​It’s time to step through the looking glass and into the wonderful (and often overwhelming) world of newsletter / mailing list managment tools. What are the tools out there? How do you choose the right one for you? What are some of the benefits of the different main players in the mailing list world? What are the specific details you have to look at for each platform you’re considering to make sure you get the right tool for YOU and your budget?

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Other resources we mentioned in this episode

• Michele Amitrani 12×2020 Challenge
• Mailing List Strategy: the Basics with Crystal (Masterclass in the Creative Academy For Writers)
• Mailing List Strategy: Automations, Onboarding and Segmentation with Crystal (Masterclass in the Creative Academy for Writers)

Visit our websites

• Crystal Hunt (Non-fiction)
• CJ Hunt (Romance)
• Michele Amitrani (Fiction)
• The Creative Academy for Writers (Community/Resources)

Transcript for Strategic Authorpreneur Episode 019: Mailing List Tool Options For Authors

Crystal: Hey are strategic authorpreneurs I’m Crystal Hunt.

Michele: And I’m Michele Amitrani. We are here to help you save time, money and energy as you level up your writing career.

Crystal: Welcome to episode 19 of the strategic authorpreneur podcast. On today’s show, we’re taking an in depth look at newsletter and mailing lists systems or platforms.

So the tools behind your sending out of your author newsletter or emails to your list that are going, of course, to be happening on a very regular basis. So we’re going to dig into some of the tools that we use ourselves, we’re going to talk about, um, how you choose a tool that’s going to work well for you. We’re going to talk about different options and price points and some tips and things you would use to evaluate how effective or how good a match those tools are going to be for you. But my fine Italian friends, what have you been up to?

What has happened since the last episode?

Michele: A couple of things? One of these is of course I’m keeping reading things.

And the book that I want to recommend for this week might be known to the majority of you, but I’m going to recommend it nonetheless. And it’s called How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie, right? That’s the way you pronounce it. Um, now I’ve read this, um, some time ago and the first time I have to confess, I thought, um, it was like a title of a book that wants to manipulate people, a few years ago.

And it was kind of a scare to reading it, but I had so many people recommending it to me that I was like, I need to read and I need to understand what’s the fuss about. And I also know that this book was written in a, if I’m not mistaken, in the Great Depression. So at the end of the thirties of the 20th century and every single person that I asked to said: read this especially if there were people like, uh, business oriented entrepreneurs. And so how win friends and influence people, I went over the title, and then I started diving in and it turns out, at least for me, the title, it represents some of the, uh, content of the book, but really the book is more like a understanding how human behavior, like how people really react to the way you talk the way you react to, news, jokes.

And it’s not that much like a book of how to change people behavior, but, just shut up and listen to what other people are saying and learn from that. Yeah. And I think because we are talking authorpreneur-wise that it’s important for us to understand you understanding parts of things and we don’t always shut up and listen.

So an alternate title of this book could be: Shut Up and Listen and Learn. But I found out that, uh, this book is basically a simple way to make a good first impression when people don’t know you. How can you leverage your knowledge to other people? Um, what can you do when nothing else works? I think every person that interested in achieving some kind of endeavor, any kind of things that can be, can be writing a book or starting a business even should read this a book for that reason, it’s a book about the person that studied and interviewed a lot of successful people. He knows what’s beyond the, the word success.

So I just wanted to take some times today to recommend this book because it’s really good. and now it’s almost as a century old, can you believe it? Almost a century old, but it’s still current. it’s still, powerful and, it can be useful to listeners and viewers then are planning on doing any kind of endeavor, might be to write a short story or a novels.

I don’t care about that. I just really liked it and I think one of the suggestions that the books gives is to reread the book a couple of times, because the second time over it’s even better because you internalize most of the things it says, and I do believe that to be true. So, even though I think, the first time that I saw that title, I was a bit scared.

I do have to say I was wrong and that it’s definitely one of the books that I will go over and over and over again. Along with the Think and Grow Rich for sure. 100%. So that was the book of the weekend. But for the first time ever, and when to talk about another book and this one is a fiction book and it’s by Brandon Sanderson, um, The Way of Kings.

Huge. It’s very big. And, uh, it’s one of, it’s an Epic fantasy and I have been trying to get the beat more into the fantasy genre, the high fantasy kind of things. So, and I’ve heard amazing things about Brandon Sanderson, but guess what? I’ve never read anything. So I started with one of these light, finereading.

And I’m enjoying it. And I think that it informed the way I am now writing my short, fantasy endeavors. I wouldn’t call it Epic fantasy, but, uh, it’s definitely helping me out on that side of things. And, as you know, my a 12 by 20 challenge is going forward. I have published my sixth story to date.

And now that makes the challenge completed at the 50%, which is amazing. I’m still thinking about that and I’m just blown away. I’m blown away. And I feel, I need to be thankful to the people that are following me that are giving me feedback, which is the number one reason why I started this challenge.

