Seekerville: The Journey Continues

Let’s talk about newsletters. Specifically, newsletter subscribers.

And… as usual, at the last minute, I figured out how to find the 0% Open and 0% Click throughs, so this post, as well as my time spent whittling my list down, could have been a LOT shorter. But a hard lesson learned is one well learned. So if you're strapped for time, just scroll to the bottom.

We've all heard the following mantras: “More than anything else, grow your newsletter list”. Or “Your newsletter subscribers are GOLDEN”. “You have control of the email addresses entrusted to you by your fans, not Facebook, Twitter, etc.”

You get the drift. All of that is true and we jump through hoops to be part of promotions and giveaways to grow our mailing list. Nothing wrong with that.

And newsletter services took note. As your subscriber base grows, you’ll have to pay for an account. Nothing wrong with that, either. But what isn’t said most of the time is that it’s just as important (more so!) to manage your subscribers after you get them as it is/was to get them in the first place.

First, there is a ton of information online about what to do and not do with newsletters, how to manage subscribers, and which service providers are best for you. But that’s the problem. There is SO much information that I could never figure out what I needed to know and what I didn’t. So it was easier to just keep building my list. 500 subscribers. 2k. 3k. Wow! How exciting!

Not exactly.

A few years ago, I had to go to a paid plan, and it’s been costing me about $500 a year. So this month I finally took the time to really dig into my newsletter service and the fees I've been paying. I’m not sure I’m providing any new information for your toolbox, but it was new to me, so here goes…

I wish someone had told me in simple language how important it is to review my lists on a regular basis, because if I had, without a doubt, I wouldn’t have had to upgrade to a paid service plan during the last 3-4 years. You do the math. 4 years x $500. Gulp.

So, it is a good idea to figure out how your service (Mailchimp, Mailerlite, Constant Contact, etc.) works and manage it effectively… before you get to the stage that you’re forced to pay handsomely for the service.

I have Mailchimp, so most of what I’m going to talk about is specific to that service provider, but (in general), it should apply to whatever service you’re using, depending on how many subscribers and email sends you’re allowed.

And, yes, I could switch from Mailchimp to a different provider, and I may at some point. But the bigger and more urgent problem was that I had a lot of contacts on my list who weren't engaged and were costing me money.

Things I wish I’d paid attention to for the last 10+ years:

• Subscribed
• Unsubscribed
• Cleaned Email Addresses
• Archived Email Addresses

While Subscribed, Unsubscribed, and Cleaned sounds self-explanatory, from what I’ve gathered, it is not. Or at least the gazillion posts I waded through made it seem that way. As best as I could tell, Subscribed AND Unsubscribed count toward your billing on Mailchimp with their current plans. Which makes no sense at all. Unsubscribed is unsubscribed, but whatever.

I could be wrong, though, since I was on a “Legacy” plan up until I started this “clean-up” journey. But I don’t think Mailchimp was charging me for the 870 unsubscribed emails on my list. Also, cleaned email addresses are those that pretty much are going into a dark hole, so according to Mailchimp, you shouldn’t be charged for those, but you can’t archive them either. As one article said, they’re just “dead in the water”.

Regardless, since I didn't want to see those 870 unsubscribes on my list, I archived them as Mailchimp was very clear that no matter what plan you were on, you would not be billed for ARCHIVED email addresses.

Now let’s talk about the following…

• Ratings
• Segments
• Tags
• Open Rate
• Click Rate

Mailchimp gives each subscriber a Rating of 1-5, and it’s not very accurate, imo. But at least it’s a starting point.

Mailchimp makes it easy to Segment your lists in all sorts of ways, and Ratings is one of them. According to one of those “know everything” articles, if you’re going to archive a group of contacts, the #2 group is the one to archive.

Think of Ratings, Segments, and Tags as a big picture, little picture scenario, or using Segments and Tags to “drill down” on your subscribers. I’m currently using it to whittle down my inactive subscribers, but it’s a good way to BUILD UP your list as well. Hopefully, we'll talk about that in a later blog post in a month or two.

