BEFORE WE GO TO MAILCHIMP:
This blog post is geared specifically for book marketers in the examples I use, but the information is relevant to anyone who is interested in learning how to use Mailchimp as a marketing tool.
Before we go to Mailchimp, it's important to know where Mailchimp fits into the whole picture. So let's take a closer look at how Mailchimp comes into play when you are selling and/or giving books away.
LETS LOOK CLOSELY AT AN EMAIL PROMOTION AT BOOKFUNNEL:
Above is a diagram of how once you upload a book at Bookfunnel, and a reader clicks on it, the diagram shows how the $20 a year package handles the email and how the $100 a year program handles it.
As you can see, there is one manual step of downloading the emails from Bookfunnel and then uploading them into your email list at Mailchimp. If you are a brand new author or a brand new marketer, if you know how to copy and paste, you can move emails from Bookfunnel to Mailchimp.
LET'S LOOK CLOSELY AT A SALES PROMOTION AT BOOKFUNNEL:
I added this diagram to show new book marketers that entering sales promotion is not the same as giving books away. When readers click on your giveaway books, that's when they sign up for your newsletter.
If you enter your book into a sales promotion, the readers go directly to your book to purchase it. I mention this because, as a newbie, I went through a long period where I entered too many sales promotions and not enough giveaways!
As anyone in marketing will tell you, people unsubscribe from time to time. So it's important to continually build your email list. With this knowledge, hopefully you won't make the same mistake I did.
MAILCHIMP - IS THERE REALLY A FREE TRIAL?
There is a 30 day free trial at Mailchimp. You have limited access to some of the bells and whistles, but there is 30 days where it will cost you nothing. However, as soon as you click on this button, you will be taken to the page that compares all of their pricing packages.
MAILCHIMP - PRICING AND WHAT YOU NEED TO REALLY KNOW:
The process of growing a sizeable book marketing email list takes a lot longer than 30 days, so it's best that you know what is behind the other packages that we will focus on.
The free plan only allows you to collect up to 500 emails. That's a lot for a beginner, but you will be surprised how quickly you can accumulate over 500 emails. The next package is called the Essentials package. This one costs $13.00 a month or slightly over $100 a year. This is the plan I have been using.
This plan allows you to build a list up to 2500 emails. Once you grow over that amount, it begins to charge a little more for every 5o to 100 emails after that. Once you grow past 3,000, then this becomes an expense. Hopefully by then you will be selling enough books to cover your monthly business costs.
Here is a close-up of the Essentials plan. This plan works well for me as a book marketing platform for the following reasons:
- It allows me to integrate Bookfunnel with Mailchimp and it also allows me to integrate Mailchimp with my WordPress website. This type of integration doesn't come with the first plan.
- You can have up to 3 separate audiences. An audience is a fancy word for email list. Now, it may be easier for you to keep one list and separate the emails using Tags. For example: I write mystery romance and also vampire books. You can use a tag entitled "vampires" and one entitled "mystery" and this would be enough to function with one list but target each segment by using a tag.
- This plan also allows up to three users in case you have a family member who helps you with marketing or you want to hire someone down the road.
- You do get more templates with this plan, but as I go into in the video below, having more templates is really no big deal. Most people follow a very similar template for a weekly or monthly newsletter.
MAILCHIMP ALLOWS ONE AUDIENCE BUT . . .
I already touched on how to use Tags to segment off your one audience list. Above I have a snapshot from the video and it shows an example of some of the tags I have used with my giveaways both at Bookfunnel, SiteOrigin and my website at readfirstchapter.com.
Go to bookfunnel.com and sign up for an account. Here is a screen shot from the first page. I've fiddled with it to show the actual address and the logo, but it will look similar to this picture here.
The Books Tab keeps track of the eBooks you have uploaded and how many downloads there have been. There are drop-down links (in the orange boxes) to edit your books information and also to reupload copies.
Turn these Scrivener features off, especially if you plan to move your finished novel draft into Microsoft Word for final formatting. Because I self-publish and I need to upload in ePub and PDF manuscript, I use Word for a final proofread and formatting. I find Word is the best choice for me. The smart quotes do not translate well between Scrivener and Word. If you turn off the smart quotes, Scrivener will replace them with straight quotes and these translate better.
I'm writing my fourth novel in the Jack Nolan Detective Series. The book is still unnamed. This is Level 4 in my Eight Levels of Writing a Novel series. This first draft is down and dirty. It is the hardest lift of the entire project. At least for me, the first draft is the hardest. The characters all seem like stick figures. I find them unlikeable -- even if I liked them in the last book! Any humor doesn't seem to work. Everything just seems awkward. I have to literally force myself to keep typing. So this tip is to just keep writing. Don't check on any spellings or grammar. Don't even look back. Just keep going until you have the crime down, the main plotline down and the subplots at least in place. That will complete the first down-and-dirty draft. Every other layer will be easy compared to this one.
With bard.google.com, now it's possible to do research on the fly when writing fiction. Simply open a browser window, type in bard.google.com and start asking it questions.
Scrivener allows you to highlight text in any color you want. I use this highlighter in the Level 4 Draft to make a mental note to myself to check on things. For example: If I say that someone is coming home from a hospital in four days, I highlight this. This makes sure that this lines up with the plotline, or the crime line, or the subplot lines.
Like I mentioned earlier, I'm in the first draft of my novel and each scene begins with the same Scene Template as seen to the left.
When writing the first draft, I use the Scrivener Synopsis section in the Inspector Pane to list the clues I have dropped in that scene. Once I've finished the first draft, I can open the project in Outline View and this will give me a bird's eye view and chronology of the clues that have been dropped.
