I know these days a lot of people are over resolutions. And I get it—why set goals based on a milestone in time when time hardly even feels real anymore these days?

But hey, even if you’re down on resolutions, I know you’re into building your author career. And why not tackle something new now?

Personally, I’m all about it. There’s something about the idea of that new year that feels like a blank slate, and it gets me really fired up to take on a new challenge. And in fact, your author platform is a really excellent space to channel that kind of energy!

If you also get that warm buzz for a challenge at the start of the new year—or if you’re just a person looking for a way to focus your author platforming efforts—here are a few ways to channel that energy into meaningful effort as we head into 2022.

3 Author Platform Resolutions for 2022

Guest Posts

As an author, I’m guessing you enjoy writing. Guest posting for an outlet, whether it’s a blog, a magazine, or another forum, can be a great way to put those skills to work to expand your platform to audiences through a channel they already love and trust. Guest posting on a respected website can signal expertise and professionalism.

As you look for opportunities, remember to focus on outlets that draw in a readership similar to the audience who would enjoy your books.

[Editor’s Note: Psst! Interested in guest posting with DIY MFA? Check out our submission guidelines]

Already guest posting with success? Great! Level up this challenge by trying to earn a regular contributor role with an outlet you love.

Newsletter

Many authors dread tackling the challenge of the newsletter. But as I wrote earlier this year, I believe your newsletter can be fun and even joyful! Why not make this the year you learn to love this all-important platforming channel? It’s an opportunity to connect with your biggest fans that nothing else can offer.

You could also set a goal to hit a milestone number of subscribers, improve your open rate, or commit to an increased newsletter frequency.

New Channels

Social media is changing around us all the time! It can be hard to keep up with everything, and you don’t have to. But, if you just keep doing the same thing you were doing five years ago and never change at all, you’ll fall behind and lose opportunities. To take on this challenge in a manageable way, I recommend picking one way to stretch yourself this year with social media and going all in to master it.

That might mean finally diving into a new platform like TikTok and making a study of it throughout the year through expert guides and other authors in your genre who are nailing it. Maybe you’ve been curious about podcasting and finally buy that mic. Or, maybe it’s experimenting with Facebook ads.

Whatever it is, remember, you have a full year to build up your learning curve. Don’t worry about being an instant master, just keep seeking out opportunities to learn.

Ready, Set, Resolve!

After another year of change and chaos, are you ready for a clean slate? I sure am. And when I get hungry for something new, I automatically start thinking about what the next challenge will be that I set for myself.

Platform is a wide-ranging thing that takes on many forms and is bottomless in what you can grow. This makes it a wonderful space to focus, set goals, and commit to learning something new.

Happy holidays, and best of luck with the new challenges you take on in the new year!

Tell us in the comments: What author platform resolutions are you going to make for 2022?

By day, E. J. Wenstrom is a digital strategy pro with over 10 years at communications firms. By early-early morning, she’s an award-winning sci-fi and fantasy author of the Chronicles of the Third Realm War novels, starting with Mud. She believes in complicated characters, terrifying monsters, and purple hair dye.

The post 3 Author Platform Resolutions for 2022 appeared first on DIY MFA.

I mostly troll on Facebook, but every now and then I crawl out from under the bridges of my personal pages to post something. I don’t use my writer’s FB page at all, but it is connected to my website (which sits mostly unused). I love participating on the WNU Facebook page. I never go on Pinterest, except by accident. I have LinkedIn that I don’t use, and I find Twitter baffling. Then there is Tiktok. Frankly, I just gave up. 

I knew I needed to make my online presence known but had no idea where to start, how to do anything on the platforms, or who, quite honestly, would care what I had to say? 

I kept hearing about newsletters and how important they are. A newsletter opens the door to your potential readers and future fans. They are low-risk but can have a fantastic reward. It is moderated by you—you are in control of content, you decide who receives it and when. 

In December of 2020, I had an epiphany: I had already been sharing a lot of my thoughts. Whenever something happened—moving, pets passing away, or the time we couldn’t get home because there was a suicidal maniac parked down the street with a rifle—I would write a quick email and send it to select groups of friends and family. I always received positive feedback. 

