The Newsletter Cometh

[hrj]

Having listened to the promotional strategy advice of a wide variety of people, I'm planning to accomplish two things this weekend. One will be to set up Hootsuite (or some equivalent social media manager, but that's the one people seem to prefer) to handle automated promotional reminders that I rarely have the emotional energy to do manually. The other will be to set up an opt-in (of course!) newsletter for fans and readers to provide both a direct way to communicate announcements and other information, and to provide special content in exchange for access to attention. I figure to aim for absolutely not more often than once a month except for things like unexpected special sales (which I never know about in advance). Maybe less often than once a month, we'll see. I have a hard time planning these things because I'm not a newsletter reader myself, so I have to figure out what works for people who are.

So what sort of content will the newsletter provide? A lot of it will be just basic information:

• Upcoming/New publication information


• Upcoming appearances


• Current projects

But I'll also be offering some special content not available to people who don't subscribe to the newsletter. And that's where you come in. Here are some ideas of my own, plus suggestions people have made online. Which of these would entice you to sign up for and read a newsletter? What other content would entice you?

• Worldbuilding information (Alpennian language, geography, history, etc.)


• Snippets of work in progress (no spoilers!)


• Exclusive previews of Alpennian short fiction (stories that will eventually be released either free or as a collection, but that I'm not trying to sell individually)


• Discussions of my writing process (for example, I kept a diary of how the plot of Daughter of Mystery developed as I was drafting it)


• Alpennia fan art (with the artists' permissions, of course!)


• Access to Alpennia swag (there is none yet, but I have some ideas percolating -- what would you be interested in?)

Let me know what you think. I'm still trying to get my mind around the psychological aspects of doing a newsletter and how it would differ from my blog, other than providing me with a list of people who have expressed a particular level of commitment and interest to following my writing.

 

Comments

[kareina]

I have no need of swag of any kind, but I would subscribe to a newsletter (assuming that it is in electronic form and you don't want to send me paper), and all of the above content sounds interesting to me. I have also really enjoyed your "newsy letter home" style of blog posts, and think that posts about other things you are up to, be they adventures, events, sewing projects, gardening, or whatever would be welcome. I think that even readers who have never met you would enjoy the occasional personal glimpse.

I wouldn't likely ever write any (since I continue to maintain that I am not a writer, and even if I were, my free time is fairly full), but I wonder if your "fan art" category also includes fan fiction?

I am also delighted to hear that you can automate your promotion stuff both because I like it when my friends have less stress, but also because we, your loyal readers, will directly benefit if you can spend your time working on projects you enjoy (like, for example, writing, instead of promoting your books.

[hrj]

Re: swag, I was thinking more of "the existence of this stuff will be announced in the newsletter so you can feel all exclusive about it" rather than directly giving away swag that way. No paper! No! Are we living in the 20th century or something?

Fan fiction is a different thing than fan art. The community standard is for authors to pretend not to know about the existence of fan fiction, much less to read it. In part, it's a courtesy to the fan writers so they don't feel that God is looking over their shoulder judging. In part, it's a protection so that authors don't get accused of lifting story ideas from the fics.

[kareina]

That is interesting to learn about the authors pretending not to notice about fan fiction. I never heard the term fan fiction till fairly recently (while in Tasmania for my first PhD), but over the years before then I had read a number of stories by other authors set in Kathrine Kurtz's Deryni series in a book she had published, and a number of stories by other authors set in Darkover that MZB had published, so I kinda assumed that there was some sort of method for fans to write stories set in other people's worlds that could, sometimes, be judged good enough for the world's founding author to deem worthy of sharing with their other fans.

[hrj]

Different authors have different attitudes towards fan writing and have had different experiences. MZB began with a very welcoming approach, starting with sponsoring a fanzine that included fan fiction, and even putting out a series of anthologies of Darkover fiction by both professional and fan writers. But then she got burned by having a fan writer come up with a story element that was coincidentally similar to something MZB was working on and demanding to be given author credit for the concept. After that she wouldn't even read fan fiction, much less be involved in publishing it.

Some authors are simply deeply uncomfortable with other people "playing house" with their characters and worlds (even aside from the subset of fanfic that's erotic in nature). For some, they'll actively ask people not to write it, others are content to pretend it doesn't exist.

My attitude is that I would be immensely flattered to have people want to write in my world -- there are plenty of stories that I'm not going to write that have threads hanging off them to be picked up -- but if they do, I want to allow elbow room for them to have fun and not feel like I'm watching and judging. And there are potential legal issues with giving official "approval", especially if it involves elements I'm going to be working with myself in the future.

[ricardienne]

I would and will subscribe to a newsletter regardless of what extra content it has. I'm not always good about checking blogs (or dreamwidth), so getting something in my regular email inbox once in a while is really the best way for me, as a fan of a writer, to find out what that writer is up to.

(But of course, I'd always love to hear more about Alpennian linguistics, history, and literature. [One of these days, I'm going to triangulate Caesar, Tacitus and the tidbits about geography that you've mentioned and figure out what glorious pre-Roman (or/and Roman-era) past must be being invented and embellished in the burgeoning Alpennian nationalism of the day...])

[hrj]

The whole push/pull thing with information is tricky. Given the demise of topical mailing lists, and the general drifting away from blog communities like this one and LJ, an author newsletter seems to be the only way to make contact relatively labor-free for the recipients. So I don't know to what extent "exclusive content" is necessary to make it attractive, as opposed to simply the ease of access. But I have an aversion to writing the same thing redundantly in multiple venues, so it'll probably be different from the public blogging. And there *are* folks for whom "exclusive content" is a plus.

I'd love to hear about what the Roman and pre-Roman history of Alpennia would be! I've mentioned some Roman-era ruins in Chalanz, and there's going to be an artifact in Floodtide that should be recognizable as dating to Roman times, which means there must have been some sort of civic presence there.