The Ultimate Guide to Writing an Author Newsletter (and Why You Need One)
I started my first newsletter on a bit of a whim. It was called the Right Brains’ Society, and was my first, very haphazard attempt to begin broadening my conversations beyond food. I’d been writing a food blog for four years already, and learning a lot about how to simultaneously write and work full-time. I wanted to talk about it more, but sharing ideas about slow writing and sustainable creative living didn’t feel like it fit seamlessly within the container of my blog posts and recipes.
I was also motivated by the fact that I’d recently been approached by a publisher about turning my literary food blog into a cookbook. It was exciting! But as someone with a tiny following, I needed more eyeballs on my work and to build a more engaged community both on and off social media. I enthusiastically dove in, and it was probably one of the best decisions I ever made.
Supporting a community of readers and building trust over time is the reason they have signed up to be part of my launch teams, bought my books, come to events, purchased programs, listened to my podcast, and told their friends about my work. A newsletter puts you in front of people who resonate with your message and are eager to hear from you, which is both invaluable and a great privilege.
Well over a decade later, I still believe wholeheartedly that one of the most important relationships to cultivate in your writing life is the one you have with your readers, but I also remember how intimidating it was in the early days. Today, newsletters are more popular than ever and have even become actual business models (hello, Substack). Although it’s a saturated online world out there, connecting with your community is still a critical part of author life, and a newsletter is one of the best ways to do it. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, stick with me.
This guide covers a simple 6-step framework to start and grow your newsletter.
Understand Why You Need a Newsletter
Figure Out What to Write
Make Decisions to Get Started
Develop an Easy Workflow
Choose Your Email Service Provider (ESP)
Create and Send
Before we dive in, you’re in the right place if …
You’re a writer who doesn’t have a newsletter (but might have thought about starting one at some point)
You do have a newsletter, and you want a little more direction or inspiration
You’re nervous about putting yourself out there
You’re unsure what to write
My goal is for you to feel excited about this aspect of your writing life, and truly empowered to get started in a way that feels doable.
Why Writers Need a Newsletter
The first step in starting your writing newsletter is having a really good handle on the why. Why do you even need a newsletter in the first place? Why should you spend your time sending one?
When I ask writers about newsletters, I get responses like …
I don’t see why I need one
I’m waiting until I have something to share
I haven’t written a book yet
I don’t know what to write
I’m someone who approaches my creativity with a seasonal lens, and having a newsletter is definitely part of The Season of Visibility, because it requires putting yourself out there. It might not be showing up in a bookstore or at an event, but sending a newsletter—or the idea of sending a newsletter—might make you feel a little bit vulnerable.
Nervousness is a pretty normal reaction, especially when you might also have some self-doubt around growing your list, or finding readers, or even losing subscribers after they’ve signed up. Something important to keep in mind is the newsletter you send out now, at this moment in time, will evolve. It’s easy to get stuck in this fear of not doing things right, or not having permission to change something after we’ve started, but I sort of see newsletters like living, breathing things. You’ll learn things over time, experiment, change your frequency—it’ll grow with you, essentially, so don’t worry about having everything be perfect before you start.
My first newsletters, by the way, were all over the place—I just sent musings and thoughts, whatever happened to be on my mind at the time, and I had absolutely no schedule. Sometimes it was once a week, or three weeks would go by, and I sent newsletters on different days and at different times. There was no consistency at all. Again, permission to evolve!
3 Benefits of Starting a Newsletter
Here’s what convinced me (and still convinces me) that newsletters are so essential.
1. You own your list.
If you’re building a community on Facebook, or you have thousands of Instagram followers, or Pinterest generates traffic to your website, or you host Twitter (er, X) chats—those are all worthy components of an overall engagement strategy, but you don’t own a single email from anyone on social media. That means you’re at the mercy of algorithms, which we know change frequently. People also haven’t given you explicit permission to contact them, which means even though they might like your announcement when your new book comes out, they may not feel as motivated to buy it because you haven’t been in their inbox for months or years.
Here’s an example: I hosted a private group on Facebook for five years. It was a thriving space where we had lots of great conversations and supported one another, but when I decided to close the group, I didn’t lose touch with everyone. Why? Because getting an invitation required writers to be signed up to my newsletter. I still had a way to personally contact everyone, and in that way, social media served as a supplement to my newsletter.
The CEO of Instagram has been quoted saying “on average, people miss about 70 percent of the posts in their Instagram feed” and other statistics have found organic reach to be around 20%, or even lower in recent years. The platform used to show photos chronologically in feeds, but has switched to making choices based on what they think users will like an engage with. So let’s say you have 1,000 Instagram followers, when you create a new post, only 200 of them might see it, and on average, the number of followers engaging with that content (so liking, commenting, or sharing), is only around 2%
For Facebook, at one point even before some of the recent changes that transformed our newsfeeds, fans were only seeing about 16% of posts on pages they followed.