I just needed to be more intentional, more organized. And anyone who knows me well knows that is not my strong suit. It would appear that I already had the seeds for a newsletter. 

I took DIY MFA’s Pixels to Platform (P2P) course. I had an idea and a very, very loose outline and set of articles. It was mostly in my head with some of it written on scraps of paper shoved inside a folder. I really hadn’t pursued it. I decided to do the “100 Subscribers Challenge” with ConvertKit.

I launched my first newsletter on January 1, 2021, and have successfully published on the first of every month since then, with a little mid-month blurp. I made errors every month and had to course-correct a few times. 

Here is what I learned as a novice newsletter writer:

1. Don’t overextend yourself. 

You need to ask yourself two questions:

• How much time do you want to spend on your platform? 
• How often do you want to send it out? 

Whatever commitment you make, be sure you can follow through. I didn’t want to commit to a weekly or biweekly newsletter. Mostly, because if I stumbled, I would just lay and wallow in the dust of my failure. I decided that the 1st of every month was a good goal. 

2. However long you think it will take—double it. 

The writing part is actually the easiest. But there are so, so many steps to creating and publishing a newsletter, and each of those steps have steps: 

Think of topics for your newsletter. 

When an idea comes to you—WRITE IT DOWN. I learned that when I thought of an idea, often while driving, I needed to write it down right away or it would vaporize into the ether.

Research. 

Researching a topic can be a huge rabbit hole. Just finding the distance that your house moved on that first day, five years ago, can chew up an hour. Picking the perfect picture of your house sitting in the middle of a farmer’s field… don’t even get me started on how long that takes. Plus, it often led to looking through pictures of kids, dogs, and flowers.

Writing.

I write longhand and then have to transcribe the article into the computer for editing and formatting

Editing/formatting. 

Transcribing into the computer is only the first of a multi-step step. You have to edit and revise to get it to the point where it is “good enough.” Then transfer to your newsletter template, find titles, make sure your fonts are consistent, get the pictures where you want them, and all of the other things that make it look good. 

Publish. 

Pushing send. You have done steps 1-4. Now you have to click “send.” I like to have it done a couple of days early and schedule the broadcast. That way I can go back and tweak something if I get nervous. 

3. Be prepared for responses, good or bad. 

I am pleasantly surprised at the positive responses I continue to receive as the months go by. I think this is due to the content in my newsletter. 

If you make an error, own it. My readers love to point out my spelling errors and incorrect dates, but that means they have read it. I nod and smile (one of my mantras), thank them for their input, and then double-, triple-, and quadruple-check the next newsletter. 

4. Do outlines. 

Organize what is going to happen in each newsletter. It is best to have an entire year planned out. You can always deviate from that plan, if necessary, but to have an outline to fall back on is critical.

If you have a series of articles on one subject, outline from beginning to end. Or even better, write the complete story and then break it into pieces. I have a running article that covers a single event. I have wasted a lot of time figuring out what I told the reader last month or the month before that and what I want to say in the current newsletter and then the next one. This is one of my organizational issues I spoke about earlier.

I also promised a 4-part series and had to apologize twice for not getting it done because I didn’t have time to do the research (see Point #2).

5. Have fun.

Don’t take yourself too seriously. Don’t be afraid to try. 

It took me 3 years to actually publish my first newsletter. 

To make a newsletter (or whatever platform you chose) successful, share with everyone. 

Remember, if something interests you, it will interest someone else. 

Whoever enjoys your musings will stay, those that don’t will unsubscribe. That’s okay; they weren’t your people.

Social media. A necessary evil. It builds confidence, teaches you skills, and finds your “peeps.”  Find the platform that works for you. For me, the best option is the newsletter. For you, it may be one of the many, many options out there. 

Tell us in the comments below: do you have a newsletter? What was the number one thing you learned when you were first starting out?

