My Indie Author Journey: Newsletters and my shift to Substack

Daily Diary June 30, 2023: Day 1034

Newsletters, emailed to subscribers, are one of the most effective tools an author has (whether traditionally published or indie) to build and maintain an audience for their work. This has been true since the late 2000s and the emergence of ebooks, online book shopping, and the indie author movement in the late 2000s. At the beginning, these newsletters were primarily blogs, where a subscriber would get an email every time an author would put up a new post. Eventually, they became actual newsletters, where the full post itself would show up in a subscriber’s inbox as an email, and now many people get these newsletters through aps on their phones.

Unlike many of the sure-fire tips for marketing dispensed over the past fifteen years that have come and gone, the one thing that hasn’t changed is the advice that two of the most effective tools for indie author success are newsletters and writing more books. For example, a recent survey by the Alliance of Independent Authors found that 61% of the indie authors used free reader magnets to get people to sign up to a newsletter.

In 2009, when I first started getting ready to self-publish my first book, Maids of Misfortune, the general wisdom was that indie authors should set up a website, a place where people could learn how to find their books, and that they should start writing a blog, a kind of newsletter, so they could then let people know about new publications and promotions.

I dutifully did both, using the free wordpress.com platform that included a blogging function, with the only initial cost being paying for my domain name. Eventually, I did pay a designer to update the website with an author-friendly theme. However, I made sure I would still be able to make any needed changes on the website myself, so I wouldn’t have to pay a designer to update.

If you look at my archives of blog posts on this website, you will see that a lot of the pieces were on my journey as an indie author. At that point in time there weren’t that many authors going the indie route or writing about the process, so these posts drove a lot of my traffic to the blog and website. I also found that my blog pieces on San Francisco history garnered a good deal of interest, in this case from fans of my historical mystery series. As a result, by the years 2013-2016, I routinely had 4,000 to 5000 views of the website per month.

However, by 2017, there were a lot more people out there giving advice through blogs, books, speaking engagements, etc. As a result, I did fewer blogs on these topics, wanting to concentrate more of my time and energy on writing. In addition, in 2013 I had set up a newsletter on mailchimp, directed at my Victorian San Francisco mystery fans, adding a second newsletter about my science fiction series in 2017. The primary goal for these two newsletters was to alert people to new publications and discounts of books. Consequently, my blog became less important in that realm as well.

As my subscriptions to my blog went down, my subscriptions to my newsletters went up. The offer of free short stories for sign up, participation in group promotions with BookFunnel and Booksweeps, where participants were encouraged to sign up for my newsletters, as well as organic growth (people who after reading one of my books would then click on the link to subscribe to the newsletter found at the back of the book), the number of people who subscribed steadily rose over this period, eventually reaching over 3000 subscribers, way more than the 600 or so subscribers to my blog.

So, heading into 2021, I was still posting on my website blog, putting out two newsletters, and then, for a variety of reasons, I started posting a daily diary on my FaceBook author page. I was also posting weekly on the Historical Fiction Author’s Cooperative blog, an organization of 49 historical fiction authors that I helped found, promoting new publications or promotional deals for the authors.

I am getting exhausted just thinking about the level of activity this all entailed—time and effort that I could have spent writing. To make matters worse, there were problems with all three methods of communication (my blog, my newsletters, and my Facebook page.)

For example, the blog had become less and less effective. I used to post 2-3 articles per month, but in the past few years, I was lucky to publish a piece every couple of months. Often these were devoted to promotional material, which duplicated my newsletters. Needless to say, the blog post got fewer and fewer views.

In addition, while I was steadily increasing the number of people subscribed to my newsletters, this also meant that I no longer could use the free version, and by 2019 I was paying over $1000 a year to use this service. And the very sophistication of the platform in terms of graphics, etc, mean I found myself spending way too much time creating these newsletters.

Finally, while the daily posts on Facebook, and the responses by readers, were a lifesaver for me during the isolation of Covid, I was also getting more and more frustrated as Facebook kept changing the mechanics of getting post to followers. By 2021, I found that FaceBook was only showing my daily post in the newsfeeds of less than 10% of my two-thousand followers, and this percentage dropped even lower when I linked to anything like a new book or an ongoing promotion.

That’s when I began to read articles about authors trying out a relatively new platform called substack as the way to send out newsletters to build and maintain an audience for their work. While much of the focus seemed to be a good place for journalists and non-fiction writers, I couldn’t help but be intrigued by the possibilities of using substack to supplement my facebook posts, and replace my blog and mailchimp newsletters.

In April of 2022, I started a substack newsletter for my daily posts, called An Aging Author’s Daily Diversions, which is a free newsletter that shows up in subscribers’ emails every day. In these emails, I continued my facebook habit of describing how I am working on aging gracefully, reporting on my writing progress, and making recommendations of books I am reading/listening to or tv shows I am watching. The difference is that instead of only a proportion of people even seeing these posts on facebook, the newsletter goes out to over 400 subscribers, and over 40% of these subscribers actually open the email on a day-to-day basis.

Over time, I started adding the kind of posts that I had done for my blog, (and which were impossible on Facebook,) One example is my Historical Tidbits post, another was the series of my father’s poetry, and I have also have done an occasional post on my indie author journey, this post being an example.

Substack has therefore permitted me to successfully replace the function of both my website blog and Facebook author page (I still post on facebook, but then simply cut and paste sections of these posts into substack), and that has also freed up more writing time.

Most of these subscribers came to me from my Facebook followers and the people who had followed me on my website blog, almost 300 of them trickling in over the first months. I have also started getting some new subscribers who have found me through recommendations from within the substack universe, again, a function that didn’t exist when I was simply posting on facebook or on my blog. In short, starting this newsletter has done exactly what I wanted, helped me build and maintain a sense of connection to others, including fans of my work and other writers, but doing so more efficiently and with less frustration.

That is why, after a year of putting out An Aging Author’s Daily Diversions, I felt confident enough to shift my Mailchimp newsletter to the substack platform. This second newsletter, called Mary Louisa Locke’s Monthly Newsletter is primarily devoted to announcing new publications and promotional discounts of my work and other work, and it replaces both of my old mailchimp newsletters.

To do this, I simply migrated my audience from one platform to another (which was a simple task), and except for the simpler look of the newsletter, from the perspective of the people who have subscribed to the newsletter, nothing is changed. People still get a chance to download two free short stories for signing up, the newsletter shows up in their mailbox. And to my delight, I have lost very few of my 3000 subscriber and substack costs nothing to put out the newsletters.

However, what is most satisfying to me about both of these newsletters is the assurance that the people who, for whatever reason, enjoy hearing from me, are actually getting the newsletters.

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Hi, I’m Mary Louisa Locke, the USA Today best-selling author of the Victorian San Francisco Mystery series and the Caelestis Science Fiction series, and here is my daily reflection on life as an indie author trying to age gracefully.

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