The Siren Call of Signups

David Gaughram's latest newsletter is all about CTA's, which I had to look up because I didn't know what a CTA was. He could have just said "signups". I'm a fan of Gaughram because he offers a lot of useful publishing information. I learned from his instructional video how to utilize BookBub ads appropriately, not that it helped me, but that's my issue; not his. 

So I always read his newsletters with interest. In this one he talks about the importance of, in essence, newsletter subscriptions. I'm not yet convinced. 

I suppose a newsletter could be helpful to an author if she has an organically-grown subscriber list. I don't. I hate repeating myself, because I've mentioned this a couple of times before, but I signed up for a Written Word Media 20-book giveaway a while back. The lure of it, for readers, is that they can win twenty books in a particular genre plus a Kindle. And the more author newsletters they sign up for, the more chances they have to win. In one regard the promotion was successful. I gained 166 subscribers. But they only signed up to boost their odds of winning. None of them were fans of my work. Shoot, none of them had even read my work. I don't even know if they like women's fiction, because the genre category was, I believe, literary fiction (the place doesn't list women's fiction as a separate genre).

I've yet to gain even one organic subscriber, and I've tried. Today I tried again. I wrote a blog post on Goodreads and offered a free digital book to the first ten people who subscribed. I posted the same message on my Substack page. Ten sounded like a good number. I only have five followers on Goodreads, so it's a safe venture. Substack is pretty dead (for me), so I won't get any.

I may try the same on Instagram, but that's it. I don't like Facebook, and X is useless to an author. 

And yes, I add a note to the back matter of all my books, instructing readers where to go to subscribe. I do all the things Mister Gaughram suggested. I actually have some readers now, but none of them have shown any interest in taking our relationship further.

I'm not sure any of this matters anyway. But it costs me little to nothing to try.