Of course I need to thank Crystal because she’s helping me a lot not only in providing feedback. Giving me strategy to think about but also because of the motivation side of things, and that’s Crystal, I think like a, we writers, we need that kind of stuff. It’s like the, engine, the fuel of the engine that powers us without that we are basically nothing. We need the, we need that force, the exterior’s force to just keep writing our stories. So that was me. Uh, that was my, week, what happened to my lovely, lovely partner?

Crystal: Well, I have been feeling all inspired down the writerly rabbit hole and trying to get back into the part of the strategic entrepreneur business, where one actually creates products and content, because that is key, it’ easy to get lost in the marketing and all of the other stuff.

But at the heart of it, we have to be writing or we have nowhere to go. We have no new products, we have no actual growth. So that has been my focus over the last couple of weeks. And I have been missing writing in the magic. So I watched a couple of shows and I did some reading of some different books.

I found a genre, a series of books, actually that starts with one called Ever Strange. And it is paranormal FBI stuff. So it’s like magic plus a law enforcement kind of thing. And it’s, it’s a romance. And so I’ve been reading that and it just got me back into the mode of how much fun it is to play with magic and things.

So I have been working on one of the shorter stories that is called Luna. And I’m I doing a bunch of research for that. So I have been reading the Crystal Bible, using it as a reference tool, as I’m deciding what kind of ambulance people need to have and what kind of jewelry they wear too, you know, enhanced, specific powers and things that they have.

And so that’s just a really helpful resource that lets me kind of make sure that all the little details are lining up with what I want to do. And as a fun aside, I did something that might, might be totally insane or might be brilliant, only time will tell, uh, is that one of my other series I’m working on one of the characters writes under a pending and his books appear in other books and yeah, a series gets option to a TV show that one of my other characters ends up playing a leading role in, and it’s all very intertwined and I found they weren’t real enough. The books weren’t real enough to me to make me able to talk about them in a kind of offhand fashion, in the other things that I’m writing. And so I decided I needed to really flesh those out. So I had to actually make Fin a pen name and I had to figure out what he was going to be writing and, and all of that. And so I actually created a pen name. I created a book trilogy complete with plots. I pulled some potential cover images, and then I was like, these are really fun. I may actually want to write these books at some point and bring this pen name to life is a real thing.

So I actually purchased the pen names, website domain as well. So that I can actually make the references to these books in the book are real link to an outside source. And I do anticipate actually writing those books. At some point, I’ve been struggling with, there’s a couple of things I really want to play with in the writing world that do not fit with my current branding and my current sort of they’re they fit with the world of creative, but they really very different sub genre and more like crime thriller with a touch of magic.

And so in order to branch out into that, I need a bit of a different identity there. So I think that I created myself and one of my characters a pen name that we are going to share, he’s going to have it in the book world and I’m going to have it in the real world. So that was a pretty fun random adventure for this weekend.

And, I’m excited to see where that goes. And part of the reason why I needed to switch my focus to this short story is because I missed the date by 24 hours to pull one of my stories out of KU that I wanted to use to refresh my newsletter list and uses as a reengagement tool. And when I looked at them, in fact, almost all my stories are on the similar kind of cycle, cause I republished them all at once to make it easier to remember. And what happened was I missed, I missed everything. So there was nothing I could pull out without waiting for three more months. So I decided it was faster just to write another story than it was to wait for that to come around so that I could use it again.

So anyway, that’s another piece and related to our newsletter topic of today, which is, you know, when you go to reengage your list, often giving them something free to download is a good way to find out who’s paying attention on your list and who is actually gonna open and click and, yeah. Interact with whatever it is you’re putting out there.

So, that has been what I was up to in the past week, which has been all kinds of fun. I have to say. And the one other book that was really useful is, um, it’s called Romance Tropes and Hooks by Karen Winter. It’s super straight-forward. There’s nothing earth shattering in it. It’s just like 500 different tropes and hooks for romance novels all summarize and. I like that when I’m doing short stories, I just kind of open it up and find one that appeals to me as a starting place. And then I make a couple of characters and then I can figure out what happens from there. So it’s just a good, like writing prompt book for me effectively. So for any of you who are writing romance and looking to shake things up a little and get a little variety and, or are writing short, it can be fun to write and group a series of shorts around a specific trope, and then you can box set them.

And that is also a fun opportunity. So there you go that is my, my summary of actions and also some resources for folks who are interested in those bits and pieces. And now, now we dig right into the meaty mailing list discussion. So there are a lot of mailing list tools out there and becoming more. It seems by the week.

And I think maybe if we start off with just talking a little bit about which tools each of us have used, that would be helpful. Just so folks know what that we’re coming from a place of experience around certain tools over others. So which ones have you got familiarity with?

