#Email Marketing and Your Average #Author

Since early January, I have been inundated with blog posts and emails, telling me that email marketing is A.B.S.O.L.U.T.E.L.Y.  E.S.S.E.N.T.I.A.L.  to the point of being critical to anyone and everyone’s success. I carefully read them, considered implementing it for my own work and then pitched a fit! Why? I do N.O.T.  have the  T.I.M.E.

This advice has been coming from sources I follow and greatly respect. However, I have been marketing online for nearly four years and this is the first time this has come up with so much sink or swim emphasis. Plus I am noting that some are adding to their income by running paid seminars on the topic. Are we falling prey to their marketing? Is email marketing for authors without thousands of followers essential?

Yes, building a following is critical. Yes, keeping followers up to speed with what’s happening is essential. But: isn’t that what our blogs and social media streams were designed to do? That is the reason I was told to get a blog in the first place! If I am over-busy, the first things in my email box to hit the dust are newsletters and blog post notices. They don’t take priority. I know we need all the tools we can utilize to reach our audience, but this seems to be doubling up on what we already do. I don’t have any newsletter content that you won’t find here or on my web site.

The first thing I thought of, beside myself, is the other Indie authors out there, who have kids, work, busy lives, health issues, limited time: how are we supposed to add another thing to the mix?

Mr Internet, have mercy on us! I am noting that the writers who are recommending email marketing are backed by a decent income and those magical beings: staff! I am me. I run everything. There is not enough of me.

If email works for you: awesome! Go for it! But Mr Internet, on behalf of many of us, we work our butts off on our blogs, books and social media. Don’t ask us to repeat what we have to say in yet another expensive, time-chewing form.

This blog post by Cate Russell-Cole is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. You are free to share and adapt it.

Images are from my Bitstrips account.

Filed under: Blog Building and Promotion, Book Marketing Tagged: author, balance, blog, blogging, conflict, email marketing, exhaustion, fads, fashions, goals, growth, Indie publishing, marketing, promotion, publishing, stress, time, writer, writing