To write weekly or not to write weekly, that is the question

Today, it's a break from the usual fare of setting the stage for my (hopefully) epic relaunch.

Instead, let's talk author newsletters!

First off, my favorite resource for author newsletters by far is Newsletter Ninja: How To Become An Author Mailing List Expert by Tammi Labrecque.

That book forms the basis of my author newsletter strategy.

Secondly, I love writing my author newsletters.

As such, it's one of the things I get to go 100% perfectionist on¹.

My author newsletter is also going to form the backbone of my revamped marketing strategy for 2025 and beyond, something I'll write about another time.

Now, back in January 2024, I switched my biweekly (i.e. every other week) newsletter to weekly. 

It was meant to be a short-term experiment of a couple months or so while I was serially releasing a winter-themed novelette called Monster of Snow and Flame: A Magical New Year's Eve Romantic Urban Fantasy Inspired by a True Story to my VIP readers on my email list.

Then I extended and extended and extended the experiment. In fact, my newsletter has been going weekly since then. As of today, that will be forty weekly emails sent!

The argument for weekly author newsletters

I've been loving my weekly author emails. I love the regularity of writing weekly to my VIP readers, and I have plenty of things to tell them about, even when I'm not actively marketing or releasing books(!)^{2, 3}. 

Further, weekly emails make the email-delivering robots happier than less frequent ones⁴. 

Weekly emails also give you "more shots on goal" in the same amount of time, i.e. more opportunities to catch a reader's eye than biweekly or monthly newsletters⁵.

Readers can come to expect to hear from you on a certain day and time too. Opening an email from you can become part of their weekly routine, something that can't happen with a biweekly or monthly newsletter. 

For the record, I have noticed the open rates (the percentage of people who open a particular email) for my author newsletters increasing recently. It's been a bit of a delay (40 weekly emails later!), but that increase has been sustained for a little over a month now.

And that's with me being way behind on clearing out my cold subscribers, those who haven't opened or clicked on an email from me in a while⁶.

Lastly, I hoped that—with the freedom of sending shorter emails that don't have to be perfect⁷ due to that "more shots on goal" thing—sending more frequent emails wouldn’t increase the amount of time I spent on newsletters overall.

Or at least sending more frequent emails would minimally increase the amount of time I spent on newsletters (i.e. decreasing the amount of time I spent per newsletter, if not reducing the amount of time spent on newsletters overall).

I was wrong.

The argument against weekly author newsletters

In short, time.

With a biweekly newsletter, I felt the need to make each newsletter perfect, and each newsletter took me roughly two hours to create from start to finish.

I hoped that, with a weekly newsletter, I wouldn't feel so much pressure to make each email perfect, that I would be able to settle for that 80% "good enough" level.

I couldn’t.

Sending a weekly newsletter has pretty much doubled the amount of time I spend on newsletters.

Time that I don't have⁸.

The brutal truth

The brutal truth is that I am way behind on the marketing side for the great big relaunch of The Eversfield Academy Vampire Hunters romantic young adult urban fantasy series and the standalone prequels of Eversfield Academy: Vampire Origins.

"Fortunately," the writing/editing side of the relaunch has also been taking me way longer than I anticipated, so this isn't a big deal.

Yet.

But I need to find more time for the marketing side moving forward.

I have three options:

1. Find more time for work in my life: This feels pretty unlikely⁸, but I did have a recurring health problem pop up in late July that didn't (mostly) calm down till mid-September. From there, I entered a string of family doctor and vet appointments that won't let up for another week or so. So, it's been a rough four months. It's possible that I get more time for work naturally in the future since I won't have family doctor and vet appointments and my own health issues will hopefully require less and less active management over time.
2. Steal time from writing and editing for marketing: I don't love that. I'm a writer, not a book marketer⁹! But I do spend roughly twice as much time writing and editing than I do on all other tasks, marketing, publishing, and administrative work combined. It's possible that I need to tweak this ratio.
3. Reduce my weekly newsletter to biweekly or monthly.

