It's Always Ups and Downs

 So on the house side of things I had a fairly positive day yesterday. I didn't achieve all my office goals, but I can happily say I got some of them.  I went off the reservation in my email and kept up with the other household chores belonging to me so maybe I broke even?

First, I forgot to mention yesterday when I was talking about the Expense template that needs a ton more research because I have a program to learn and I'm not an accountant that I already downloaded a bunch on both topics that I save into the file for quick access when I come back to it.  I'd like to at the very least get the tally page done soon because I want to tally all my research and craft-related books into there while I'm thinking that I want to do this.  I'd also like to look up how many years I subscribed to the different magazines I have in holders on my filing cabinets before I gave up because they never got read then look up how much I spent.  I expect my initial sales goal will not be small once I tally those things that I only bought because of the dream.  But it gives me a goal to work towards once I get to that part of writing.  It's not that I want to sink all my time into this now when it's not relevant to me. It's that I don't want to spend so much time with it later.  So maybe it's a matter of building a little here and a little there.  The templates are supposed to make my life easier once I have them built, covering all the aspects of writing, and I really do want to know if there's some way to make one for promotion and websites that's useful and can manage those.  

I have it in my head that it might be neat if I can manage it to build a site with sections and you'd have to have an account on the site to see most things.  At the end of each book would be a code that would unlock a new section of the site, therefore, avoiding spoilers but allowing the reader to enrich their experience in the world.  I don't know how to build that yet and I imagine it would be crazy expensive to have someone else build it, but it's on my wishlist to-do list once I finally start finishing things. I've read a lot about the push for Patreons. I'm wondering if there's a way to incorporate something like that without guilt.  If you had short stories for them, you'd eventually want them available for all the other readers too so they didn't miss part of the world. And the way many people crowdfund actually bothers me on a moral level because I feel like it encourages that sense of entitlement.  I don't want something for nothing, even if it seems like a logical income stream based on what I'm reading and watching.  So when I get there they'll be a lot of brainstorming about if I can use that and feel comfortable doing so, or if I'll just have to not do that one.  

My experience with email not just yesterday but over the last couple of months, trying to get back down to a manageable level, has me thinking a lot about newsletters.  I'm a sucker for 'want the extended ending? Sign up for my newsletter.'  And that would be fine if so many of these authors weren't downright criminal in the way they abuse the power of a newsletter. I noticed Unroll.Me had missed a bunch of these newsletters.  They were not all finding their way into the roll-up and I got it into my head it was because they weren't in the inbox, they were in the promotions tab.  I decided what I needed to do was mark them all unread and move them to the inbox, then unsubscribe from Unroll.Me, delete my account, sign up for a new one and then have it scan my inbox again.  So I did all this and it took hours moving more than 103,000 emails to my inbox and marking them unread and for the record, it didn't work.  UnrollMe picked up even less of the subscriptions than it had before it said I had like 10 on the new scan, instead of the hundreds I actually do have.  But now I had this inbox with 103,000 emails.  I couldn't leave it like that.  So I caved and subscribed to a paid service called Clean Email. It's costing me $29.95 a year for just one email but I had to do something.  I only intend to keep it until I get this under control.  But here's the interesting thing, it tells me how many emails each of these people had sent me.  Some of these authors had sent me 3,000 or more emails and I hadn't been subscribed to them for more than a few years.  That's not a newsletter, that's spam.  I don't know if it's the way you're supposed to do things or not, but if it is it's wrong.  I have a laundry list of issues with this.

One, I felt forced into subscribing because I wanted the ending of the book and that's not right.  Newsletters should always be a choice.  Two, you're not even just spamming me to promote your work, you're sending me an email every time you or any of your friends puts out a book and then some in between.  Half of them, you're teasing contests in the subject line where the body says to keep watching it's coming soon.  That's false advertising in my head.  A bunch had ridiculous subject lines where I think they're about something else besides more advertising and of course they aren't.  They just frankly spam and now I've had to spend money to get my inbox under control because of authors that won't stop spamming me.  I have no interest in reading their books anymore because I feel like they abused the trust of the newsletter.  I've already invested all the money I'm going to invest in them trying to get their spam out of my inbox.  Maybe that works for some readers, I don't know who, but maybe some people like it.  But for me as a reader, you've lost me.  

So like I said considering my own experience I've been thinking about Newsletters, I don't know if what's in my head is the right way, but I know when I have to write one this will be the way I do it, right or wrong.  First, there should be 12, exactly 12 in a year, one per month, so the reader remembers you're alive.  There should be no more or no less than that, so you aren't contributing to sending someone's email out of control.  The exception to this rule being some sort of email class that tells you in advance there are this many lessons and they'll come this often and at the completion of those lessons, the emails will stop.  First I'd pair the newsletter to a blog so that you can both keep it brief and have a place to be wordy.  I'd say the outline would go something like this.

Intro - Something short, only a couple of sentences.