Tools we use often

Michele: Okay. Absolutely. One thing that I wanted to just say, before, that if you are listening to us and you haven’t started the newsletter or you’re scared of the idea of starting your newsletter or using tools like that. I was there. I was there four months ago. I had no idea really what the newsletter was for how to build the mailing list. So to all the people out there that are listing into us and they I don’t really know why are we talking about this? Again, I was with that with you, before starting my challenge, I really didn’t know a what these, very powerful elements structured into the business of being an authorpreneur. And I really hope that the experienced that we gathered, in my case in the past months and in her case in the past years, are going to help you understand one important thing: after your books the most important thing for your business is building a strong engaged mailing list, there’s nothing more powerful than that. There is no Facebook page, no other Jimmy-Gimmy tool that is going to make or break your author business, like a newsletter and the emails, again, for the people that are out there, maybe using a Thik Tok, one of the last kids in the block, the email are not going to go anywhere anytime soon. So it’s something that’s really is embedded in our way of basically send messages and connect with people. So that’s something that I just want to do have it out of the way.

Crystal: So for anyone who is just getting started with mailing lists, there are a couple of masterclasses that I have put together on mailing lists and how you use them and some basics to kind of run you through how all of that works. And so if you’re interested in those, you can find the links in the show notes, and then you’ll be able to get access to those if you like, as, as a bit of a framework to expand on some of the things we’re going to talk about, we are going to drill down into the tools specifically today, but we will definitely talk more about the other elements of mailing lists as we go forward, too. So.

Michele: And that’s going to be very useful for people that want to, as Crystal said, dive in into, that subject.

But I was saying, there are a couple of tools mailing list wise, that I’ve been using the past few months. One is the big kid in the block it’s MailChimp, which is basically being a mailing list provider for a very long time. It’s one of the most, I’d say, ancient service out there. And the second one, it’s an established service, but maybe not as known as, MailChimp, which is MailerLite. And there is another one that I’m really starting to getting to know, and I didn’t really dive in into this one, but thanks to my good friend Crystal, I now possess this instrument is SendFox and this is the equivalent of the new kid in the block, because it literally didn’t exist like a couple of years ago and correct me if I’m wrong, Crystal, and it’s just another one of these tools that basically help you doing one simple thing, which is a a direct contact with your fans. Again, I can’t stress enough how important that you choose any of the services. We are going to speak a bit more of the differences between each and every one of them, so that you can hopefully have an idea of which one is more tailored to you, some of them are more expensive than others.

Some of them are more user friendly than others. Some others give you a bit more analytics that you can really use to dig in to understand what is your audience doing and what is the behavior that they have. But yeah, I would say to answer your question is MailChimp is the one that I’ve been using the most, and I’m more, a bit more confortable with.

And then MailerLite I’ve been using it for my Italian newsletter and SendFox is the really, new a tool how dare that I didn’t use, but I’ve heard very good. And there is also as we are talking a good promotion on the stool. We can dive in and speak about that a bit later on, but these are the three that I know a bit more.

And I know that there are a couple of more and more one is ConvertKit, if I’m not mistaken. I’ve never used it. What I do know about this, it’s, it’s a bit more expensive than the others, but you can do way more things. I get some more specific it’s really professional. And, it is recommended, it was recommended to me by a couple of big, author names, again, I never had the pleasure of using it, but as of now, everything I need that is being done and perform the very well by MailChimp in the MailerLite. So I’m curious to know what are the one that you used. If you have anything you want to add to what I said.

Crystal: I have used, I think I’ve probably used upwards of 12 different mailing lists services in the last 10 years.

Partly because I used to manage a lot of author clients communications with their readers, as well as my own author stuff. And so I’ve been able to see into the back end of a lot of other systems. And also because I have multiple businesses in various areas. We use different ones for different businesses as well.

So I have actually used Drip, I’ve used ConvertKit, I’ve used MailPoet, MailChimp, MailerLite, and SendFox, and probably half a dozen other sort of less commonly used ones. And it is really interesting to just see the similarities in them and also the subtle differences. So one of the biggest things I think that comes up when you’re first choosing a mailing list, service is going to be price because when you’re getting started your mailing list isn’t going to be making you a lot of money at first and so most others will default to one of the ones that has a free learning option and ConvertKit did not have a free learning option. And so for a lot of people that was kind of an instant default out of it. And their starting place was about $30 a month. And so when you’re first getting started, that is quite an investment. It’s one thing if you have a business you’re running and you’re using it as a sales platform, and while our writer business is a business, it’s not the same as selling, you know, a hundred dollars pairs of jeans or something like that, where you’re using it like a store, basically. And so it doesn’t take very many sales to justify paying out that money on a mailing list when you’re dealing with some higher ticket items for things like our books were probably what we’re mostly using it for is sending out stuff we aren’t charging people for.

And then occasionally announcing a new release, which is where we do make some money from it. It isn’t a direct revenue earner, so MailChimp has always offered 2000 subscribers before you have to start to pay, but the functionality is limited with that free account. So you can’t do all of the automation stuff and everything else the same way you can once you’ve unlocked it by paying. Whereas MailerLite gives you a thousand people for free to get started, but you get all the functionality. So it’s a smaller group that you can have to onboard before you start paying but the costs, when you start paying are lower and also you do have all the functionality so you can really set up your list the way you want it to grow with you and have all of that good interactive stuff and get your automations already and functioning. And then just scale up your numbers as you go. And then the price scales up in conjunction with the numbers scaling up, but you don’t have to start over or redo your processes.