Email, on the other hand, is much more algorithm-proof. 40% of people start their day looking at email, and industry averages for folks in the “Arts and Artists” space is around 27%, and a click rate of 3%. A lot of writers report much higher open rates, because they’re speaking to a really targeted audience of people who are deeply interested in what they have to offer. My own average open rate has been as high as percentages in the 43%-55% range and a click rate in the 20% range. But I’ve had open rates as high as 70% or 80% when I’m sending something really targeted, like a course someone has signed up for.
If you’re someone who uses Instagram or Facebook to nurture your community already, you could very easily take your captions and prompts and repurpose them into a newsletter format. I’m a huge fan of recycling content in different ways. Even if you’re getting great engagement on social media, you don’t have a way to contact those people beyond the platform, which means you need an email address.
But enough about numbers—the main thing to remember more than the numbers themselves is that when you own your list, you have an edge over social media in terms of your reach.
2. You have an opportunity to build relationships.
Think of any relationship in your life—your partner, your parents, your boss, fellow writers, parents at your kid’s school… every relationship we have requires effort. And going back to vulnerability, it’s often when we share and are open with one another that those relationships deepen. We have to show up, share, listen, help out, and we have to do it over time. That’s what builds trust.
Someone who joins your list tomorrow may not be your most loyal fan immediately. But give them a few months, give them some emails that reveal who you are and what you’re about and how you might be able to help, encourage, or support them. That’s how you develop long-term relationships with readers.
This is not an overnight thing. We have to be in this for the long-haul and see a newsletter as a true investment in your writing life.
There are plenty of trainings out there that talk about how to get 1,000 or 10,000 subscribers to your list in a very short amount of time, and the trick, usually, is to use paid advertising, or to do something that requires a lot of work like hosting an online summit where you’re leveraging the mailing list of your guests. That’s not the kind of thing I’m talking about today. I’m talking about the slow-and-steady-wins-the-race kind of approach.
The intention is to build relationships that are mutually beneficial. We all want to feel seen, heard, and understood. Having a newsletter is an opportunity to do that for others. I’ve gotten replies from people who simply say “Thank you, I’ve been feeling the same way about this. Or “It’s nice to know someone else struggles with this too.” That’s a really powerful thing.
As writers, I think most of us are hoping that our words inspire and impact people. A newsletter is one of the ways to do that on a very intimate level, and it puts you in a position that when bigger things happen, like publishing a book, or you have writing published online and you want to share it, a built in audience can help amplify your message. And in between, you’re providing real value to someone on the other end of your emails.
3. Showing up provides value.
Most writers don’t like to talk about their work in the context of being a brand or a business, and many writers I’ve spoken to say “I don’t need a newsletter because I don’t have something to sell.” or “I haven’t written my book yet.”
Maybe you don’t have a book or courses or workshops or products you’re selling, but if you’re someone who wants to write a book one day, who even has a dream to share your work with others in any capacity, a newsletter will help build a groundswell of support for your work. That way, when you do step into the space of having a publication date on the calendar, or you’re hosting events in your community, or creating online courses, or anything else, you have a direct communication line to people who want to hear from you and believe in what you have to offer.
Entrepreneur Amy Porterfield has this saying I really love, she says: “The success of your launch is directly related to how you show up when you’re not launching.” Translated for the context of writing, it would read something like this: “The success of your book promotion is directly related to how you show up when you’re not promoting a book.”
Like I said, your newsletter is an opportunity to be of service to your readers and have them get to know you.
I wrote a newsletter for four years before my first book came out. Everyone on my launch team came from my newsletter, and the same was true for my second book. In other words, if you’re waiting to start a newsletter until you have a book deal or your manuscript is written, that’s probably the worst time to start a meaningful newsletter.
If you *think* you might write a book in a year, in three years, in five years … you need people on your team, people in your community, readers who can help magnify your message and put it out into the world. And then when you do send more promotional emails for a period of time, everyone will be primed and ready for it as part of your evolution as a writer.
Choosing Topics for Your Newsletter
One of the biggest barriers to starting a newsletter not knowing what to write, but once you have a better idea about what to share, you’ll automatically be more excited and ready to move ahead! (Don’t miss my list of free author newsletter prompts to help get you started!)
Here’s something to remember before we brainstorm: A newsletter is less about you and more about your readers.
