Do Paid Newsletters Work?
The term "Buyer Beware" applies when booking paid newsletter promotions.
Standing out from an ever-growing crowd of books from indie authors is not simple nor cheap. Millions of titles are available on Amazon and its algorithms favor Top 100 and Top 1000 books in terms of site visibility. Running ads on places such as Amazon, Facebook, and BookBub to boost your book’s visibility can quickly turn pricey even for a budget-conscious indie author.
Paid newsletters are often touted as a viable alternative for generating new sales and increasing visibility for your book. Many indie publishing marketing gurus will encourage you to stack newsletter promos over a few days, promising this strategy will offer a short-term boost and long-term gains.
Real life isn’t that simple. If it were, every indie author who signed up for a paid newsletter promotion would be making money hand over fist right now.
Promoting your book in paid newsletters can drive increased sales and boost visibility … if you select the right ones at the right times. Not all paid newsletters drive sales as well as their pricing and subscriber base suggest. Booking a promo with the wrong newsletter is akin to setting your wallet on fire. Your money will vanish into the proverbial smoke and flames.
What can you do as an author to find out if a paid newsletter offers a good investment before you waste your time and money?
Consider these tips drawn from my experiences using this marketing tool:
Check out the newsletter’s social media accounts.
Always scope out a paid newsletter’s social media activity and engagement before purchasing any high-priced promotion package. It will help you avoid wasting your advertising dollars.
Many book promotion sites will boast that tens of thousands of readers follow their social media accounts. They charge indie authors to send out tweets or post on Facebook or Instagram, reasoning that your book will receive a major boost in visibility because of their account’s reach. It’s a huge red flag when you check those social media accounts and instantly see virtually zero engagement on any tweets or posts.
A simple reason exists to explain this discrepancy. Social media followers for these paid newsletters are largely composed of bots or spam accounts purchased to inflate the newsletter’s true following. In other words, it’s utterly useless to send out a tweet or post to that newsletter’s followers.
Investigate the newsletter’s subscribers.
Many paid newsletters love to boast about their massive subscriber base as a selling point for their services. They claim tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of subscribers — all hungry readers scouring their newsletter daily for great deals on books. If you feature your book in their newsletter, they promise you will mine tons of sales from an untapped vein of readers within your genre.
One dirty little secret characterizes these subscriber lists and paid newsletters do everything possible to hide this fact. Their subscriber lists are largely populated by unsuspecting indie authors who booked past book promos. When their promotion is finished, those authors ignore future newsletters and turn into inactive subscribers. That doesn’t matter to companies running the newsletters. They only want to tout their impressive subscriber numbers as an enticement to reel in other authors desperate enough to sign up for a promotional package.
A telltale sign that a newsletter has a limited pool of actual readers doubling as subscribers is a simple lack of name recognition. Have you ever seen or heard of this reader newsletter mentioned outside of indie author circles? If the answer is no, do not pass go and spend $200 (or whatever rate they charge for their promotion packages). Chances are strong the newsletter’s open rate will hover near zero and any sale you make from your book’s inclusion will be a miracle.
Sign up for the newsletter before purchasing a promotion.
The easiest strategy for learning if you will get your money’s worth from a paid newsletter is to subscribe to it for a limited time. Sign up to receive the newsletter for a month and take note of how it promotes books each day. Witnessing how a newsletter markets other books is the best way to see how it will treat your book.
Subscribing to a reader newsletter before purchasing a promotional package will help you answer the following important questions:
Does the newsletter spotlight a limited number of books or cram as many titles as possible into each email?
Are featured books separated by genre or mashed together in the same email, blended into a nondescript fiction goo?
Are featured books a mix of free and discounted titles?
Does the newsletter feature Kindle Unlimited titles, wide titles, or a mix of both?
If a newsletter charges extra for special features, how does it differentiate those specific books from others included in the newsletter?
Many paid newsletters take a buffet-style approach to promoting books. The newsletter slaps a couple of dozen titles drawn from multiple genres into an endless email. Each book earns a thumbnail cover, brief blurb, and purchase links. Assuming a subscriber opens the email in the first place, they will likely only check out the first two or three titles at the top before closing or deleting the email. If your book is buried in the middle or near the end, it will largely go unseen.
Choose newsletters focused exclusively on your genre.
If you decide marketing through paid newsletters is worth your time and money, choose a newsletter that caters exclusively to readers in your genre. BookBub is so effective because readers sign up for daily newsletters offering deals within a specific genre. That means sci-fi readers get sci-fi books, true crime readers get true crime titles, and so on. There’s no cross-pollination with genres that don’t hold their interest.
Promoting a fantasy novel, for example, works better in a newsletter devoted to the fantasy genre than in a newsletter featuring titles from a grab-bag of popular genres. Odds of actual readers and fans seeing your book are much greater in a single genre newsletter because it may be their main resource for finding new inexpensive books to read.
Grab-bag newsletters are a turn-off to many actual readers because it’s hard to predict what you’ll get in the daily email. A mystery fan who has to sift through a barrage of romance and fantasy novels just to find a mystery novel isn’t likely to waste time on that newsletter again.
Always approach paid newsletters from a reader’s perspective. If it doesn’t draw your interest as a reader, then it will never be an effective promotional tool for you as an author.