I segmented my lists this way for now:

#1 Rating - According to Mailchimp, these recipients have either unsubscribed and resubscribed, or soft bounced in the past.

#2 Rating - These rarely engage, but all new subscribers start out as #2 rating, so you can't just willy-nilly archive all of the #2 ratings.

#3-#5 Rating - These are supposed to be the most engaged. Later, I will segment these out in order to send targeted campaigns to my most engaged subscribers.

I’m in the process of going through 800 subscribers who have a #2 rating but signed up at least 2 years ago and as far back as 2011. These subscribers rarely engage according to MC. But #2 is weird, because some of these people have a 15-30% open rate, so that’s why I’m manually going through these. Granted, click rate is much more important than open rate, and I’ll talk about that a bit more below.

Where do Tags come in? You can do ANYTHING you want with tags. I had over 700 in my segment of #2 rating of subscribers who’d been with me 2 years or longer, but hadn’t opened anything in a long time, if ever. I needed a way to manage that group in small chunks as I only needed to reduce my subscriber base a couple hundred to downgrade to the free account. 

Now, here's where I wasted some time over the last few weeks. At night, while sitting around watching tv with hubby, I’d pull up the #2 rating segment, tag a group of 50 with a temporary tag of SMALL GROUP, then I’d manually check that group to see what their open/click rate was. Sometimes I’d even look at their history a bit. Once I decided to archive them, I added an ARCHIVE tag and removed the SMALL GROUP tag and they would immediately disappear from my “small group of 50” that I was working on. Every few hours or every couple of days, I’d look at the group I’d decided to archive (tagged appropriately as ARCHIVE), choose them all, and actually archive them. Clear as mud, yes? lol

Oh, and while I was at it, I added tags like “Do Not Archive”, “5%+ Click Rate” to those I was keeping. I’m nowhere near done, but I met my goal of whittling down below 2000. From now on, I’ll only archive subscribers that have a 0% Open Rate AND a 0% Click Rate and have been on my list for years.

Here’s an important tip: If your list isn’t out of control like mine was, start learning how to manage it now. On the other hand, if you have THOUSANDS of (as in 20, 30, 80 THOUSAND) subscribers, I can’t help you! But maybe YOU can help the rest of us! Do tell your secrets for such a robust list. lol

Final Takeaways: 

• DO learn how your provider works.
• DO learn about segments and tags.
• Don’t just blindly archive based on Mailchimp’s ratings. Many of my 2 star ratings have a 30-40% open rate.
• DO review your list regularly. If you only have a few hundred subscribers, the time to start is now. If you don’t want (or need) to archive anyone yet, at least segment them so that you can manage them better when the time comes.
• Do I WANT to be below 2000 subscribers just so I can have the free plan? No. But if 500-1000 subscribers haven’t opened or clicked anything in 3 or 4 years — if EVER — then there's no need to pay to send them an email that they aren't going to look at. At least for now.
• Are these archived subscribers gone forever? Again… no. As I learn more about how to improve my open and click rates, I can test drive some of these guys. Maybe even unarchive in small groups and alert them to a new release and see how they respond.

Final, Final Takeaway

As I was finishing this up, I went back into my Mailchimp account and searched one last time for 0% open rate and 0% click rate and I found it. Sigh. The thing is, there are many different ways to search for your subscribers and determine if they haven’t been engaged at all, ever. I hated archiving ANY of mine, but it had to be done.

Here's an example of a segment with 3 parameters. It's before 12/31/2018, a 0% Open Rate, and 0% Click Rate, AND has not opened any of the last 50 Campaigns. Contact can match "Any" or "All" of the conditions you assign.

And then this dropdown shows all the options for how the campaigns were opened or not opened. There are similar dropdowns regarding dates. You just have to think through what you're looking for.