So that is really handy. MalePoet is an interesting one because it’s a plugin for WordPress that goes into the back of your site. So the good news is you, can you buy a male poet as a plugin, and then you don’t have those ongoing fees in the same way. So that’s something to think about as well is just, you know, do you want to buy something that you just own, or do you want to be basically renting it from someone else?

And there are pluses and minuses in both directions, but for now, if there, if you’re looking specifically for something to put into the backend of your website, then MailPoet is something to think about. Substack is also an interesting player on the scene right now, which I’ve also used and that one is it’s not really great for doing elaborate automations and stuff like that. What it is really good for is if you are a writer who is sending out, let’s say articles or nonfiction stuff to your audience, or you’re building an audience, you might want to monetize in some way, you can actually set it up so that subscribers pay $5 a month or whatever it is to be on your sub stack list and get access to content that’s just for your list. So it’s kind of like Patreon, but it’s really specific to sending out articles. And so it’s great for journalists or for short story writers, or really, if you want to monetize the content you’re sending to your lists and that is one that’s kind of an up and comer on the scene, and they’ve done a lot of really cool things in the last while which do that. SendFox is, as Michele said, it’s similar to the others there is a free plan you can start with, you do have all the functionality on the free plan. So that’s great.

You can get in there and play around with it. And the reason why I’ve switched most of my stuff to SendFox is because it had an option to buy through AppSumo a lifetime code. So I was finding, as I was growing my mailing list, it was getting to be really quite expensive each month. And I mean, for me, quite expensive was, you know, $50 plus each month.

But I have friends who are paying hundreds of dollars a month because their lists are 30 to 50,000 people. So if you’re looking from a career growth perspective, it really depends where you’re at, but I didn’t want to get to the point where my mailing list was going to cost me $500 a month or even more than that.

So for me to be able to buy a lifetime license with the SendFox to know that I can have up to 50,000 people and it will never cost me any more money. That was pretty motivating for me to make that switch. Yeah, I think that it’s really the good news is it isn’t that there’s a right or wrong tool to choose.

It’s really how you’re going to use it and finding the one that’s the right fit for your budget right now. And also that can grow with you in the way you’re going to want to grow. So let’s talk a little bit about, how you decide, which is the right one for you. So Michele, are you willing to be a case study for us?

And you can give us a little rundown of when you were choosing your mailing list service. What were some of the questions you asked yourself or some of the things you had to think about in deciding which one to use?

Figuring out which tools work for you

Michele: Absolutely. So one of the thing that happened, and I’m going to tell you exactly what I need.

My first, one of the first objective for my 12 by 20 challenge, I need this service that did that, that delivered my stories, in exchange for that email address. So I actually needed two instruments to do that. One of these was MailChimp on my newsletter, mailing list provider and the other one was BookFunnel.

BookFunnel is basically the tool that helped me, along with MailChimp to grow my newsletter. But when I started, January, 2020 I had 75 people on my newsletter, this is a true case study. I want to be extremely transparent on that point of view, because I’m going to show you a few things that I did and the choice I made, in order to grow my list.

I chose MailChimp and I want to specify it is for my English newsletter. Then I chose MailerLite for my Italian newsletter, but I just want to focus on the English side of things here. I chose MailChimp because I knew how it worked and the learning curve for me, wasn’t as steep as any other service that I didn’t know when Crystal suggested me SendFox and MailerLite I was like, what? There are other services that do other things? And I was like, there is no way I have tome to learn them. So at the beginning I was: okay, there are 24 hours in a day, I have this time allocated to do this staff most is going to my writing. So I need to use something that I know how to use already, so you see my case was I needed something that worked basic and that had me gave me access to, gave me some room to maneuver. So MailChimp did that for me, because it gave me the freedom to have at least 2000 people, as a bedrock for my newsletter.

So the choice number one was: Choose something that, you know how it works. MailChimp is not necessarily the most user friendly now that I know other tools. So I want to get that out there immediately. I just use that because I knew how it worked. At least the surface of it, as Crystal, no automation, that kind of stuff I didn’t even know how to spell it. Still don’t know how spell the word, but it did work for I needed it to do. Provide me a base to welcome and to host my newsletter subscribers. And the second thing was, it was free. This is something major for me, especially for people that are starting out.

Unfortunately I do not have at this point, a lot of resources money-wise, let’s speak frankly. I just started, doing these things seriously on the English side. So I need something that, (A) I could use, and (B) that did what I needed, which was to provide a place on the internet to host my followers.

