In my spare time these past months, I’ve been organizing my rag-tag collection of business cards and teacher contact lists and compiling them—along with the email addresses of my friends and family and acquaintances—into a massive (for me) Email Marketing Database. It was an angst-ridden process.
Why the angst?
Well, for starters, I am not good at tooting my own horn. The very idea that I was compiling this database with the end goal of sending every person on it a few words about myself was daunting. Excrutiating, even. That said, I’ve learned over the five years since my first book was published that marketing myself and my work is not something that is going to happen effectively without my help. My publishers are wonderful, and they do a lot for me, but their resources are limited and they have many authors and many books to promote. If I don’t supplement their promotion with a little legwork of my own, fewer readers are going to see my books. And toot-challenged or not, I do want readers to find my books.
So I kept at the database.
There were other demons. I kept asking myself: Will Tom want to be in my Email Marketing Database? (Tom being a high school friend.) Will Jane think I’m being pushy? (Jane being a writer friend I know personally but not well.) Will Harry wonder why I’ve included him? (Harry being the neighbor I sort of know, but not well.) Doubts like these haunted me the entire time I was creating the database, learning how to export email addresses from my contact books, composing that first promotional newsletter, and right up until the moment I told my marketing program (Mad Mimi, if you’re wondering) to send that first e-Blast.
But send it I did.
And the most amazing thing happened: my colleagues and business contacts and teacher friends and neighbors and family members and random acquaintances and Toms and Janes and Harrys began responding. Kindly. And while there are a few folks who’ve asked to be taken off that marketing list (2 out of 940!), yesterday was filled with lovely email messages of support and congratulations from all over the world. In the words of an editor friend with whom I shared my database/marketing angst: “Let it go!”
And so I’m letting it go…
My third book, Citizen Scientists, was published yesterday. If you didn’t get an email from me, or hear about the release on Facebook or Twitter, feel free to drop me a line (lgb (at) loreeburns (dot) com) and I’ll add you to my new Email Marketing Database. If you did hear about it, please feel free to spread the love far and wide. And if you’ve already spread that love, thank you from the bottom of my angst-less heart!
PS: The lovely valentine graphic above was a gift from my son on Release Day. How cool is he?