This screenshot is a sampling of some of the tags I've been using. Again, tags are different to segments. Segments come directly from the FIELDS that Mailchimp has set up. There is ONE tag field, but you can tag a contact multiple times if need be. Tags will likely be unique to you and your needs at the time.

Well, that's a lot to take in. But if you take anything away from this, just know that if you have a small list that's on the verge of having to move to paid or is already on a paid plan, you might have options if you look more closely at your subscribers.

When the sun goes down on my side of town

That lonesome feeling comes to my door

And the whole world turns blue

Oh, wait, wrong topic, wrong song, wrong everything. Sigh.

Seriously, I heard that country-sad-song yesterday and when I looked out the window and saw the sun going down, and an empty screen staring back at me, it seemed to fit.

Sigh.

What do you DO when all the ideas for your blog post just get up and walk out on you?

I really wanted to blog about the cool online class that Missy and I, along with THOUSANDS of others took, this past week: Bryan Cohen’s Author Ad Challenge, which is an introductory class to setting up advertising on Amazon. 

It’s INTENSE and takes about 1-2 hours a day to keep up. And, did I say that it was free, or at least the week-long challenge is. Bryan and his team offer a much more intense program of coaching, teaching and “hand-holding” for a fee called Amazon Ad School (I believe that’s the correct term), but the free training was more than enough to help me get started.

However, I didn’t want to give away information that Bryan and his team have done tons of leg-work on. And what’s the point of blogging about it if I can’t give Seekerville readers a small taste of how Amazon ads work? The good news is that the Amazon Ad Challenge will be offered again in April 13th, so if anyone wants to take the class, you’ll be able to then.

Now if you lose your one and only 

There's always room here for the lonely

So, one topic down. Then I planned to blog about past (as in LONG past) contest entries where I would find snippets of what judges had to say about what was wrong (or right) about a passage from a contest entry, then show the various stages those passages went through before they made it into publication, but that was also a no go. I couldn’t find much in what I kept from 10, 15, and, yes, TWENTY years ago, to be helpful.

And, let’s be honest. Do I really want to go back all those years and be reminded of how bad some passages were way back in the beginning? And, would I want to share them with you? Probably not.

To watch your broken dreams

Dance in and out of the beams

Of a neon moon

Yeah, let’s just say that it’s best that blog post left me, too! lol

So, here we are, singing a sad song and looking BACKWARDS at lost love (blog posts and horrible writing) and broken dreams … 

Whoa!!!!!

Wrong topic! Wrong Story!

WRONG EVERYTHING AGAIN!!

Let’s turn this train around, folks. Right here… I mean RIGHT HERE, I stopped working on my blog post and read Cate’s post from Wednesday. Why would I feel the urge to do that? In some ways, she already said what I'm saying again today, but I think we're both trying to hammer a point home, without even knowing that the other one was on this same track. Go back and read Cate's post here! What an encouragement!

Seriously, that neon moon song is a catchy tune, but if that gal's gone, she’s gone. Right? Right!

She -- meaning a blog post, that idea for a short story or a novel that packed up and left a long time ago, an submission opportunity I missed in 2020 because my head was stuck in the sand... or even staring (figuratively) at a neon moon… -- ain’t coming back. Let’s stop whining about it. Let’s stop going to the dark, smoky places that aren’t doing us any favors. Stop moping around mooning over that particular story, that particular area of our lives that we can’t fix, that we can’t bring back, that just isn’t working anymore.

And before anyone gets all up in arms, I’m NOT talking about torn relationships, sick family, fractured lives, financial woes, and burning the candle at both ends until you're burned out. I’m talking about writing for those of us who write. I'm talking about just holding on.

Turn on ALL the lights, brighten things up and write something big, beautiful and new. Create a NEW thing. Draw bright, sunny pictures with the kids or the grandkids. And if you don't have any kids in your circle, borrow somebody's for a day or volunteer in Sunday School or at a preschool for a day.

Put some brightness in your life and that neon moon will pale in comparison to the big, beautiful new sunrise you’ll wake up to tomorrow!!

