I Bit The Bullet

 

My God, the indecision! I've been playing around with my MailerLite newsletter for days, inserting, deleting, changing font colors, revising the wording. I finally just got sick of myself and scheduled it to be sent on Friday. I seriously could drive myself crazy with this stuff.

And the ironic part of it is, most of my subscribers (who only, mind you, subscribed in order to increase their chances of winning a prize from Written Word Media) probably won't even read it. My newsletter does, however, include an "unsubscribe" link, which I'm pretty confident will be employed by many. So be it.

MailerLite's templates raise a lot of questions, which I cannot get answered because I have a free account and help is only provided to paying customers. I guess that's fair. So I ended up guessing and second guessing my page elements. I initially added a button for people to click to become ARC readers, but I began to wonder, does that button even lead to anywhere? I would have liked to ask, but...

So, I removed it. Another question was, since I initially named the template "Test", because it was a test, but then I changed it to something more appropriate, would it land in people's inboxes as "Test"? That would be "awesome". I sent it to myself and it did show up as "Test" before I thought to change it. Hopefully my change stuck.

The other point I was mindful of is that nobody wants to read a long slog of material, so I reduced the newsletter down to three data points:

• My welcome and my "what's new"
  
• A giveaway
• A positive review for one of my books

I'm basically working blind here, so time will tell if my instincts were correct. My cynical nature tells me that most people are like me and might scan a newsletter before deleting it (to see if there's anything worth my while), which is mainly why I included a giveaway. I was right to delete the ARC reader section. It's kind of unseemly to ask people for favors instead of offering them something. I'll do the ARC thing once my new novella is complete.

On a semi-related note, I wrote a blog post under my Goodreads account in which I encouraged people to subscribe to my newsletter, but so far nobody has bitten. I would ask for subscribers elsewhere, but I have no "elsewhere". 

I'm trying my best, folks!