Starting a Newsletter

I’m thinking of starting a newsletter. I know, I know, I’m totally late on this and should have started one years ago. There are multiple reasons I didn’t.

I honestly, didn’t know what to say, and still don’t. As it stands, I’ll probably be writing a bi-monthly newsletter…about how my writing is going? I’m still not sure what to write to be honest. Now the reason I finally decided to start a newsletter was to give away my prequel short story, Blood Money. I was thinking of just uploading it to Kobo, Amazon, Smashwords, etc. and setting the price the zero. But I’m not sure if you can put something on Amazon for 0 unless it’s in Unlimited? And I have been thinking about doing a newsletter over the last couple of years. When I tend to think about doing things for years, I end up doing them eventually.

I didn’t specifically write Blood Money as a way to draw in people to the newsletter. Blood Money is a bunch of flashback chapters from my upcoming fourth book, Eternal Darkness. My editor suggested I do it as a giveaway. Not a bad idea. Also feel like it’d be a waste if I just trashed it. Blood Money isn’t necessary to reading The Passage of Hellsfire. But if you want to learn more about Hellsfire’s father and a character in Eternal Darkness, it’s worth a read. On the plus side, Blood Money didn’t take away from working on Eternal Darkness.

Generally speaking, I’m also not a fan of newsletters. Newsletters are very obtrusive. If you don’t believe me, check your inbox. Over the last couple of years, I’ve been unsubscribing to a lot of things. Because of the recent laws, I unsubscribed to even more things. Thanks for the reminder! Even the few ones I do subscribe to, I still get a lot of emails. If that wasn’t bad enough, pretty much every major website has a little popup to try and get you to subscribe to their newsletter. Drives me crazy. Almost as much as sites being behind a paywall. I’ve started to use Facebook as a way to follow companies and when they have sales and deals.

I’m going to give it a year, maybe two, to see what good a newsletter is, if I enjoy doing it, or people even care about it. PO Boxes aren’t cheap and they went up the last time I checked. I hope you’ll sign up for it in a month.

Marc Johnson