I’ll leave you with this…

It's gonna be a bright (bright)

Bright (bright) sunshiny day

It's gonna be a bright (bright)

Bright (bright) sunshiny day

Let's choose to live in a bright, sunshiny day, not under a "neon" moon.

Occasionally the stars align and everything falls on the same day, which is TODAY. Now, we can boohoo and say poor, pitiful me. I'm so stressed and can't do everything I need to do today, or we can take one BIG IDEA and repurpose it to fit all the niches we're trying to fill at the same time.

For me, my BIG IDEA for this week is that Castaway with the Cowboy goes on sale for .99cents today!! Shameless plug? Not at all! The sale, my Seekerville blog post, getting a newsletter out to my subscribers, sharing the deets on SM, all dovetailing on TODAY is what prompted today's blog.

Many years ago, I attended a workshop where the speaker showed us how to take one idea and write many articles on the same topic. For instance, if I remember correctly, he was an outdoorsman, and wrote about hunting and fishing. An example might have been that he'd go on a hunting/fishing trip. While he loved the idea of just taking off and enjoying his trip, by planning his work (his writing life) ahead of time, he could gear one article toward a fishing magazine, and maybe another to a foodie mag on how to prepare a delicious fresh-caught meal in the field, and even another article on packing for a relaxing trip into the wild. 

Another example for the cooks among us might be to cook a pack of boneless, skinless chicken in the crockpot, then make several meals out of the chicken: Chicken salad, Chicken and noodles, Chicken fajitas, etc. See what I mean?

It's truly an art to use this strategy to our advantage no matter what we're doing, and honestly, while I know how to do this in my head, I don't do it as often as I should, either in cooking, writing, or just day-to-day living and working.

So, how does it work?

First, either draw off a grid on a piece of paper or use a spreadsheet, which is what I did for these examples. Plan your strategy for whatever project you're working on. For me, this week's target date is/was TODAY and the one topic hinged on Castaway going on sale today.

Unlike the example of creating 5 meals from our cooked chicken, my chart for this week has been a work-in-progress. It started out with a few boxes, then as new things popped up, I added them in.

Once a project was completed, I highlighted it green. As you can see at the writing of this, there are some yellow boxes that need to be completed. Hopefully, they'll be done by the time this blog post goes life. We can hope! :) But, the most important got marked off. Scheduling a newsletter to go out, and finishing up this Seekerville blog which had a hard deadline of today. Actually, Seekerville is still orange on the chart, or whatever color that is. So, it gets changed to green now. Yay!

No, I'm not usually this organized or detailed. Most of the time, I'd just pencil this stuff on a piece of paper, but when I remembered the workshop where we planned out how to use one topic to query periodicals in different areas with varied subscriber bases (not that I wrote much for magazines), I felt it was a good lesson for us to revisit.

It goes without saying that this is a simple grid that would have been quicker and easier to just pencil on a piece of paper, but knowing I was going to blog about it made the spreadsheet (and screenshots) a better choice. And, we won't even talk about using flowcharts for this. Let's not get TOO crazy. Simple is better.

What are you currently working on where this strategy could help you? This week's meal planning? Promoting your latest novel? Or maybe even just starting a new project? Cleaning house? Decorating for fall? Or maybe just running errands this week, yes? Grab a piece of paper, draw a 6-8 block grid, and get to work.

And just in case you MISSED it, Castaway with the Cowboy

is on sale for .99cents!! Whoot!

>>>>   BUY HERE!   <<<<

Hey kids! Do you know what time it is?

It's contest time!

One thing almost all published authors have in common is that we got our feet wet in the publishing industry by entering contests. 

Keep in mind that some of the tips below do not apply to all contests. This list of tips is to help you get in the habit of doing all the steps every time you enter a contest, so that you can whip out an entry in a matter of hours. If something doesn't apply, you just mark it off your list.

Once you’ve got the content of your manuscript and your synopsis polished to a shine and the deadline is approaching, then:

1) Review the big picture rules

Then you sit back and wait for the results...or...

better yet, write another book!!!

