Please, Join My Email List!

Here’s the link: https://subscribepage.io/EngdahlHouse

I promise not to spam you. My email list is to update friends like you on my discounts, appearances, and upcoming novels. 

I am really enjoying this journey. I hope you are, too. I’m excited to have you along. 

Being an independent author is a struggle, but it’s the struggle that excites me. I’ve learned so much along the way, not only about history, storytelling, and writing but also about digital marketing. 

I suppose one of the advantages of being a commercially published author is that someone else does the marketing for you. I can see the allure of that. You just write the books, and they do the rest. Heck, I hear much of the editing is handed off to a professional staff so you can start cranking out your next book. So, I’m not knocking it, and please tell me if I’m wrong in my assumptions about how things work with the big publishers.

I like to think of myself as an independent author and an entrepreneur, or solopreneur, as the cool kids say. I like the marketing part of the business. I worked in advertising for years. I also enjoy interacting with my friends the readers on social media and learning from other authors there. I’ve joined several of their email lists, first to keep up with their new releases and also to learn how they do their email marketing. 

Every social media guru seems to say you need to have an email list. You may have a big following on X, Facebook, YouTube, or wherever. But that is borrowed ground, controlled by algorithms and community managers who stifle organic marketing. You own your email list, and nobody can take it away from you even though your members can unsubscribe. So always treat them with respect and give them what they want.

The best part is that after you pay the startup cost of buying a domain name and paying for an email server, it’s free advertising.

Trust me, I spend a lot of money to run ads on Amazon and Facebook. That’s usually to tell people that one of my books is 99¢ or 99p. There’s not a lot of return on investment there, even when they do buy.  The hope is that they’ll like that book so much that they’ll buy the others and become a lifelong reader.

With my list, I can fire off an email anytime I want to tell you that one of my books is on sale, and it doesn’t cost me a thing.

Admittedly, I was reluctant to get started. There were upfront costs and certainly a lot of technical effort to get the thing running. I read Bryan Cohen’s Self-Publishing and Email Marketing book and followed most of it. 

Unfortunately, there is no click-by-click guide for the technical part. I don’t think there could be because technology is constantly changing. As soon as you know how to do something on Facebook, for instance, they change it. However, I was able to use technical support on both the domain name seller and the email server side to finally marry the two after days of hair loss and tears.

There’s still a lot I need to do from Cohen’s book, including writing an exclusive free short story for people who sign up. Don’t worry, if you sign up now, or have already signed up, I’ll make sure you get it too. But that’s a long way off from here. 

Still, I’d like to know if you’d be interested in that. It would have to be connected to my series and add some insight, but not be necessary to read to understand everything else. I think it should probably take place before the narrative of Book One: Rampage on the River. I have an idea, but I’d like to hear what you think. What story would you like? What or whom would you like to know more about? 

Please leave a comment or reach out to me, any way you like, and once again, please join my email list: https://subscribepage.io/EngdahlHouse.

Here’s a preview of Cohen’s book on email marketing:

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