That doesn’t mean you aren’t there sharing your stories and experiences, but a newsletter isn’t about you getting something off your chest—it’s about adding value to the lives of people who sign up and give you their email.
It’s about inspiring, instructing, educating, or sometimes a combination of all three.
And if you’re thinking “I don’t have anything to offer” or “I’m not an expert” or “I’m not running a business” or any other narrative that’s happening, to that I would like to say: that’s just your inner critic talking. All you really have to do is be yourself, you just want to *also* have a mindset built around service.
So the question to keep in the forefront of your mind, as you start exploring what’s possible with your own newsletter is…
How can I serve my readers?
As I mentioned, your newsletter will evolve over time, that’s just the nature of a long-term endeavor like this one, but these questions can help get you started thinking about how to position yourself in terms of what you can offer.
What kind of writer are you? Fiction, non-fiction, poetry, freelance/magazine
What core topics do you write about? This can be really obvious like yoga or parenthood, but you can also think about the kinds of topics that thread through your work like family relationships, a search for meaning, spirituality, healing from trauma, etc. Most people won’t just be writing about one thing, so these big bucket topics can provide inspiration for your content, as well as draw people in who are interested in exploring these topics more.
What do you know something about? Or, what’s something people often ask you about/ what are you already a resource for? This can be related to your writing or not.
How do you want people to feel when they get an email from you? This can give clues to the kind of tone you might want to set
Don’t overthink this—a friendly, thoughtful note is perfect. You don’t need to do anything fancy, but over time, knowing more about your perspective and topics that you become known for will help you refine your newsletter as you go.
If you *are* someone who loves being on social media and finds a lot of meaningful engagement there, you can take your captions and prompts and use those as a starting point for your newsletter—content recycling is something I really believe in, so don’t think you have to start from scratch all the time.
So in conclusion, you can just write a note, share something you’re learning or struggling with, just be yourself, be human, be personal. Invite people to reply to you so you can have deeper conversations.
The point is to do it in a way that feels true to you and what you’re about, and when you’re approaching a newsletter from an authentic place (as opposed to trying to copy what works for someone else), the whole process will feel more enjoyable and less like something you have to tick off a to-do list.
Book reviews and recommendations
Favorite poems
Your journaling process
How you research novels
The Top X Things You Learned From Graduate School
Favorite books about XYZ
Advice you’d give your younger self
10 things you learned in the past year
Journaling prompts
Resources for the area of expertise you’re known for
Write what comes naturally. This should not be something that’s forced. The longer you write a newsletter and the more you engage with your readers, you’ll learn about what they’re interested in, you’ll become more strategic with your process and planning. Something to think about when you’re brainstorming is if there’s a topic you could share more about, and break it into a 3 or 4-email series? That gives you a lot of material right there.
I wrote a literary food blog and was really more known for food writing at the time, but I started my newsletter to talk about creativity because I needed a venue to do that. As I shared, when I first started there was no plan, I was just getting going and making it a habit, and getting to know people. Now I have a different kind of plan and I’m more strategic, but that didn’t happen all at once.
Also, you don’t have to write about writing. You might write different kinds of books, but you spend a lot of time on social media talking about other issues that are important to you like social justice or mindfulness or healthy eating, or whatever. All the different parts of you can show up in a newsletter, you just want to let people know what to expect, and we’ll talk about the different ways you can do that. And we’ll talk about how to structure a newsletter in a minute.
Who You’re Writing To
Something you’ll want to think about and refine, over time, is the question of “Who are my readers?” Who are the people signing up, what are their motivations, what do they need, what do they like, are they writers, not writers? As you start sending a newsletter, you can do occasional surveys to find out more about your audience, but don’t let knowing everything about who they might be stop you from starting.
Depending on what you write about, your audience will likely either be made up of other writers who are both interested in what you write and the writer’s life generally, readers who resonate with your core topics, or a combination of both.
For example, Andi Cumbo has newsletters segmented based on the kinds of writing she does: one for writers, and one for readers of her historical novels and cozy mystery series.
Let’s say you’re a mom who writes about the intersection of wellness and parenthood. You might share personal stories in your newsletters, or back stories of essays you’ve had published, just tidbits of your life to help other moms feel like they’re less alone.
Maybe you write about overcoming something—chronic pain, abuse, trauma, you can share your story, and what’s been helpful to you, maybe online resources for others, to help encourage others to heal.
If you’re a writer of historical fiction, you might have a lot of writers on your list who would be interested in learning more about research, character development, or readers who just love history and want more behind the scenes or fun tidbits about your research process.
If you’re a poet—you can share a poem in every newsletter, either your own or a favorite poem of someone else’s with a little commentary. You can share a writing prompt.