Jan here again - I mentioned the First Impressions contest above. You can find out all the details of that contest for newbie, pre-published authors HERE! And that deadline is THIS FRIDAY! 

As always, new projects lead to deep, deep rabbit holes. I don’t like to reinvent the wheel, so I’ve been digging for resources on the best strategy to price my indie published ebooks, plus strategies to get them into readers hands, and even the best way to put them on sale.

I’ve scoured the internet. I’ve asked in groups. I’ve read articles, and….

I’m still confused. Confused, but not undaunted!

There just doesn’t seem to be ONE answer to these age-old question. For someone that works well with step-by-step instructions, the “shotgun” approach makes me twitchy. But, apparently, the shotgun approach is the only way to go when trying to set prices on ebooks.

To date, I’ve published five novellas in Amazon’s KDP program, and they’re also available for free in the Kindle Unlimited program. I set the price at $2.99 to receive the 70% royalty rate. However, every 90 days I can either put each ebook on sale (referred to as a Kindle Countdown deal) for up to 7 days, or offer them for free for up to 5 days, but I can’t do both within a 90 day period.

Before I became a hybrid (the term that describes a traditionally published as well as independently-published) author, my mind spun when authors talked about all the different options available for indie authors. Okay, it still spins A LOT, but not as much as it did a year ago, which leads me to lots of questions like … what’s the difference in Kindle Select and Kindle Unlimited? 

Ebooks enrolled in Kindle Select (the author side) are available to download for readers who have the Kindle Unlimited program (the reader side). You’re probably familiar with the Kindle Unlimited program, but for those who might not be, Kindle Unlimited costs $9.99 a month and allows a reader to download as many ebooks that are enrolled in the program as she wants for free. Oh, and, to make it even more complicated, an ebook isn’t eligible for Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program if it’s available for sale elsewhere like for Nook or iBooks, etc. Listing for sale in multiple venues is the same as “Going Wide”. (Hmmm, I think my head is starting to spin again.)

All that’s well and good, but it still doesn’t really help me when trying to decide when, why, and how to put a novella on sale. The jury’s still out on that, but I’m learning and researching and trying to figure it all out. I’d love to hear your thoughts on ebooks, either as a reader, writer, or even a blogger or reviewer. Anything goes, from price points, to whether you enjoy novellas or fulls, to whether you’re a fan of Kindle Unlimited, or you buy based on sales or your favorite author or enjoy picking up ebooks based on Amazon recommendations. Let’s hear it!

But, in the meantime, I'm so excited to unveil the latest novella!

A weary and bedraggled wagon train rolls into Silver Lining, KS only to find a ghost town. The party moves on, leaving a handful of settlers behind. Can Maggie O’Toole and the others find their silver lining in the abandoned town? And can Maggie depend on cowboy Rafe Alonzo to stick around long enough to see them through the coming winter—and beyond—in order to find her own silver lining? (Originally published as Love's Silver Lining (With this Kiss Historical Romance Collection)

Available on Amazon for $2.99 AND as a free download for Kindle Unlimited members.

Click HERE to buy

by Pam Hillman

The other day, I bought these off-brand BBQ potato chips. (Yes, this is writing related.) The chips were pretty tasty, and as someone who hasn’t eaten too many chips the last few years, I probably enjoyed them more than they deserved. The description on the bag stated “Zesty BBQ” and the flavor certainly lived up to that. Too much, actually. They were a bit too zesty to enjoy. Basically, I tasted bbq and not much of the potato chips.

As I consumed the last of the zesty bbq flavor, I was thinking about this blog post. (Let’s just say that I needed the chips for inspiration. Yeah, we’ll go with that.) I tend to create analogies out of thin air, or in this case, out of potato chips. But it occurred to me that just like we all have foods we like or dislike, or even really have no preference one way or another because we’ve never tried them, it’s the same way as writers and even as readers.

