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Paul Teague authorWelcome to Paul's Podcast Diary for Saturday 19th January, 2019.

Coming up this week:

  • I’m back to writing after 6 months doing other things
  • My results from a Fiverr impromptu promo
  • I submitted The Secret Bunker for a BookBub this week – but am I in or am I out?

This diary charts my self-publishing journey – the ups the downs, the successes and the failures.

Everything goes into this diary, week-by-week, but you'll also find it a source of great tips, resources, tools, podcast recommendations and so on.

If you're new to the podcast and want to easily access the back catalogue of podcast diaries, in chronological order, please check out this page.

If I ever miss something out, or you'd like more information, just drop me an email at paul@paulteague.com.

This Week's Talking Points

1) From Robert Scott-Norton, who was a guest in episode 65: https://self-publishing-journeys.com/episode-65-robert-scott-norton/

I've been tracking my stats for a while, and this shows the picture with the graph that follows.
My desire to do something had been needling away since the GDPR date, and probably your stated intention to get rid of the unengaged from your list. It was further spurred on by the incoming Mailerlite bill (I'd pain annually in an effort to save some money) and was feeling sick at the thought of spending so much money on a large list that frankly wasn't buying anything.
I first used Mailerlite's Clean up inactive feature, which got rid of some, but I'd got some advice from the 20booksto50k group.
Create 2 segments in mailerlite. First called subscribed in the last 4 months. This would protect those newbies to the list.
The second segment was called Inactive for 4 months. This has subscribers that haven't opened or clicked on an email in 4 months but don't belong to the subscribed in the last 4 months list.
I got rid of a LOT of subscribers the first time I used it. Almost 4,000 subscribers in August.
That hurt for all of about 30 seconds.
I now use this method prior to sending any email. It's harsh but you can see my stats have dramatically increased for the better. I'm now at a level of subscribers I don't mind paying for and am working hard on my newsletter to keep people interested. Not sure if you're a subscriber but I'm following lots of Advice from Newsletter Ninja by Tammi Labrecque. Here's my latest one. I recently released a new horror series (previously only a sci-fi author) and I know that I didn't want to just flip the newsletter content into horror as that's not what the original subscribers signed up for. So, I asked subscribers whether they would be interested in horror stuff as well, and those that clicked the link got added to a horror group in mailerlite. I've been using the visibility features in mailerlite to show Sci-fi stuff to those that signed up for sci-fi, and to show horror stuff for those that clicked that link. This is working great as I still only prepare one email a fortnight and don't have to worry about annoying anyone.

2) > From 2k to 10k, by Rachel Aaron – EACH CHAPTER OR STORY SECTION SHOULD:

  • Advance the story
  • Reveal new info
  • Pull the reader forward

[amazon_link asins='1548271101′ template='ProductCarousel' store='author-pt-21′ marketplace='UK' link_id='3e475818-a339-4b46-b2e1-5af9d6ca520b']

3) Word count:

Thursday 17th = 5035 words written

Friday 18th = 5434 words written

Sorry, I messed up Scrivener and lost my word count image for Friday 🙁

> Total = 10469

4)  BookBrush author website: https://bookbrush.com/

5) My Secret Bunker stickers:

Secret Bunker stickers

6) BKKnights promos:

https://www.fiverr.com/bknights

This is their promo website: https://digitalbookspot.com/

This is their Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/Digital-Book-Spot-376198459143010/

7) Recommended podcasts:

The Writer's Well Podcast: https://shows.pippa.io/thewriterswell

Science Fiction and Fantasy Marketing Podcast: https://www.marketingsff.com/

8) Christian Kallias sci-fi covers: https://www.christiankallias.com/art

Vellum

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