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I’ve been trying to run an email newsletter for more than a decade without success. It’s too much trouble and not enough people have signed up for it. It’s also a time-suck trying to ask people to sign up for the newsletter. Even if the person signs up for the newsletter, who really knows if the subscriber is actually going to read it?
That said, I have lots of content to share and rather enjoy keeping up a newsletter Also, I really like receiving newsletters from authors! I almost always read their news and random thoughts. I recognize that these newsletters have an ostensibly commercial purpose. But who cares? I just like to keep up with what I’ve been missing. Unfortunately now it is hard to keep up with what authors are doing and saying. Social media can help with that, but sometimes these thoughts are miniaturized and not particularly noteworthy. A newsletter tends to highlight the major things, the more important pieces of writing and life news.
Email newsletters have a technical and financial challenge. First, a lot of these newsletter maker services for businesses are rather pricey (100-300$), and authors often are operating under shoestring budgets. Second, setting up these newsletters requires some understanding of email and web domains and web templates. Some of the mailing services often a free service to people starting out. That’s good, but they can be hard to set up and unexpected things can occur. For example, I use mailerlite which charges $110/year for a growing business and free for a single user. That was a bear to set up (and I felt that I was pretty expert about such things). Then, quite randomly, when mailerlite updated its website, it deleted all the previous newsletters and email subscription information. That should have been reason to leave mailerlite, but it still was the best available service for free users.
Even if everything is set up successfully, often you can just forget to write the #$#$ update. Sometimes it just slips my mind. I know you can make reminders, etc. But it’s still another low-priority task to add to the To Do list.
Believe it or not, I used to write nice chatty emails when people signed up for review copies from the Librarything Member Giveaway. And yes, I used to beg people to sign up for whatever mailing list I was trying to start. But these mailing lists always failed. First, only a miniscule number of people signed up. Then, I really didn’t have much motivation to write a witty or informative newsletter. Eventually the free email services died away.
That said, I really want to make it work this time. For one thing I can republish things I wrote on my blog and elsewhere. And maybe I can write insightfully and wittily in the hopes that someday I will have achieved my goal which right now seems so far away and outlandish.
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