Your Upcoming Releases.  Include the blurb and cover image for your stuff, but use a link for the excerpt that brings them to your blog if they want to read more.  Or maybe just include the excerpt, then click through to the sale page for the blurb.  Possibly a click back to the blog for a character interview or some other cool item.  You could even do a partial excerpt and a click-through to read the rest to maintain brevity.  Here's the thing you need to remember, most people are leading ridiculously busy lives.  You want to remind them that you're here and you have outstanding books, but you don't want to force them to read a novel in your email.  Give them chances to learn more when or if they have time, but if it's a book in their inbox that isn't actually a real book, they will not read it.  I've been a stay at home Mom the past decade, in most people's heads I have the most time of any adult on the planet and yet I managed to let my email build to over 103k and that's after deleting a few thousand a day for months on end,.  Also, I had more free time before I became a stay-at-home Mom, but that's a story for another day.  What might be cool here, is a click-through to something like wallpapers, Facebook covers, or forum avatars that you can only access from that newsletter link.  Not only is it potential free advertising for you if they use them, but it's also something cool to make the newsletter worth it.  Again, make it a link don't make it a massive email.

Your Upcoming Appearances - I would do this as something like I have some events this month, click here to check out my calendar if you'd like to catch up with me. I'd use this for both online and in-person events.

Cool Website and Social Media Updates - Unless this is short I'd again make it a link to check it out.  Something like got some cool new features or a revamp on the website/blog/Facebook page. Click here if you'd like to know more.  

Contests/Giveaways - If you're doing one, don't just tease it, tell them where and when to enter or find it.  Or give them a link to more information. I don't feel like this is necessary to have each month, but I feel like it's a jerk move to tease coming soon about contests instead of just hosting them.  

More Features - I'm not sure I'd call it that but like some sort of sign that from here on out it's a click-through if you want the rest so the people that aren't interested in these things can skip it.  Under this section, I'd put:

• Writing Updates, if people want to know about future projects you're working on that aren't ready to release yet or where you are with writing that book you're waiting on. 
• My Life, if you've done something interesting you'd like to share.  That neat little anecdote you think people might like.  You could put an interesting spin on this if you don't lead an interesting life, like making it a sort of feature where every month you write about someone you saw on the subway or at the grocery store, what you saw and then make it sort of a writing exercise on what you think their story is, inviting readers to interact with ideas.  If you did something like that, maybe you could write a short story at the end of every month using all the ideas or the best of the ideas that you can only get the download link to in the newsletter.  I mean, you obviously couldn't profit directly from it, but it might be a sort of fun interactive project with readers.  And again it's a sort of fun thing that encourages people to subscribe to the newsletter without forcing them to.  You'd probably have to look into the legalities of it, but still, it's an idea.  
• Writing Tips, like something you learned that month or just some trick of the trade you'd like to share with the aspiring writers in your midst.  
• Research Corner, I'd probably include the topic here, but you have to do research for your books and some people just eat up random research tidbits.  
• Reading Recommendations, If you're connecting this with a blog you could hook up all those friends with a sort of weekly feature where they just talk about their book and that would link up in the newsletter without making it too long.  At the bottom of your weekly posts, you can put a little section of cover images for your other friends you want to promote.  

My point is that you could have all these cool parts to your newsletter without making it long by connecting it with a blog or with posts that are only linked from the newsletter if you didn't want to share on a blog.  

And then at that point, I'd sign off, but I'd use one of those signatures that has the backlist links in the sign-off.  

Now I'm not sitting here pretending I know how you're supposed to write an author newsletter. I've never even published a book. What I am saying is that as a reader, that would be my ideal author newsletter.  That would be the one that never got on my nerves and I wouldn't mind staying subscribed to forever.  It's reminding me that the author I like exists and letting me know of his or her upcoming release and just giving me bookmarks for it I want to know more about other topics, it's short, sweet, and only comes once a month.  It even works in some neat freebies that are only for newsletter subscribers.  If I do find a way to make a scrivener template to manage newsletters and blogs, I'm so making this one of the sketches. I might alter it here and there based on actual research on the author newsletter, but I'm keeping that basic design and maintaining that more than a monthly newsletter email is freaking spam.

Anyway, I'm sort of forced to deal with my email again to be able to find the things I actually need in there because of my idiocy yesterday. It will probably take up a lot of my day.

But in the house, I kept up with the laundry, which was super weird this week because I didn't even have a full load of jeans.  I went searching even.  I ended up throwing in some darks just to fill the load.  The bedroom got cleaned its daily cleaning.  My son got transported to and from college. (I really need to find time to finish teaching him to drive.) But my office was the real pride and joy of the day.  I didn't get the picture totes put back, and I decided to wait on mopping until I schedule it in for a weekly thing, but it got swept and all the surfaces got cleaned. The cobwebs were cleared and every decoration new and old was dusted and given a home. My husband actually cleaned most of the decorations for me because I was worried about breaking some of them.  I figured instead of a description, I'd share pictures because I love my office. I put them into a slideshow because I took so many.  Hopefully you'll enjoy.