Can I ask, how much do you have to pay for the website? And is it monthly or yearly installments?
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It was reasonable. Certainly not enough to prevent anyone from doing it.
I think it was $6.95 per month if I remember correctly, so not bad at all. And the domain name was free (I think for two years). I signed up for 24 months, so that helped lower the per month price. And I can’t remember if it’s all up front or monthly; frankly, I’d prefer to just pay it instead of having to deal with little monthly dings on my account for two years.
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But…but…it should be free with ads.
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I have to get back to work but that made me lol.
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LMAO! I know right! Seriously, do people not get how much money there is to be made in ad revenue? I mean, if a million people watch a three minute ad on your channel, you could make like… A whole dollar! 
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$1.09 to be exact 
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Y’all are cracking me up right now.
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Okay, I added more to the About Eric page too during lunch. Added a little humor (I think). Site should be close to being ready for an official roll out now.
I will probably tweak the page titles a bit and perhaps consolidate all CCH releases under one page, but I think I’m pretty much there for now.
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Speaking of taglines my own website has the following;
A graveyard is no place for the living, for here dwell the dead…
I think it suits my writing well lol
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I don’t know what I’ll do marketing-wise, other than a “you might know me from _” page (which is currently empty until I get my first novel finished). I abhor Facebook, but I might just be forced to get back on it after a decade of absence. Twitter seems to be a fair enough means of self advertizing, but it’s harder to really get into it.
That’s not even getting into whether I should adopt a pen name or not. My first thought was “Nick Nobody” but he’s already a music producer on Soundcloud, so I’ll probably have to go with Cole Nixon.
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Been listening to some podcasts in the afternoons and I’ve really been impressed by the Novel Marketing Podcast. http://www.novelmarketing.com/. The guys are likable, knowledgeable, and funny, and they have a TON of marketing content directed right at fiction authors.
Some of the information is Amazon-centric, but most of it can be helpful to anyone. Some episodes are super focused on topics like:
- How to Write a Crazy Cool Author Bio
- 11 Ways Proven to Draw Readers to Your Novel’s Website
- Five Kinds of Author Homepages
- How to Become a Career Writer (4-part series)
And there are TON more, like over 100 episodes. Most run 20-30 minutes.
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So I just discovered MailChimp a few days ago, and I realized that I’ve been doing my prior email reader list allllllllllllllllllll wrong. But I have set up my new MailChimp account and I’m ready to send out my first message this weekend!
Things I didn’t know…
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Federal law (CAN SPAM Act) requires those sending commercial message (like emails) to include a physical address or a PO Box for the sender, included in the body of the email. Uh, I had no idea. And I’m a lawyer. So unless you want to plaster your home address in the body of every email you send your readers, you need to sign up for a PO Box. I just opened my this week: $24.00 for 3 months.
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You are also legally required to provide an easy opt-out for recipients, and you must process their request, fee-free, within 10 days. Uh, I didn’t know this either. That being said, no one ever asked to be unsubscribed, but still, maybe they just reported me as spam instead (which is MUCH MUCH worse).
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And beyond the legalities, there is the dreaded spam filter. I have a feeling that 75% of my messages were going right into spam folders. To avoid this, you want to AVOID sending a huge email with all the recipients as blind copied on it (That’s how I had been dong it). So that pretty much requires that you use a service like MailChimp or Constant Contact. Also, do not use “salesy” terms like “FREE” or “prize” because spam filters will gobble up your email. It also helps if your domain has some age to it, because the spam filters tend to treat you as more legitimate.
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You do not, under any circumstances, want recipients to report your messages as spam. It can cause your emails to go to everyone’s spam box, and enough of it can get you in legal trouble and get you kicked off services like MailChimp. Make sure EVERY recipient really wants to be in your group. I’m using a double opt-in approach, where they have to sign up, and after that, they get a “are you sure you want to sign up?” message. Yes, it creates more friction (generally a bad thing), but you’d much rather have an email list of 200 devoted fans who really want to read your messages than an email list of 400 people, with some of them not that excited to be in the group.
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With MailChimp (and other similar services) you can actually SEE who opens emails, and who ignores them. As your group grows in size, especially if you get close to the 2,000-person email group where you have to start paying, it’s recommended that you manually unsubscribe the recipients who never open your messages.
I hope this was helpful to someone! I wish I would have known most of this 3 years ago.
It looks like the net effect of me doing all of this will reduce my email list from 400 members to 200 members, but at least the 200 are “fresh,” meaning they actively signed up within the last 2 weeks, and 95% of them used the double opt-in, so I know they are very much on board. I can now grow my list more easily in the future, because instead of me receiving a reader email and manually adding them to the list (the old way), the reader signs up through the portal on the website, and it’s all automated. I don’t have to do a thing. Plus, I have proof that they wanted to sign up.
If anyone has any questions about this, just ask!