Brenda Rech is happily married with two beautiful daughters, one dog, three cats, and a bird named Amy Farrah Fowler. Her flower gardens are forever at the beginner’s stages as she would rather hike with her husband and dog or explore her writing. Her favorite breakfast is crispy bacon and strawberry jam on white toast. She is currently working on her first novel and you can sign up for Brend’s newsletter here. Brenda loves to doodle and is a fan of Rebecca Fish Ewan’s Doodling for Writers, so she drew her own headshot.

The post #5onFri: Five Lessons I Learned as a Novice Newsletter Writer appeared first on DIY MFA.

You just have to rethink how you go about it.

Just follow these steps. 

1. Shop Around

The best place to start for a great newsletter is by knowing, in general, what you love in a newsletter. So for a couple weeks, go ahead and sign up for every single email newsletter you come across. Other authors, news outlets, experts, shopping websites, everything. 

Then, watch it all come in. What trends do you see? How are different people and companies going about their emails differently? What kinds of layouts catch your eye? Take it all in, and question every piece of it. 

And more than anything else, pay attention to what you enjoy. For some, it might be the top quality curated links a certain person has an uncanny knack for pulling together on a theme. Or, maybe it’s the simple elegance of ample white space. Maybe it’s the digestible quick hit of a top 5 list, or the satisfying deep dive into a topic you’re passionate about. 

There’s no right or wrong answer here, just note your observations. 

2. Create Your Own Template

This is where it starts to get fun: Consider the notes you took in step one as you took in all different kinds of newsletters. 

• If a snarky headline enticed you to open an email right away, find ways to add your own humor into the subject lines. 
• If a picture of an author’s dog gave you the warm fuzzies, your cat might do the same for your subscribers. 
• If you lost yourself in the latest updates about an author’s creative process, find ways to give your own subscribers a glimpse into how you work. 

Don’t think in terms of topics, here — think in terms of sections, pieces you can offer a variation on every time. Then stack them together, keeping an eye out for balance between meatier content that will offer readers a bit of depth and smaller bites that will give snackable satisfaction. 

And of course, don’t forget your goal is to keep in touch with readers who will want your books. As long as you have reasonable tie-in to what you write about in some way, you’re golden. 

3. Commit to a Schedule

Now that you know what combination of content is going to keep you excited to write a newsletter, it’s time to figure out your schedule. 

How frequently can you create the content in the template you created, at top quality? 

Once a month? Once a week? Once a quarter? There’s really no right or wrong to this, just find a workflow that’s a reasonable commitment. (Okay, if you can’t  commit to once every three months with confidence, reassess what you’re including in your newsletter and make it less demanding to create —that’s a bare minimum frequency).

And hey, no pressure. If you commit to a frequency that later proves overly ambitious, you have the power to change it. You’re the boss of this little publication, after all. 

4. Promote 

While there’s nothing wrong with slow, steady growth, a newsletter is undeniably more fun when you have an audience to address. Which means you need to invite people to subscribe. 

Start by creating a snappy description of what readers can expect from your newsletter. This works best when it’s specific, short and matches the tone of the newsletter itself. 

Then, drop that thing everywhere you can–your website, your social media profiles, your email signature, swag, everything. Your fans will be sure to catch on!

Have Fun with Your Newsletter

Newsletters are an amazing way to stay in touch with readers, share more of yourself and your work, and stay in touch between new releases. So don’t let the idea of a newsletter intimidate or frustrate you–choose to include content that you’ll enjoy creating and sharing with your fans. 

Over time, you can learn more about what your readers love by monitoring your engagement analytics and hone it even further if you need to. But by starting with a formula of content you know you’ll love creating, you’re much more likely to stick with it. Odds are, that enthusiasm will be contagious, and your subscribers will have more fun, too. 

By day, E. J. Wenstrom is a content marketing and public relations expert. By early early morning, she’s the award-winning author of the Chronicles of the Third Realm War series. Join her email list for bookish news and a free download of the TRW series prequel RAIN at www.ejwenstrom.com.

The post The Secret Formula to Author Newsletter Joy appeared first on DIY MFA.