And when it comes to deciding how vulnerable to be, that’s entirely up to you. Sharing personal stories is an important way to connect, but you don’t have to include every last detail to make it impactful. It’s really about your own comfort level, and when you start receiving responses back from readers, that might help you gauge the right balance.
Essential Decisions to Make Before Sending Your First Newsletter
Let’s start with the style of your newsletter. It might be…
A personal note
A list of round-up
Prompts and writing ideas
Book reviews
Any combination of the above
Next, consider email frequency. It’s best to choose your frequency based on what’s happening in your life right now, not some aspirational circumstance. If you’re brand new, I don’t recommend starting a weekly newsletter. It can be really overwhelming to launch into a weekly newsletter and commit to that. Every other week, or monthly is a great way to form the habit, and then as you build your newsletter and learn more, or things change, you can make tweaks, always letting people know about the change along the way and what to expect. Overcommitting is one guaranteed way that you’ll burnout or feel bad for not sending a newsletter.
Monthly
Every other week
Weekly
What will you include from your online ecosystem? Do you have a regular blog, which social media site are you most active on, do you host a podcast, do you have a book or books to share, etc.? This might not be the focus of your newsletter, but don’t forget to include a section for your work at the bottom
Blog posts
Social media links
Podcast episodes
Books
Coaching or workshop opportunities
Develop an Easy Workflow
Something that’s very easy to overlook when you have a newsletter is a workflow. When you start feeling overwhelmed, it’s often because you don’t have a system in place—you need that foundation. If you’re already sending a newsletter but find the process to be cumbersome, a little streamlining can go a long way.
Now you can do what I did and just fly by the seat of your pants at the beginning, but I highly recommend coming up with an easy workflow that supports you and makes things feel as easy as possible.
In your workflow, you’ll have a few different phases:
Idea generation
Writing / drafting
Editing
Scheduling
Responding to emails or comments
For writing, I organize my newsletter in Google Docs, and I also use a template for all of my newsletters. This makes it really simple because it includes all the sections that I include in my newsletter, with space for my note, my links, etc. Once you customize a template for your own newsletter, you can create individual documents ahead of time. For example, if you know you’re doing a monthly newsletter, create 12 docs and save them in a folder, with your template, and then they’re ready to go.
What to include in a newsletter template
Date
Subject line
Newsletter copy
Closing P.S. - a lot of people land here
Promotional sections (books, events, blog posts, workshops, podcasts, etc.)
Choose Your Email Service Provider
In addition to not knowing what to write, not knowing which ESP to choose can also be a stopping point for people because there are a lot of companies out there. When I got started in 2013, MailChimp was really the main option. There was also Aweber, which was geared more towards corporate businesses. I also had experience with Constant Contact at the company I worked for. Today, you have Flodesk, Substack, and more. Every platform has pros/cons, different pricing structures, and features. So, how do you choose what’s best for you? If you’re looking for a free service, Substack is the easiest place to start!
Send Your first Newsletter
Regardless of which provider you use, you’ll need to go through the same process behind the scenes to get yourself set up to start getting subscribers to sign up.
Create a newsletter template: We talked about this earlier in the workflow section, but it’s an easy way to streamline the process of creating a newsletter at whatever frequency rate you choose
Create a landing page: on your website, create a page called www.url.com/newsletter
Create a form: inside your email software, you’ll be able to create a simple form to capture someone’s email address, and then you can embed that onto your landing page.
Include this link in your email signature, on social media, and in bios
Send your first newsletter!
In general, no matter what kind of newsletter you’re sending, you’ll want to make your emails easy to scan—use headers, bolded text, and other visual cues to help readers find what interests them, drive home a point or insight, or draw their eye to a place you want them to click. And again, don’t be afraid of recycling content—like we talked about, content creation and generating new ideas can be one of the things that stops people from starting a newsletter in the first place, but you can supplement totally new ideas with blog posts or articles you’ve already written.
As we wrap up our time together, I want to leave you with a few thoughts.
Writers need readers. If you want to write a book one day, if you’re publishing articles you want people to read and share, if you want people to come out to an event … all this requires building relationships, and a newsletter is an amazing way to do that virtually.
The first email you send will be one of probably hundreds over the years—things will evolve over time. When you embrace this, it’s easier to let go of the idea that everything has to be perfect before you start, or you need to have everything figured out. Spoiler alert: I’ve sent a newsletter for seven years and I’m still tweaking things and changing things.
And finally, you are worthy of this work.
Anytime we put ourselves out there, we’re taking a risk, but there’s also great potential for connection and understanding, and it’s simply one more way to make the world a little bit smaller, and impact people who can benefit from our message while supporting your writing life at the same time.