So that was the beginning of everything for me and why and how I use MailChimp to grow my newsletter from 95 people that’s another thing that I think is interesting too to point out, how did I use it MailChimp to grow my newsletter from 95 people to around 900 people as we are talking now, again, the very nature of the experiment of the 12 by 20 challenge was I’m going to provide to you free content, that is something that only you can get if you subscribe to that, to my newsletter. So my promise was I’m promising you I’m going to give you a short story, what I need, the only thing that I need is your email address, because I want to get feedback from you. I want to learn if I’m doing stuff right or wrong writing-wise, I want to learn more about my crafting and again, I don’t see it now how you can do this on Facebook, for example, because on Facebook, as any other social media, there are so many things that compete for the other people attention. So if you have, I see if I had started something like this on Facebook, I don’t think it’d have gone well.

While with MailChimp as a newsletter provider you actually have the contact, the personal contact with the person, I had dozens of back and forth to contact with people from the US, from Australia that I’ve never known and that provided feedback. There is no way something like that could have happened as easily with Facebook, Instagram LinkedIn in you name it.

And it’s just the nature of how a mailing list these works. It nurtures more private and personal links. This was the very beginning of my, the newsletter revamp revolution if you wanted to call it like that. So to answer your question, what did I do? Basically from that point, I made sure that I stick to my plan, to release one story every month in exchange for a bigger audience. And it worked because I was consistent. And hopefully, because my story were not too boring. So other people start o talking about them even on social media, on Instagram, for example, and Facebook about these stories and the fact that, Hey, there is that guy, which I can’t pronounce the name of that is doing these 12 by 20 challenge.

And so the word of mouth was also something that helped with the newsletter list growing, but the other two that I was mentioning was BookFunnel and BookFunnel was from where most of my new subscribers came from. But again, if you just have BookFunnel, but you do not have a way to integrate that tool with the newsletter there is really no way for you to get the retention of the readers.

So I would say 70 to 80% of the people that are now in my newsletter come from BookFunnel from the book promo that I’ve been part to increase. It has been in many of those book promo, if I’m not mistaken, she also created some, I don’t want to go too deep into the BookFunnel thing, because we already spoke about that.

But this is basically the way I use MailChimp. The second way I used it and I’m still using it is I take a lot of time when I’m at, in the back hand of MailChimp, every single time I send a newsletter to see who’s opening it. What kind of title of the newsletter elicit more interesting.

What kind of phrasing? What kind of wording? What kind of call to action get answer the most. These are all things that I found it’s easier for me to understand or MailChimp because for me, again, statistics-wise, it’s stronger than other services like SandFox and MailerLite at this point in time, where at least I’m more familiar with them at this point in time.

So I’m using that to understand a bit more about my audience, my newsletter audience. And for example, today I sent a newsletter to those 900 people and I already got people answering, I saw the number because there was a link that went directly to my website, how many people clicked it? How many people interacted? And for me, that’s gold because I really get to understand what’s working and what’s not working on the way I interact with these people, which are strangers that are interested in what I’m doing. So to answer your question. It’s been a learning curve, even though I kind of knew how MailChimp worked, but for example, three months ago, I didn’t have a welcome message, which is like a huge bummer. It’s bad if you don’t have that, it’s like, basically somebody is introducing himself or herself and you are almost spitting in his or her face. You are supposed to have like a welcome message, to make people know, that subscribed to your newsletter, to let them know who you are, what are you doing?

Luckily enough, MailChimp, at least as one automation, which is like sending one welcome email to people that subscribe to the newsletter. As Crystal said on that side, it’s not very powerful other services, like MailerLite to do a way better job at that. Um, but yeah, so that’s the way I’ve been using MailChimp.

That’s the way it’s helped me to keep track of how my audience was growing and, how they were interacting with the kind content that I was providing on a weekly or monthly a basis. And I’m just curious to know if I may Crystal, you did use it a plethora, a different number of services.

And I was wondering not only how these services compare to MailChimp, which is probably one of the choices that are more I talked about out there. How does it compare with the other services, but really what is the value that you think this one gives compared to others, and if there are choices that are maybe better for people that are starting out right

Crystal: Okay, so a ConvertKit, I loved using ConvertKit. It’s fantastic, but it’s, it’s expensive. So for business, we used convert kit for years for the creative Academy. That was our go to you can tag people into different groups. The functionality was just really cool. You could do a lot of really advanced stuff. And at the time there weren’t a lot of other services that were offering those same functions.

So very cool. If you could afford to ConvertKit, go nuts. It’s, it’s wonderful. The folks we’re so great with our tech support and with the help articles and everything else. So really cool product. Definitely shout out to that. It can do anything you could ever want it to do. And the interface is relatively easy to use it’s not the easiest of all of them, I think, but it’s, it’s really functional. And considering the level of difficulty or complexity of what you could do with it, I think it deals with that really well. For MailChimp, I liked the interface, but it used to be easier to use I think in my opinion, it used to be a lot more kind of simple in how it’s put together as someone who has used it for more than 10 years I actually have a hard time with the interface now, a little bit, it’s gotten, it’s gotten less user friendly as time has gone on, and they’ve added various other restrictions onto the free accounts and different ways of doing things.