Before we talk about how these two things are related, I’d like to share another food-related incident. I’m not a mayonnaise snob, but I was raised on Blue Plate mayonnaise. I’ll eat a different brand if I’m at someone’s house, but I buy Blue Plate exclusively, unless it’s an absolute emergency. However, several years ago, we took a long road trip when my oldest graduated from high school. After eating fast food for almost a week, I decided that a picnic on the rim of the Grand Canyon would be a nice change of pace. We found a grocery store and stocked up on all the fixings for some sandwiches and a few bags of chips (I’m sure we bought Ruffles or Lays, not the off-brand Zesty BBQ ones!) But the mayonnaise… there was not one brand of mayo on the shelves in that store that I was familiar with, so I picked the one squeeze jar that seemed to be the best. Maybe squeeze mayo isn’t made to keep in an ice chest, but regardless, let’s just say it left a lot to be desired. I still remember that it wasn’t Blue Plate well over 10 years later. It’s also a blessing that I don’t remember the brand since I’m sure it would be somebody’s favorite. :)

So, back to reading and writing. As a kid, I was enamored with horses and books, so naturally I read a lot of books about horses, which led to Louis L’Amour westerns, then to historical romance books as I grew older. Besides reading, television/movies I enjoyed were John Wayne, Gunsmoke, and Bonanza. Naturally, even my early attempts at writing consisted of westerns and prairie romance type stories. I liked my “Blue Plate” and wasn’t interested in trying another brand.

Fast forward a few years and I was asked to head up the ACFW Book Club. Part of the duties (and a perk) of the book club coordinator back then was to receive a copy of the book club pick, read it and facilitate the discussion. During my tenure, I read Women’s Fiction, Suspense, Science fiction, Lad Lit, Chick Lit, Dystopian, Biblical, Historical, Contemporary, Amish romance, and enjoyed every single book club pick in the 3-4 years that was coordinator. I specifically remember loving Kathryn Mackel’s Outriders (Fantasy/Science Fiction, Thomas Nelson, 2005), and ended up buying Trackers, read them both, then passed them on to my teenage son, who also loved the books.

Now, one more food-related story. I had the grandkids yesterday and we had some leftover fried rice from their favorite Japanese restaurant. Ella (5 yo) likes Yum Yum sauce with her fried rice, but I didn’t have any. I was throwing together a quick lunch with the rice, some chicken nuggets, and my special homemade honey mustard sauce (mayo, honey mustard, and Sweet Baby Ray’s BBQ). I also whipped up a bit of white country gravy (from a packet) to put on my own rice. Ella and I taste-tested a bit of the rice with Pammy’s honey mustard sauce AND the white gravy and we decided the combo was just as good, if not better than the real store-bought Yum Yum sauce. Well, maybe that’s stretching it, but when the grand-doll declares it, it is so, yes?

I guess I’ve gone around the world to try to tie all this together, but as I munched on those zesty bbq chips that weren’t bad, but they weren’t Lays, then when my granddaughter and I figured out how to make a sauce that tasted enough like Yum Yum sauce that she ate her lunch quite happily, I realized that there are times that I try something totally new and love it even more than what I thought was my “favorite” thing.

As a reader, I would probably have never tried Science Fiction/Fantasy if I hadn’t been the ACFW Book Club coordinator. But I’m glad I was willing to branch out. I’ve enjoyed many genres since then. Do I still have my favorites? Yes. But I know that there is more out there than just one genre.

And as a writer, even though all of my published fiction to date has been historical in nature, I’ve worked on some contemporary romances and some romantic suspense. I suppose I might try my hand at any number of genres, but it would be a stretch for me to attempt to write a sci-fi, and I’m pretty sure that I’d draw the line at reading or writing horror. (The fact that my sister-in-law and I were both huddled in the floorboard of my brother’s car at the drive-in trying to NOT watch a slasher flick over forty years ago scarred me for life!)

Other than that, who knows what the future may hold writing and reading-wise. 

But I’ll stick to Blue Plate, thank you very much.