12 July 2020

My Mailing List For Readers

How to subscribe, unsubscribe and other details

UPDATE (28-Oct-2022): Given the amount of fake email (sent by governments or their reputation/perception management agencies a.k.a. troll farms), I have abandoned the idea of maintaining a mailing list. Just follow my RSS feeds instead. My FREE EBOOKS will continue to be available. Scroll down for details.

  • Email: ____
  • Subscribe: Send blank email with 'subscribe' as subject
  • Unsubscribe: Send blank email with 'unsubscribe' as subject
  • Get notified of: New books, book updates and offers, advance review copies (ARCs)
  • Note: No unnecessary weekly, fortnightly, monthly or yearly messages. No updates = no messages.
  • Alternative: Anonymously follow my RSS feeds.

The conventional wisdom for an author is to select a book genre or category and try to dominate it. I am no one-trick pony so my books are all over the place. In any book category that one of my books find itself in, it will be only one title with my name and it gets no traction. My books for children are published under the pseudonym Ólafía Óla but they do not have a seperate author page. In 2020, I wrote one of the biggest jokebooks of all time (under my own name) and a 440-page compendium of 149 political cartoons (under another pseudonym). I might very well be the King of Satire but the world is moving against comedy and there is no room for satire.

Fiction authors are often advised to ‘write to market’ but I am a non-fiction author and I like to write whatever interests me. Another advice to authors is to have a captive mailing list so that when a new book is released, there will be enough initial purchases to consolidate the book's position at the top of the searches. This again will work for fiction authors who write only for one book category.

Many years ago (before Social Media sites came into existence), I used to have a mailing list for my blog posts. I wrote the mailing software in Classic ASP. I think I had at most 20 or 30 subscribers. I would put an entire blog post inside the email rather than give them a link to the blog. My goal then was to spread the content rather than acquire traffic. After I got a job in Bombay (and got separated from my desktop PC), I forgot the mailing list. In subsequent updates to the website code, I removed the mailing-list mailing code. If I had maintained that mailing list, all my books would have been bestsellers. Now, I will have to build a mailing list from scratch.

I am not a niche writer. I have no idea what I will write next so I have no 'reader magnet' for subscribers. You can download the free PDF ebooks listed below (scroll down) without subscribing.

Free PDF downloads (mostly excerpts)

These are low-resolution watermarked PDFs but they are fully functional. The ‘FREE CONTENT’ in these PDFs are not watermarked.

Free titles from ebook stores

I have made these ebooks permanently free. You can download the ebooks from Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, ScribD, OverDrive, etc…

Ebook not free on Kindle?

Amazon Kindle does not normally offer ebooks for free. It MAY OR MAY NOT do price-matching with competing ebook stores (in your country) and offer those ebooks for free. If it is not free on Kindle, then choose one of the apps of the other ebook stores. Please do not ask me for the EPUB files. If I were to offer them, their content will be disassembled and hosted on content-farm sites. Then, the self-publishing platforms will question me if I am really the author of the books and block sales of the paperbacks. I made the ebooks free so some of the readers will buy the paperbacks or look at my other titles. If I cannot sell the paperbacks, there is no point in making the ebooks free in the first place.

Link: ⟴ | Magic Link: ⛳

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