So I think it’s really, it’s great. It’s super useful. It’s very powerful deliverability is high, which is something we haven’t really talked about, but when you’re, when you’re analyzing a potential mailing list service, you have to look at their blue variability scores. And so there is an article or a ranking that comes out at least once a year, that rates all the different email providers.

And when we say deliverability, we mean the ability to actually get your email into someone else’s inbox, because just because we send it doesn’t mean it makes it all the way to the people on the other end of things. And there are some things you can do to help that, but there’s some stuff that’s built into the tool that you choose.

So there’s tons of smaller, more obscure kind of services and lots of them that are sort of Permafree to use, but they don’t always have the best deliverability. So that is something to watch out for one other challenge, MailChimp has great deliverability MailerLite is right up there. SendFox is right up there, ConvertKit as well.

Like any of those ones you’re going to have really comparable deliverability. One of the things to watch out for with Mailchimp, a lot of authors were struggling with it. Because it was built for business there is a really quick trigger to shut down any spam accounts. It’s part of how they keep it with such good deliverability is by saying, okay, if you get more than X number of percentage of unsubscribes, we’re going to freeze your account. Because we think you might be adding people who don’t want to be on your list, but the way that author promotions work is that if you run a BookFunnel promo, you might have a thousand people who sign up just to get a free book.

And then the first time you send something out, it’s unsubscribe, unsubscribe, unsubscribe, which is what you want, because you don’t want the people on your list who don’t want to stay there. And you’re counting on them having got the free book, reading it, loving it, and maybe they resign up later or maybe they just go buy all your other books or read them in KU.

Which is great, but from a business perspective and looking at the way MailChimp treats, that is not great. So a lot of authors found that they would run a book promo and their account will get shut down because people would be unsubscribing from that initial welcome email. And so MailerLite was a little bit less strict about that.

And so that’s why a lot of authors were turning to MailerLite because (A) you could start with your free account and you could get all the functionality in and then you could also be running your promos and not having the same level of trouble about your account getting shut down. So that was, I think, a common reason why a lot of people made that jump.

The inside MailerLigt, the automations are super clear. I really like the groups, functionality, the interfaces pretty straight forward. They’ve been adding functionality, you can do landing pages and full websites and all kinds of stuff in MailerLite. It’s, it’s very, very powerful now and it’s very, I think user-friendly, but also it’s complicated if you really just want to send an email to your subscribers.

So I think that’s where SendFox as a newer kid on the block, they don’t, they have automations, the automations I find very easy to use actually in SendFox. And it’s a nice clean interface. It makes lots of sense. It’s not quite as high powered as MailerLite or MailChimp or ConvertKit yet, but I’ve noticed I’ve only been using it for maybe five or six months and it has drastically grown and dramatically grown over the last few months. And so features are being added on kind of a weekly basis. It seems every time I log in, they’ve added something new. So it’s definitely growing and it’s catching up, but I think what it has going for it right now is two things actually, the first thing is the simplicity of it that you log in, it’s not a ton of really over-designed templates. It’s really focused on like sending an email to your mailing list, which is as authors, really what we want to be doing is making that direct connection. And then the second thing is that the price is currently very right, so it was designed for creators to use, to send out to people. And so the base plan gets you in there for free and then there are all these deals right now where you can still we’ll link to it from under the episode in the show notes, you can grab it from AppSumo and you can get like $50 was 5,000, people on your list for life. And so for me, I stacked some coupons. I took my, my budget from my mailing list for six months out of this year. And I spent all of that at once on SendFox, which got me the capacity of 50,000 subscribers for the rest of my life or the life of the tool. Let’s be honest it is possible that it’s, you know, tools don’t always last forever.

So it is important to make sure that you are, just aware that things change over time. But for me, I knew as long as the tool keeps going for more than six months, I’ve got my money out of it. But that does bring us to one other point, which is you won’t necessarily want to keep the same tool for the entire time of your life and the entire, time of your creating life. And so it’s really good to just make sure, you know, when you’re analyzing a mailing list tool, what is your ability to export your list and bring it into something else? If you start in MailChimp, for example, and you use that until you get to 2000 people, you can then export your list and move over to another mailing list provider.

There’s nothing that says you have to stay with the same one forever. So you just have to make sure that the format, you can export it, your context in, is one that’s functional. Now all of these mainstream ones make it super easy to export from one and import to another. It just comes out as a CSV or basically an Excel spreadsheet, and the list is then uploadable somewhere else. So that is not a problem. It’s more if you’re using kind of an obscure one or one that, you know, isn’t in that list of like the six main ones that you really need to check and make sure that there is a way to get that data out in a way that’s usable.

And I would say the last thing to really check is with any of your mailing list services, what other of your tools does it have to play nice with? So for me, I was like, Oh, SendFox looks amazing, but I use BookFunnel for everything. That’s how I deliver my free reads. It’s how I deliver free audio books.