Andi is a writer of both magical realism and nonfiction, but in the last year, she has taken on a new persona as ACF Bookens, author of cozy mysteries. Today we’ll be talking about her process and strategy in crafting this series.

When she’s not writing, Andi is also an editor and writing coach, and she runs a beautiful, supportive online community. She lives in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains with a number of animals who cannot possibly coordinate their veterinary needs.

In this episode Andi and I discuss:

• Why Andi cautions against writing for the market, but encourages writing in a particular niche that you love.
• What Cozy mystery tropes readers tend to expect, find funny, and appreciate.
• How writers of the Cozy mystery genre tend to market themselves, including newsletter writing tips.

Plus, their #1 tip for writers.

About the Author

Andi Cumbo-Floyd is a writer of both magical realism and nonfiction, but in the last year, she has taken on a new persona as ACF Bookens, author of cozy mysteries. She lives in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains with a number of animals who cannot possibly coordinate their veterinary needs.

Her decision to begin writing under a pen name had nothing to do with secrecy, obviously, and everything with finally putting into place all she had learned about marketing.

You can find out more about Andi on her website. You can also follow her on Facebook and Goodreads. 

Plotted for Murder

She has always said if she was running, it’s because she was being chased. That’s never been more true.

It’s Autumn, bookstore owner Harvey Beckett’s favorite time of year, and she’s most excited about two things – her bookshop’s float in the annual Harvest Parade and pumpkin everything. But when her best friend Mart finds the body of her running coach and high school gym teacher behind the bleachers one fall morning, Harvey becomes enthralled in a mystery that uncovers their quaint town’s darkest secrets.

When Harvey’s curiosity gets the best of her, she and her pup Mayhem find that maybe there are just some secrets left undiscovered.

If you decide to check out the book, we hope you’ll do so via this Amazon affiliate link, where if you choose to purchase via the link DIY MFA gets a referral fee at no cost to you. As always, thank you for supporting DIY MFA!

(Right-click to download.)

If you liked this episode…

Head over to iTunes, Stitcher Radio or Google Play and subscribe so you’ll be first to know when new episodes are available.

Also, remember that sharing is caring so if you know anyone who might enjoy this podcast, please tell them about it or leave us a review so other listeners will want to check it out.

Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome!

The post Episode 332: The Craft and Business of Cozy Mysteries – Interview with Andi Cumbo-Floyd appeared first on DIY MFA.

When I started my indie career, I made a lot of mistakes with my email list. I knew I needed a mailing list, but I didn’t know the best way to get addresses legally and ethically or what to do with them once I had them. Sure, I knew I had to send subscribers a newsletter, but how often should I write to them? What should I say? “Yeah, still working on the book…?” I might be new to email marketing, but even I recognized that I could only rephrase that sentence a finite number of times before the eyeballs started rolling. 

I’ll presume you’re not in the dark about why you need a mailing list or how to get started with one, but you might like some list-building best practices. Here are six tips on building a mailing list that I wish someone had said to me when I was starting my writing career.

1. Write to your email list at least once a month 

Once a week is better. Write less frequently than once a month and you risk people forgetting who you are and why they signed up for your list. Trust me, I learned this the hard way. As a profound introvert, I felt like a newsletter should contain…well, news. And I didn’t judge the contents of my life to be especially newsworthy. When I finally sent a second newsletter, who opened my email? My mom. Two college roommates. The others I could count on one hand.

A tip I learned from Kristin Oliphant helped me get over the newsworthiness hurdle. She recommended reframing the idea into it’s just an email you’re sending to a friend. Once I latched on to that idea, the prospect of writing a monthly author newsletter became much less daunting. 

2. You don’t have to impress, they like you already

Your email subscribers likely signed up for your list because they either stumbled across your website and liked what they saw, or they read a short story or another sample of your work and want more. You’ve already sold them. What they want is you, so don’t be afraid to share yourself.

3. It’s okay to experiment

So much advice insists that success demands brand consistency. I fretted and stewed over what my emails should contain and how I should present the content. I let perfect become the enemy of good. When you’re new to email marketing and you don’t have many subscribers, aim for good enough.

