Newsletter | Sharon C. Williams-Author

Recently I blogged about newsletters. How I wanted to get on board with this way of spreading my brand. The sites I visited all wanted me to share my personal home address with the world. I wasn’t feeling that. Thanks to my lovely editor, Nancy, she directed me to Mad Mimi, a free site where all that was required was town and state.

So I went about setting up my first issue. It was a little time-consuming for I wanted it just right. I’m not sure how many emails I got from myself as I tested various versions. It took some time but after a few hours I got the pictures, links and story laid out that looked pleasing to my eye. I was nervous as heck and excited to get it ready in time to announce to the world which I did promptly on my social media outlets

Here is the link to the first issue.

https://madmimi.com/mimio/b1a564/preview

The link to subscribe, if interested, is here:http://mad.ly/signups/98152/join

I was fortunate enough to get a nice small crowd of people interested in reading more of what I had to say. Hopefully I won’t disappoint. Being an author means more than just writing. It involves editing, revising, editing again and then either self publish or find a traditional publisher. But it doesn’t end there. After comes the marketing and promotion which one has to do regardless how your book is released to the world.

It’s a marathon not a sprint. I need to invest in water.

Email marketing is something I’m new to in the sense I don’t have my own newsletter. I most definitely subscribe to a lot of them. For some reason I thought this might be a good idea to grow my brand. I asked some people, research a few sites and made a small list. I found one I liked that was free, if I had x amount of subscribers, call my name. It wasn’t easy since this was totally foreign to me. But hour after hour I worked on it trying to get something that people might actually like.

Signing up myself I did a test run and waited. When it finally appeared in my mailbox I was able to see where I had gone wrong. Just before I deleted the email something caught my eye at the end. My home address. Not wanting to shout to the world HERE I AM I immediately went back to the site to check this out. Turns out there is this thing call the anti-spam law that they adhere to as do the other programs. Contacting them by mail I was told I did have options. YAY!

I could use a business address. I work at home. Or I could get a post office box and use that. Hmm let’s see. I need to pay for a post office box to get my newsletter to a subscription population of one? Can you tell I was not feeling that? I was now dejected for I had high hopes I had high hopes. Anyone remembers that song? Venting to my editor she shot across a possibility of a place where you did not have to put your address on the page. I will be checking it out soon. They do have a free option, I am totally loving that. Hopefully this one will work out.

How badly do I need a newsletter especially one with one subscriber? I’m not sure. But it be fun to learn something else new that could help my brand.

The Musings of A New Englander