1:42pm

The website work continues. It’s going well, but it’s a long slog.

But that’s not really what I want to discuss today.

Email marketing for indie authors is gold. If you’re an indie author and can cultivate a decent list of loyal subscribers, with most of them being superfans who read everything you publish, you’ll do all right. There are a lot of Email Service Providers out there, and most of them charge a premium to use their service.

Beyond that, if you’re an indie author who wants to start focusing on direct sales, you need someplace to host your website. You also need a domain name, as they’re ridiculously easy to come by these days if what you want isn’t already taken. Back when I thought I’d be doing the digital nomad thing, I tried registering wanderingwriter.com, but it was taken. I had to “settle for” nomadicnovelist.com.

I’ve set aside the interest in being a digital nomad, though, so I allowed that domain to expire.

But I digress…

Over the past few months, I’ve helped a number of writer friends switch from systems and/or providers with a “lock in customers” mentality to a modular infrastructure for their internet presence needs.

If you’re in the market for a better infrastructure for your online presence, this is what I recommend:

• Namecheap.com for domain registration (domain registrar with the lowest prices I’ve ever found plus free registration privacy);
• Amazon Web Services (AWS) Route 53 for DNS hosting;
• Hostinger.com for the actual WordPress site hosting;
• and FluentCRM Pro for handling your newsletter subscribers.

And yes, I recommend WordPress & WooCommerce over Shopify. It’s a tad more work, but the customization options are damn-near endless at this point, especially if you have a quality web designer.

I mention all this to say that I sent my first newsletter out today using FluentCRM Pro. I have cancelled Kit (formerly ConvertKit and a damn-stupid rebranding if you ask me), mainly because I can get the functionality I want from FluentCRM Pro at roughly a third of the annual price.

Now, to be clear… FluentCRM Pro is just the interface. It handles list management, automations, email sequences, etc. It interfaces with other services to handle the actual sending of the emails, and I use Amazon SES for that since I’m already using Route 53.

Within 90 minutes of the scheduled send time of my second newsletter this year, I received 26 bounce-backs and a blank email that didn’t tell me anything. I have no idea what the blank email was. It came from the Mailer Daemon at SES, but there was no content that I could find.

Those bounce-backs ran the gamut from “access denied” to “over quota” to something else that I’m forgetting, but I largely do not care about the specific reason sending failed. I don’t want any bounce-backs when I send a newsletter now, because I get to listen to the notification pings when they hit my newsletter inbox. Kit never sent me the actual bounce-backs; they were just a number in a dashboard I never really looked at.

So, I spent about twenty minutes (probably less, honestly) deleting those contacts from FluentCRM Pro.

All in all, I’m rather happy with the experience.

I need to update my newsletter template, because the opening paragraph referenced content in my welcome sequence that no longer exists. I pared those down, too. Instead of a sequence of something like five or seven emails spanning two calendar weeks, I just have one email now that offers the appropriate Newsletter Story.

I’ve never pruned my subcriber list since I started building said list, but something tells me I’ll get lots of practice now.

If you’re reading this and realizing you didn’t get The Newsletter – Volume VII, Issue 2, when you thought (or maybe knew) you were subscribed… well… now, you know why.

This didn’t turn out to be as long as I expected it to be, but Life surprises me like that sometimes.

If you’re reading this, thanks for sticking with me. Hope the days treat you and yours well (whether you stuck with me or not 😉).

Stay safe out there.