This is a marvelous time to experiment. Think about what newsletters you subscribe to and you enjoy. How often do they send messages? What do you like about them? What’s their tone? Can you borrow an idea here, an idea there, and give them each a twist to make them your own?

If your email service provider permits it, try some A/B testing and see which messages generate the best responses. Now’s the time to test and refine, so when you ‌scale up, you’ll have a winning formula in your pocket.

4. Readers want a novel, novella, or short story for a magnet.

A reader magnet is the literary equivalent to the free cheese cube at the grocery store that entices shoppers to buy a half-pound of the fancy stuff. Food samples may have disappeared from the landscape in the age of coronavirus, but the reader magnet freebie is still going strong. 

But like free food, not all magnet samples are created equal. While some sources will tell you that any freebie—a piece of research, your character profiles, or a deleted scene from your novel—is good enough, the truth is that new subscribers want a completed piece of literature.

You’ll get far more sign-ups with a novel, a novella, a short story, or a handful of poems than you will with other magnet types. Perhaps after a year or more, once you’ve built a relationship with your readers, they’ll be receptive to taking a peek behind your writing curtain, but if you’re writing fiction, such material isn’t strong enough to convert browsers into subscribers.  

5. Use promo services to get into the community

Use that reader magnet novel, novella, or short story with services like BookFunnel, StoryOrigin, or ProlificWorks to find new readers. Authors on these sites regularly put together group giveaways and other promotions. Participating authors agree to share the promos via social media and their newsletters, exposing your work to thousands of potential fans. 

These services work especially well for genre fiction, as the promo organizer often customizes them to a single genre. But sometimes they’re organized around other principles, like inclusion in Kindle Unlimited or promotional sale prices. You can also reach out to individual authors through these services and agree to swap mentions of your books in each other’s newsletters. This is a great technique to employ before a launch. 

6. Prune your email list regularly and ruthlessly

This one hurts, but think of it as a vaccination against spam. 

You’ve worked hard to collect those email addresses and watching those subscriber numbers rise definitely boosts self-confidence. But look into your stats and you’ll see plenty of people who seldom open your emails. In the long run, these people hurt your reputation as an email marketer. 

Services like Google regularly evaluate the reputations of every email sender to determine who’s sending spam. Even if your subscribers verified their desire to be on your list via double opt-in, if they don’t open your emails, they tarnish your reputation as a sender. Over time, these slights can hurt your ability to acquire future subscribers. 

To avoid this, do two things on the front end.

1. Set up an automation “onboarding” sequence. This is a brief series of emails you write ahead of time that get sent automatically when a subscriber first joins your list. Send these a few days or a week apart, when you’re still fresh in the subscriber’s mind. This trains the subscriber to be on the lookout for your messages, and the increased open rate signals to the email service provider you are not a sender who should get sent to spam. 
2. Second, assess your list every month. If you identify subscribers who haven’t opened a message from you in six months (or less, if you prefer), give them one final chance to stay on your list. Use a clear heading like, “Do you want to stay on my list?” If they don’t open it, delete them. Furthermore, if your list is large enough, you may be paying to carry these subscribers. Why pay for dead weight?

There’s even more information on how to build your email list in the DIY MFA Pixels to Platform Course. Trust yourself and be fearless! A beautiful new world of reader relationships awaits you. 

Helen J. Darling writes and publishes contemporary women’s fiction at her imprint, Bricolage Books. She published her first novel, I’ll Know Me When I Find Me, in January 2018. Her latest novel, Terms and Conditions, was published in November 2019. You can connect with her at itshelendarling.com, on Instagram, Twitter and on Facebook. 

The post Email 102: Building Your Author Newsletter List appeared first on DIY MFA.

With so many platforming tools, your following is actually owned by the application you’re using. Consider: When you’re on Facebook, you have to play by Facebook’s rules. If they change their algorithm and say Page post reach will be reduced unless you pay for advertising to “Boost” it, you have no choice but to pay or be less visible. You can’t take that list of followers elsewhere.

