...most of my newsletter subscribers are duds. I had two hard bounces, meaning someone had signed up with a fake email address, which is weird because how would they even know they'd won the book giveaway if they'd input a made-up address? Bots, possibly. There are a lot of those making the rounds. The three soft bounces are possibly temporary and possibly not. As I mentioned before, one person unsubscribed. I've done it, too. I may subscribe to a store's email list in anticipation of scoring a future discount, but once that happens or doesn't happen (and especially if they spam me every couple of days) off they go!
As far as links clicked on, the only person who bothered was apparently me when I was verifying that everything worked. Forty-two people opened the email and no one wanted to win anything (see "links clicked on" above).
My quest to gather subscribers cost me $75.00, money hardly well-spent. I guess Written Word Media's literary fiction giveaway didn't work out too well for them, either, since they don't even offer a giveaway in that genre anymore. But boy, do they like romance! Seven different categories of it! That pretty much confirms that BargainBooksy isn't the place for me to advertise.
I'm not convinced it's worth my while to continue emailing folks who clearly aren't interested. I did issue an invitation on Facebook and Instagram (oh, and on Goodreads) to subscribe, but no one has. I even joined Reddit simply for promotional reasons. I swear the only people authors are talking to on these sites are other authors. Where in the world are all those dedicated readers I keep hearing about?
I'm just going to keep doing what I'm doing, which is writing. I went years without anyone buying any of my works and it didn't kill me.
And I have a bunch of shiny book covers I can admire.
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