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For anyone who wants to know more about the CAN-SPAM act:
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Yep absolutely true. I’ve been force subscribed to spam email lists, particularly where I suspect people are selling uni email lists. It kind of annoys me so I usually threaten to report them unless they add an unsubscribe option to help everyone else out, and then report then as spam afterwards 
(it’s not as harsh as it sounds, these are people paying others to unethically obtain private contact details.) Not that that’s what you’re doing of course, but it’s super important to give people a way to change their mind about subscribing if you don’t want to be blacklisted as spam.
Yep this^. One place I worked at couldn’t work out why so many people weren’t recieving emails. I discovered Gmail has an over zealous spam filter that was kicking them straight to spam even though it was nothing of the sort. (It was a subscribed emailing list, but due to the number of hidden recipients in the list, it didn’t like it).
Anyway great points @Eric_Moser. I’d bet many people wouldn’t have known about it, and you definitely want to stay out of the reported as spam zone for anyone setting up a mailing list.
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I want to cite Novel Marketing podcast #131 (here: http://www.novelmarketing.com/) as a great resource for email delivery.
If you are an author with a reader email list, I think you need to listen to this episode. It’s about 30 minutes long, and has several great tips to help make sure your emails actually get delivered to readers.
A couple of nuggets from the show:
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Standard open rate is between 20-30%. So when I was sad about my 51% open rate from my first email campaign 2 weeks ago, I should have actually been pleased. Again, MailChimp’s open rate estimates are probably on the low side, because the image open process they use to track opens is not perfect. Anyway, if you get a 50% open rate on ANY email you send, you should be happy. (If you get 70%, please please PM me because you are an evil email genius.)
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Be careful with using “too fancy” templates for your email campaigns. The guys on the podcast say that plain emails work better because they are less likely to be screened out by email filters as “promotions” or spam. So they suggest mostly plain text with perhaps an image or two, but not much more than that.
Again, there are tons of tips in this podcast. It’s very useful info.
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Question…is anyone on Goodreads?
I know very little about this reading social network, but it’s packed with hardcore readers, and there are like 20,000,000 of them there, so I wonder if we as authors should at least set up pages and do things like try to engage readers, get on certain lists, connect our websites/blogs there, etc. At least the easy, low-time stuff.
Again, paid advertising likely makes no sense at all, but I’m wondering if we are missing out on something here. CCH1 only has 10 ratings, but frankly I was surprised to even find it on there.
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I wish I knew, I have been eying it too, but haven’t really had time to get involved. There’s so many networks out there…
@Eric_Moser Know that I love you, support you any way I can, and want to see you succeed, because I just went back to Goodreads for the first time in nearly ten years…all for you. [chokes back tears]
oh jesus christ, the amount of deadpool avatars are killing me i say this as someone who had a deadpool avatar the entire time i was on this site
Little background
Goodreads was actually my main social networking site from 2008-2010, and my best friend and I actually managed one of the most popular amateur writers group with over 5000 members in the heyday (which still isn’t bad considering the numbers I’m seeing right now). [/horn toot] So when I say I knew Goodreads…yeah, just trust me.
But around 2010, active participants had dwindled to but a handful of people who had forged ridiculously strong connections, and who had refused to migrate to either Facebook or tumblr, When I finally left, the only groups that remained active and fertile were roleplaying groups (which are still dominating the group list, I see) and groups for continuing book series (Hunger Games), and smaller groups like book clubs, hobby groups, etc.
It seems that it hasn’t actually changed much since the grand exodus.
Book clubs and roleplaying groups are still the most active, except now I don’t even see series-themed groups. When I left, the Harry Potter group was still an absolute beast, and the Hunger Games and Twilight groups took the second and third highest positions for number of members and activity.
I’m also checking the activity of forums members of the biggest groups (enter the group, click on members. they’re listed in descending order by the time they were last online) and a large handful of members don’t even have a single comment.
Despite the seemingly recent activity of most of the threads and topics, it seems like there’s only a handful of replies every day—even the largest group seems to only get a fraction of the traffic that this forum gets.
It seems that the Doom still rules in Valyria…
With that in mind, I’d say Goodreads is only worth it to have an author profile, but at this stage, even that doesn’t seem worth a daily effort.
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VERY interesting info! Thanks so much!
And I feel very loved and supported! It reminds me of my stint in the Young Republicans Club in second grade. (I figured things out in 3rd).
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Little marketing update…
So I launched a Patreon account two months ago, and it’s going pretty well thus far. I am learning, but I love the flexibility of the platform. As a creator, you are really only limited by…the vast…unstoppable power…of YOUR imagination!!
I had to do that.
Also, if you are considering starting your own Patreon account, I can give you an invite link good for 30 days where Patreon will match 50% of your page’s first month earnings (and yes, I also get a match of 50% of your page’s first month earnings, just to be transparent). Basically a win/win situation. PM me for details. Patreon does not allow folks to spam the link, but if you’re someone I’ve spoken with on here, that’s fine.
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