I needed something that was going to interface with all my other tools. And so I needed to know that I could make it work with my WordPress website and could I make it work with BookFunnel and when I looked it up, I discovered that SendFox integration had just been added to BookFunnel. So that was for me the last kind of barrier where I was like, yeah, I’m in. Okay. But for you, whatever newsletter service you’re looking at, if you’re going to use BookFunnel for promos and for I’m just delivering your cookie or newsletter list freebie, then you want to make sure that it integrates because you do not want to be doing that stuff manually. The whole point of using these tools and being a strategic authorpreneur is to really make sure that you have the ability to scale up in numbers and volume and sales without scaling up the efforts that it takes on your part. So I think those are some of the key things to really look at when you’re thinking about which tool is going to be the right one for me and above all do not panic in the words of Douglas Adams, don’t panic stuff will happen. You will make mistakes as you’re learning. If you stick around to the end of the episode, there’s me telling a story about something that went terribly wrong and how I fixed it. Uh, and how I sort of bounced back from that. I’m not going to include it now because I don’t want to make you all panic, but if you’re feeling brave, listen to the story and hear how I recovered from that. But I do think it’s just really important to remember you’re on a learning curve, you’re building a relationship with your readers and that you can always change things. Get in there, do your best for now.

And you can always do a mailing list make-over just like we do a book sales makeover, and that, that is not a problem, sir. Anything else you want to add in there?

Michele: The last thing you hinted at something interesting. We have been talking about the tools and the options, but one thing we didn’t address maybe was we didn’t talk about, is once you have all the systems set up, what do you send them?

What kind of messages do you send them? And I think what you said about the personalized as you go, as you evolve, it’s meaningful and it’s important, I had no idea four months ago, what kind of content to provide to my newsletter? Because simply I had no content. I had not, except for a couple of books, but now that I have this challenge, I have constantly a stream of news that I can provide to my followers in the newsletter.

And I’m sure in six months, I think is going to be different, different in the case, for example, If I’m lucky enough to create them box set with series of novella that I’m putting together. if I’m collaborating with another author, on my same genre. The content that you provide is always yourself, but the meaning and the shape can change.

Can shift a bit, your voice, the remains as such. It can shift that you, yes, but they know you as Crystal Hunt, Michele Amitrani, they know the person that I’ve subscribed to in this case, he’s doing this challenge that is something kind of particular, she is making, providing content on Medium. If they’re a subscriber to that kind of newsletter, or maybe she’s providing content on the romance side.

That’s basically your message that what you are, but that doesn’t mean that you cannot change or experience or experiment different things. I’ll tell you in this past four months, I did do some experiments because I wanted to see what kind of audience I had, how did they, answer it too specific kind of emails.

So for example, the first three or four stories, I didn’t do an email which sent a cover reveal. A week before of my story, that was about to be released. There was no cover reveal, but when I started to do the cover reveal newsletter and I’ve noticed that people were clicking and were interested in, I started using that then as an integral part of the process of engaging with my existing audience.

[So now every single time, I know what’s the cover usually a week before the release of the new story I released that as a special bonus material to my subscribers. So you see it changes. I just wanted to add this in small parentheses. The content you provide depends on you and the books that you have written or the stories you have written, the things that you are doing.

You can be a science fiction author, you can be a fiction, sorry a nonfiction order. It depends on you really, but what I will say is test different things, of course, in the limit of the politeness, Be wary of the ‘get rich quick schemes’ kind of things, try to grow your audience slowly, but steadily, most of all the most important thing: ask.

I, in my newsletter I ask several times about things and I got answered and I’ve learned from them. And I got some of my beta readers, like a half a dozen, beta readers because I’ve asked you if somebody was interested in reading my stories and providing feedback. So it all started from you’re asking the right questions.

So I think like it’s important for us Crystal to let the audience know that day do have ways to provide value with their messages. They just need to find what kind of message is that for them?

Crystal: Definitely. I think we should dig into the content of mailing list stuff on a future episode. I think that would make a really interesting discussion.

And if you are looking for a couple of resources to help you with that content parts, to go with the, a tool part, then you can dig into The Newsletter Ninja by Tammy Labreque is one book that talks about, what kinds of things can go in a newsletter and gives you some tips about deliverability. If you’re looking to some, for something to help you write headlines or subject lines, and you’re also looking at a great formation of kind of an onboarding sequence, the books Sell Like Crazy by Sabri Suby, which will link all of these for you in the show notes is also a good starting place. And that one is a really sales focused book, but the second half specifically really digs into how to format a welcome sequence and what you’re opt in pages, which is basically what a free newsletter cookie is when you’re giving something away to get people, to opt into your newsletter.

And then how you follow that up with a sequence of things that will help make sure your emails are deliverable, how you get people to add your address to their contacts, and to, we call it white listing, to make sure that their mailing list provider or wherether their email provider knows that you are emails should go into their inbox, not into the junk or spam folders. So there’s all kinds of stuff to dig into there, but for now, go out, do some analysis on which tools you want. And while you’re thinking about that, we are going to visit the curious jar and find out what question we’re going to be tortured with today.

So as usual, I will dig around you. Tell me when to stop

If you found out you had one month left to live, how would you spend it?

