Writers: Build Your Own List or Perish

If we want to succeed as indie writers and creators, we’ve got to own the list

We can’t just build it and hope someone will buy it. We can’t just code it and hope our social followers will ‘make it viral.’ We can just write it and hope ten thousand total strangers will read it. The creation process doesn’t work that way. The process never worked that way.

But the barrier to entry is zero now, so it feels like we shouldn’t have to promote our work either.

Self-promotion is everything when it comes to your writing. Almost everything. You’ve got to start with a great book. No one can shine a turd. But once we get beyond the baseline of greatness, we’ve got to build a list. Now. No one will self-advocate for your writing the way you will. Yes, word of mouth is amazing, but WOM doesn’t buy the Cheetos every week.

I can’t stress this enough. It’s never too early to build your list, but it might be too late.

If you’ve already written the book and you’re hoping to launch it, you might be too late. We’d rather know your story first. I mean, we’ve seen every offer before. We know how the process works. We read what we want to read and ignore what we don’t.

The difference between your work and mind is the story behind the work and the person behind the story.

We’ve become unpaid employees of social media. We work out faces-off to get likes, thumbs, comments, beeps, and clicks. Most of that time goes wasted. Some of it, fruitful. All of the traffic is owned by someone else.

As individual creators we have a choice.

We can live in concert with social, or we can let it consume us. We’ve got to pay to play if we want to use their sandbox, but there’s another option too. We can work for them as unpaid employees while simultaneously growing our own lists. It’s the perfect parasite-host relationship. I’ll let you decide who’s-who.

What’s the big, freaking deal about lists?

Who the hell uses email anymore?

Why would I want to waste the time building a list?

What should I write?

Won’t I bother my readers?

I don’t use email anymore. Why should I?

Here’s the deal — email is the last great equalizer.

I can’t think of another. If you know of one, where you can multiply the effort of one person and contact tens of thousands automatically, I’d love to hear it.

You can get same playing field in your reader’s in-box. Same Coke. Same as that bakery downtown. Same as Colgate. Same as your Aunt Tilley. We can’t buy our way up our reader’s in-box, but neither can the competition.

Someday that will probably change. But it hasn’t yet.

Email is portable. None of these social platforms will be around forever. Tech doesn’t work like that. I know all those Facebook employees want o believe Old Blue will be here ten more years, but some kid at Yale, in her underwear, will invent something better.

We’ll lose all those followers overnight.

We’ll lose the clicks. We’ll lose the sales. It’s something we’ve got to plan for in advance, not the day the bomb drops. When we own our list we own our freedom. How much freedom you want depends on how much you value your list.

They can take your entire business model from you. They can copy it. They can do it better. But you’ll still have your customers. They follow you because they like the person/people behind the brand. They found something they can relate to. They raised their hands and stepped onto your bus.

We all start from zero

It always made me frustrated when I read about this big gurus with huge email lists of hundreds of thousands of people. But then I thought, they had to start from zero too.

We all start with no subscribers, then one, then one hundred.

The beginning parts are hard. You’ve got to set up everything — write the emails, build the landing pages, set up the sequences, decide on your content, write catchy subject lines , and build a free offer — the process feels overwhelming sometimes.

But we all start from zero.

If we do one thing to move our list forward today, tomorrow will be that much easier. The tools are simpler today than they were twenty years ago (and much more powerful). Plus, we don’t have much of a choice.

Either we want to be read or we don’t. No one’s going to do this for us.

We’re waiting for you.

(Enroll in My Free Email Masterclass. Get Your First 1,000 Subscribers.)

August Birch (AKA the Book Mechanic) is both a fiction and non-fiction author from Michigan, USA. A self-proclaimed guardian of writers and creators, August teaches indie authors how to write books that sell and how to sell more of those books once they’re written. When he’s not writing or thinking about writing August carries a pocket knife and shaves his head with a safety razor.

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