As you can see from above, that #3 is probably the easiest option.

I don't like it.

But I also have to be honest with myself. I'm not getting the time I need for working on the marketing side, and the only other likely option is to steal time from writing and editing, which I'd rather not do.

So I have to be okay with reducing the frequency of my author newsletter back to biweekly and maybe all the way to monthly (gasp!).

At least this would likely be a short-term or medium-term sacrifice. As a result of this experience, I know that I like writing to my VIP readers weekly, and it looks like writing to them weekly improves my open rates on individual emails too. I think a weekly author newsletter is where I want to be long-term.

It just may not be where I need to be right at this moment.

What if my readers like my weekly newsletter?

Well, hello there, convenient excuse for doing what I want to do, despite the logic against it! 😂

But seriously, if my readers prefer a weekly email and I prefer a weekly email, perhaps that's what makes the most sense, despite the time cost.

And I guess it's an opportunity to continue to work on my perfectionism?

The path forward

I'm going to see whether my VIP readers prefer a weekly email, a biweekly email, or a monthly email. After all, I view my author newsletter as mine and theirs.

I don't think I'll go all the way down to a monthly email, but I'd like to see what my readers think about this.

When I have my readers' preferences,  I'll factor them in along with my own opinions and needs outlined in this here blog post and go from there.

In the meantime, I'll keep looking for more time in my life and/or a better way to split up my time since, in an ideal world where I have unlimited time—or at least I have Hermione Granger's time turner!¹⁰—I would keep these newsletters weekly. A lack of time is the only thing holding me back¹¹.

Stay tuned!

Happy reading, 

Betsy

The epic list of side notes and digressions

1. I'll talk about this in a future post, but one of the ways I manage my perfectionism is to define which activities I get to go to 100% on (or really, 95% because 100% perfect doesn't exist¹²) and which activities I have to restrain myself to only the 80% I can get in 20% of the time (this 80-20 concept and how I apply it to my author business is a subject for another post).
2. At least not since implementing the routine of noting three interesting things that happened to me or that I read about daily. Not that I come up with three things every single day, but I come up with enough ideas to easily fill a weekly newsletter with scrumptious goodies. I got this tip during a webinar with Tammi Labrecque, author of Newsletter Ninja: How To Become An Author Mailing List Expert, and Bill Mueller, who runs Story Sales Machine, a course about email marketing that I have not taken. It does look good though! I’m just not in the market for an email marketing course right now.
3. Writing my weekly emails should get even easier when I am actively marketing and releasing books starting with the great big relaunch of The Eversfield Academy Vampire Hunters romantic YA urban fantasy series and Eversfield Academy: Vampire Origins, the series of standalone prequels, too.
4. I looked it up and I couldn't find any references for this assertion. Sorry! It is something that I've heard from multiple places, but I just mentally noted it and moved on with my life, lol. For the record, no matter how often you email your readers, you need to have something valuable to say in each email, and you cannot sell your books in every single email. The latter is covered in Newsletter Ninja: How To Become An Author Mailing List Expert.
5. This is just math, so no references needed. 4 emails in a month > 2 emails in a month > 1 email in a month.
6. A subject for another day, but here's an article from Kit regarding what cold subscribers are and why you want to remove them.
7. For non-perfectionists, this may not be such an issue, lol.
8. These days, I'm pretty short on time, between being a mom to a four-year-old and an aging dog, being on a nationally competitive roller derby team, being a generic adult with those generic adult tasks (lol), being someone who doesn't do well on low amounts of sleep, and being someone who needs a healthy work-life balance to feel good mentally.
9. Yes, yes, technically I'm both, at least partially because I chose the indie publishing path to becoming an author. But writing and editing still come first!
10. Seriously, I have never related to Hermione more than when she's using the time-turner to take more classes at Hogwarts. 😂
11. And now "There's Nothing Holdin' Me Back" as sung by Shawn Mendes is playing in my head.
12. Another of those perfectionism-managing strategies is writing that sentence to remind myself of the fact that perfect doesn't exist, lol.