Michele: Stop now.

Crystal: A pink one today. Okay. Yikes. If you found out you had one month left to live, how would you spend it?

Michele: I knew it. This kind of questions about the meaning of life and very profound stuff.

Crystal: You know, it’s a little bit on the deep side, but there we go.

Michele: Okay. Okay. I can start. Can I start with, by quoting one of my favourite authors?

Crystal: It’s your month, man? You do with it as you will.

Michele: Yeah. So Isaac Asimov, was reported to have answered the similar question. Like what you will, what would you do if you have, like, your doctor said you had like three or six minutes or less to live. And his answer was, I would type faster. I really think like if I had one month, if I really type fast on my keyboard I would be writing a couple of novellas, so I will be doing my challenge will be like us fast forwarded, but yeah, I will, I guess, like, my answer would be since I treasure the writing part that we’ll definitely spend more time, even more time than usual trying to write maybe the difficult books, the one book that you were like, I’m not really there yet. And I still, and I have a couple of books like that. I don’t know about you Crystal, but you know, like based that book, it’s the book that I want to write, but I’m not quite there skill wise.

So I would probably give it to go anyways. That’s the last month. And I’ll make sure to spend this much as possible with my family and my close friends, because that’s the most important thing that it comes from my tradition being Italian, family’s everything to me. And I mean, it when I’m saying it, so yes, it would be like reading, writing and spending time with my family, most of all.

Let’s end with something profound, I guess. So like I think I already quoted this by Seth Godin. He said: ‘Who would miss you when you’re gone?’ I think like we as writers have an advanced advantage over other people don’t write as a passion. Uh, which is like the ones, the moment we die, basically, a piece of us is going to be there and it’s going to be part of the human knowledge.

It might be, maybe you are indie, It’s not like your stuff is going to go end up on Wikipedia but is, people who come after you, can be family members and stuff. They will be like, Oh, there was that uncle or that grandfather that wrote that. So a piece of you is immortal. Let’s, let’s face it. Like you can’t die that way really.

So I will make sure that in the month, I’d rather as much stories that I can so that people can talk about that. And the person that was writing them. What about you? I gave you my five cents on that.

What’s Crystal’s story?

Crystal: Yeah. I’m not sure how hard I would push to write more fiction, to be honest, I think I would probably on the writing side, focus on writing letters. I do a lot of nonfiction writing as well, and a lot of sort of blog articles and just trying to, write my head clear if that makes sense. I find it I, when I’m writing about things, I have to think about them in a different way than when I’m just thinking them.

So I definitely processed through writing. So I think for me, there would be a certain amount of writing to people specifically, I would want to write one story, for sure for my readers, but I also would want to write letters to my, you know, my, my daughter, my husband, my family, things that could kind of appear later, and arrange to have them sent at some future date.

I’ve always, I thought that was… Well, I’ve been on the receiving end of some of those letters and they are very powerful and I think a nice way to engaged, at a moment when those important moments, you know, and there’s some milestones and things like that, that come. So I think that would definitely be a thing.

I think there would be some good friends and some cocktails. And, we’ve done a lot of traveling, which is great. I don’t feel the need to go off and be somewhere else. I think it would be, you know, being cozy at home and just really having as much quality time as possible with the people that I love so real and imagined I can always hang out with the people in my head anytime I want.

I think that’s an interesting kind of side conversation is that I don’t, I don’t write necessarily just to share it with other people. I actually have fun creating that world and visiting it for myself. So I think, yeah, that would be an interesting thing to see is how much needed to be external and how much is just .that I need to feel some closure for me, but I would like to think that if something happened to me, other people out there could pick up Rivers End and write stories in it. And that the characters in the town would still keep on going. Even without me. I think there’s plenty of other people who could also tell those stories.

So I would really hope that that would be the case. So maybe one of the things I would do is write a letter to future writers who might be writing in my world just to kind of say, hey, this is where I was going with this. And this is how I hope you would use the pieces in terms of it being a, friendly, welcoming, open place.

And just having it kind of minority has a life of its own. So I feel like that is something that will kind of outlive me. Which is good. Now we want to know what would you do if you found out you had one month left to live, what would be on your priority list and how would you go about spending that time and getting the most out of it?

And if you want to send us a curious jar question, you can email ideas@strategicauthorepreneur.com and we will add it to the jar. You can see we’re kind of dwindling here. We’ve got a few colors, but we could always use more questions. So strategic entrepreneur.com or you can drop your answers in the comments below, uh, the video. If you’re watching on YouTube as well.

Michele: And as always for show notes, links to resources that we mentioned, and for coupons or discounts on tools we love them please visit us@strategicauthorepreneur.com also subscribe to the newsletter and each week we’;; make sure to email you just one thing that we think will help you on your authorpreneur journey and a link clearly this episode.

Crystal: Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss out on our next episode where we will be talking with special guests, Bonnie Goldberg, about converting your previously traditionally published books into indie published books and how you can update and give new life to your back catalog.

Michele: See you next week.