But your email list is wholly yours. Even if you decide to stop using a specific email service, you still have that list and can do whatever you want with it.

This is awesome. And, well, it can also be daunting.

Once you have subscribers on your email list, what the heck are you supposed to do with them?

There are a lot of different answers to this question–as many answers as there are authors, one could argue. But I always find it helpful to know how other authors are doing things. So today I’m going to give you the grand tour of the monthly newsletter I send my own subscribers.

Application

Let’s start with the tools I use. I’m a MailChimp fan, and I feel it has served me well. It’s very user-friendly and, despite my being a total disaster at graphic design, I always feel confident that my newsletter looks great, because they make it easy.

However, as more competition to MailChimp crops up and my list grows, I have found MailChimp to be more expensive. I am currently exploring moving to MailerLite, which seems to function similarly and is less expensive.

ConvertKit is another great option, if you’re looking for something more sophisticated. 

Schedule

It is important to have a regular schedule for your newsletter. Being reliable is just part of any healthy relationship, and when readers know to expect your email, they’re more likely to open it.

Anywhere between weekly and quarterly tends to be just fine, depending on what you share in each email, but for me, monthly is the right balance between staying frequent enough to stay top-of-mind with my readers, without overloading myself or annoying subscribers by pinging them constantly.

Content

In my opinion, there is no “wrong” way to do your newsletter. Let your voice shine through, and share a little bit of yourself. Make it long enough to offer some substance, but short enough to be skimmable and engaging.

If you’re stuck, look to other newsletters you’re addicted to, no matter if they’re publishing-related or not. I adore Anne Friedman and the Skimm, which share a smart and snarky voice with a little quirk. So I’ve tried to offer a bit of my own quirk in my newsletter both in its voice and in its structure:

• Status: In this top section, I share three action-oriented one-liners about what I’m up to at the moment. This can cover anything from my binge of Orange is the New Black, my ongoing sleep deprivation, or what I’m writing at the moment. As long as it’s short, sweet and crafted to entertain.
• Update: This is where I offer a little more substance with a few brief paragraphs. I kick it off with any publishing announcements I have, and then move on to tease and link to my recent blog posts. This is also where I offer occasional subscriber-only bonuses.
• Around the Web: I close out with another “quick bites” section, where I link to my top five favorite science fiction/fantasy/geek life articles from the previous month. They’re easy to grab, I just refer to my Twitter posts.

Subject Line

I used to have fun with my subject lines by giving each edition a quirky title. For example, I used ‘It Smells Like Snow’ Edition” in December, right after the new Gilmore Girls season released, and “Cue Up Another 365 Edition” at the beginning of January.

But then I did some beta testing and found that subject lines that offer a specific teaser to the content performed way better. So now I use lines like “Grab your golden lasso | Every comic book I read | AI in Dubai.”

I still like the “editions” more … but not as much as I like seeing that high engagement rate in my stats.

AB Testing

Speaking of A/B testing, I’m almost always running one. The subject line is a great one for this, and so it the release time. I’ve become obsessed with finding the most optimal time and day to push my newsletter out. Mailchimp makes this super easy, so don’t be afraid to use it liberally.

Every newsletter is a little different, and the best ones know their own voice and offer true substance.

It’s great to peek over another author’s shoulder, and I suggest you do a ton of it–really! I welcome you to join my email list even if you’re never going to read a fantasy book in your life. Follow several other authors too. Pay attention to what you like and what you don’t.

But ultimately, there is no substitute for knowing your brand and listening to your gut. Start from where you’re comfortable, be imaginative about it, and pay attention to those test results as you go.

What do you include in your author newsletter?

By day, Emily Wenstrom, is the editor of short story website wordhaus, author social media coach, and freelance content marketing specialist. By early-early morning, she is E. J. Wenstrom, an award-winning sci-fi and fantasy author whose debut novel Mud was named 2016 Book of the Year by the Florida Writers Association.

The post Behind the Scenes of an Author Newsletter appeared first on DIY MFA.