If your research requires a public figure or an organization, start at Wikipedia and take advantage of research already done. It will all have to be verified, but you will at least start off with some basics.
Go to Google and type in Philadelphia Courts or New York courts, etc.
It's important to know that there are at least four levels of record keeping in the USA. There is Federal, State, County, and then City or Municipal or Local. This will help when you are drilling down. It's best to drill down one layer at a time.
Another technique to researching over a period of time is to create a 'google alert' for a certain topic. Once you do, Google will send you a notice at hte end of each day with whatever articles are published or pop up in their search engines. This is a great way to find trendy subjects too.
Open access papers = www.oa.mg
Using an incognito window, go to YouTube and research your
Click on several videos and watch for one minute and click off. This will teach the algorithm what you are interested in.
The answer to that question depends upon your goals as an author.
If, however, you are a serious author working towards a career or life-long profession, then you will want a website. You may not need one with the first book, but you will be anxious to build your brand right away.
Although I have already said that you can write book series and operate with an Amazon author page, there will come a time when you want to brand yourself and your series. This will also help you build an online presence. It's all about competition. The more ways you use to run into readers online, the better it us for you and your books.
If you want to connect with readers, or start building a readership, you will then want and need a website. When I say connect with readers, there are a few ways to connect with readers.
For whatever it may be worth to you, I would recommend that you consider a website by the time you have written a third book, whether it is in a series or not. Once a reader has read more than one book, they will get curious about you. They will want to see a picture of you and maybe learn a few personal things about your life. Having a website, you can share a little bit of personal information.
If you will be self-publishing and are on a shoe string budget, then you will need a website, but you may be able to operate without one for the first year or eighteen months.
Step One: Find an affordable hosting company. You only need a basic plan. I use bluehost.com, but be sure to watch my video that I'll post here about how not to get into the trap of buying all kinds of services you don't need.
Do you want to be a published author and work with a leading publisher? Or do you want the freedom of self-publishing? Either way, you will need to learn to do at least some book marketing.
Don't worry if you are camera shy or introverted. The type of book marketing I'm suggesting here is for introverts. People who have these big boisterous personalities don't need anyone to help them gain a readership. Social media was designed for the extroverts -- even the narcissists!
It's important to be clear that when building an email list, that email list is your readership following. You may have free book searches who get on your list, and they may unsubscribe after a month or two. But the readers who like your books and look forward to hearing from you will remain loyal to you. You are cultivating a following. You need to see marketing as a slow and steady way to build this readership and maintain a monthly or bi-monthly contact with them.
I am knee-deep in Level 4 of writing the next book in the Jack Nolan Detective Series. I thought this would be a good time for me to take a break and reflect on what happens when I'm 'in the weeds' writing a novel.
When you first sit down to write a novel, everyone is filled with enthusiasm and creative energy. It's exciting. It's new. But as the manuscript begins to grow, before it feels finished -- or even ready to be polished, it feels cumbersome, heavy, and overwhelming. At least for me it does.
It's possible to get paralyzed by a fear of failure at any point during the writing of a novel. It's not a one-and-done operation. No one sits down, starts writing, finishes writing and ta-da, there's a book. Writing a novel doesn't work that way. It's a long process. It's a multi-layer process.
Writers block is another common problem among authors. This often sets in after that initial period of excitement about the novel wears off. At some point the writing of the novel shifts into a project requiring some heavy lifting. There's always a phase or two where the author has to tough it out. We have to keep at it.
Will my readers like the book? Will the book be good enough to get a literary agent? What happens if my book gets bad reviews? There are any number of fears of rejection that can cause us to stop writing. Decide ahead of time you won't allow these fears to stop you. Like I said earlier, think of your writing as a mission God has given you. This is your life's work, along with your other worldly responsibilities. Your writing could be an opportunity to pass on things you have come to learn in your life. That's a purpose. Or maybe writing is a way for you to share the gift of storytelling that you know you were born with. That's a God-given purpose. Whatever the reason, it's important to not allow fear of rejection to get in the way.
Distractions are one of the biggest obstacles to completing a novel. One reason is because life does serve up constant small and big emergencies that have to take first priorities in our lives. So an emergency distraction can throw a whole well-planned writing schedule up into the air in a heartbeat.
Most novels require at least some research. The internet can be a blessing with research but it can also be a curse. It's a blessing because the days of having to travel to a public library are over. It can be a curse because the research can suck you in and you can use up all your valuable writing time doing too much research.
Another trap to finishing a novel is to get caught up in a never-ending edit of the book. This usually hooks in with perfectionism problem in some way.
Once you complete a novel, there is a little sadness that sets in. This book is no longer your baby. It's no longer your little pet project. Once you hand it off to an editor, it becomes a shared work, so to speak.
When writing your book, especially if you are writing in a management system like Scrivener, it's easy enough to keep track of your manuscript.
At some point your manuscript will get closer to publication. At that time, you will need to start thinking about dressing it up for publication. The book cover. You can find any number of places, including KDP itself where you can create your own cover for free. Not recommended, but it's possible.
With 
Now another paid but affordable route to making your own book cover is to work alongside someone at Fiverr.com. There are lots of people who will create a nice book cover for $25 or $50. This may be worth it for some of you who are busy and don't have the time to learn Gimp. It always comes down to money vs. time.
Join 
If you can, reduce what you need to have done down to a single task. For example: If you ask them to create an entire book cover, they will own and control the entire design. You will have no idea what they did to create it, how many components they used, what font they chose, etc. If you want to tweak it down the road, it's impossible to do on your own.
Write forward only. Don't look back.