Writing

New draft of Wolves of the Tesseract 3 is done 🙂 I’m pretty excited for it and feel I wrapped up the whole story neatly (although I don’t think the ending is predictable at all) . The new draft comes ahead of schedule and should be ready for my ARC team in the near future. It weighs in at about 105k words, so roughly the same size as book 2. Artwork was completed before I’d even had a workable outline due to my fear that i might lose contact with the cover artist and so I made sure to get that right away after launching book 2.

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Why is My Mailing List not Growing?

Are you unhappy with your growth? Do you request newsletter swaps with other authors and have them rejected or ignored? Maybe you get accepted into group promos but nobody ever clicks to signup off of your swaps or your efforts? I may have some answers for you.

I’ve talked about my usage of Story Origin before (it’s like BookFunnel, ProlificWorks, etc.) You don’t need to have been around for very long to know that mailing lists are an author’s best friend. Many times have I said, “I wish I would have started my mailing list two years before I did, or even 6 months before my first book launched had I known the benefits.”

Maybe you’ve been working hard to acquire new members for your list and discovered the hard part: how do you get actual numeric growth? In roughly 10 months I’ve generated 3,369 new contacts via Story Origin, which is not superhuman numbers and I only sent my Newsletter once monthly, at mid-month. I also did not join more than a half dozen or so every month. After half a year I also started promoting and organizing my own group promos. In 2020 I hope to shift to 2x newsletters per month.

Below are the do’s and don’ts I’ve come to learn while being a regular SO user and group promo organizer.