Prior to the last couple of years, email marketing existed in the indie publishing industry mainly to promote book sales on other platforms. It was another form of advertisement, which meant the focus was on directing people to other money-earning aspects of your business. But recently, newsletters have gained steam as a way to monetize directly, through platforms like Substack, Ream, Patreon, and even authors’ own websites.
According to Newsletter Circle’s 2024 study of 74,000 newsletters, the average newsletter sets a yearly price of $96, which means adding one hundred members to a paid offering could add nearly $10,000 to your business.
Before your eyes fill up with money signs, it’s important to note that subscriptions are the hardest business model to get right, and you should probably only focus on them after your books are selling. People still prefer to pay for a thing they can own outright over a subscription, even if they have to pay more.
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a paid offering, though. Launching a subscription-based newsletter early and maintaining it in the background of your author business allows you to accumulate paid members over time until they become a significant part of your business. It took me almost two years to accumulate over one thousand paid members, and though my yearly revenue is a lot lower than I mentioned above, it adds up little by little.
Email Marketing and Newsletters
Let’s back up for a moment and make sure we understand the terms being used. Email marketing is an umbrella term that breaks down most simply into two categories: mailing lists and newsletters.
Mailing lists are still crucially important, but they only promote your own work or call attention to sales events. Mailing lists don’t have much intrinsic value on their own; the value comes from external sources, like buying a book or coming to a signing event.
Newsletters, by contrast, provide content directly and therefore have intrinsic value. The easiest way to tell if you're writing something newsletter-worthy is to ask whether somebody could read it by itself, or as part of a serial, and enjoy it on its own.
One of the biggest mistakes authors make in designing their newsletter is treating it like a mailing list, focusing only on promoting other work or inundating subscribers with calls-to-action. Instead, authors would see more benefit by trying to build both products individually. Today, let’s help you build the newsletter component of your business, show you where to host your new publication, and explore how you could make money from it.
Hosting Your Newsletter
As newsletters and mailing lists are two separate categories of email marketing, it can be beneficial to host them on different platforms tailored to their purposes. In my business, I keep my mailing list on Kit, which sends out weekly promotions and other launches, while my newsletter is housed on Substack, where I share deep dives into author growth, interviews, and other value-first material. Fewer people want to hear about my promotions than my value-based posts, so this allows people to unsubscribe from one while still hearing about the other.
The nice thing about a newsletter is that, because it already has intrinsic value, you can repost and aggregate your content across the internet. For fiction, places like Royal Road for Fantasy/Sci-Fi authors and Radish for Romance authors are great options. Meanwhile, Medium and LinkedIn are great choices for nonfiction articles. Because this work has value to the reader, they’ll be willing to engage with it more. Plus, if you add links to your newsletter, you’ll be able to continue building organic subscribers, some of whom will also buy your other offers. Some sites, like Radish and Webtoon, might even pay you for using them, or, like Royal Road, let you connect directly to Patreon, so you can make money even before people get to your newsletter.
Making It Paid
Now that you know where you’re hosting your newsletter, let’s dive into strategies for making it a revenue driver. The most common way to monetize a newsletter for authors is by adding a paid component to your content, whether that is an archive of your work, new stories, member-exclusive interviews, articles, or something else that entices people to buy from you consistently.
Author Seanan McGuire basically writes an entire book every month for paid subscribers. One benefit to this model is that once the book is done, you can also sell it on retailers, giving you two bites of the apple. If you add Kickstarter or another presale platform, you can get three bites—and with direct sales, it’s all about taking as many bites as you can get. If you are sharing backlist books or material that you’re eventually going to publish, you can share it with your audience without expending more effort while still making significant revenue.
Pro Tip: To gain new subscribers, I host membership drives every quarter, where I focus attention on the value I bring to people, just like PBS or NPR do on their networks. Although those platforms have elaborate video and/or audio setups, I deliver mine through a combination of my mailing list and my paid newsletter. I initially ran this exclusively through my mailing list, but eventually I learned that giving people the option to “upgrade to stop getting these promotional emails” was one of the most effective ways to get people to upgrade. I generally run these promotions for one to two weeks, and send two to three emails during that time. Over 60 percent of my paid members come from this method.
Advertising
There are other ways to earn income from your newsletter without creating a paid subscription option. Platforms like Wellput, Beehiiv, SparkLoop, and ConvertKit offer advertising options you can drop into your newsletter or mailing list to make money. ConvertKit currently only offers programmatic advertising, which means you don’t get to control who shows up in your ads with fine detail until you have ten-thousand-plus subscribers, but both Wellput and Beehiiv offer advertising options with more control.
Additionally, if you want to spend the time on it, you could find other authors promoting books who might be interested in advertising in your newsletter, similar to Today in Books from Book Riot. Prices vary, but consider a price range between $20 and $50 per one thousand opens, with a click-through rate on ads of 1 percent to 2 percent.
Pro Tip: Consider including ads for your own books in your newsletter, as well as affiliate links that deliver revenue every time somebody buys from a link you’ve provided them. Amazon has plenty of information on how to become an affiliate at https://affiliate-program.amazon.com, and most other sites that offer affiliate programs have robust resources for how to succeed.
If you find the right partner, you can even explore a deeper integration with your brand. Maybe you’re writing a blog post about a sponsor or recording a video about a product. This is usually only an option when you have a larger newsletter or a large social media account. However, if you have access to a tight niche with an engaged audience, you might find success earlier.
Creating Other Rewards
Another avenue for monetizing your newsletter further is to offer multiple tiers with digital and physical rewards, such as a book box. Creating a quarterly book box with your own books or those of other authors in your genre can add significant value to your business. It’s possible to charge $25 to $50 per month or more for these, even if you only deliver quarterly. Even if you don’t want to add book boxes or physical goods, consider a higher priced tier where people get access to you through Q&As or personal chats. Although most people will choose the lower priced options, don’t discount those few people who will pay top dollar—they might pay enough to double your revenue or more.
Be forewarned, it’s a lot easier to build a sustainable business from a mailing list than a newsletter, and a newsletter often needs to be significantly bigger than a mailing list to work consistently and deliver a lot of value to you as an author. But as you grow your newsletter, it can be a great funnel into your mailing list. Russell Brunson’s Linchpin concept, when dealing with memberships and newsletters, suggests a subscription should undergird your business; it probably won’t make a lot of money for several years, but after those years, it could be your biggest money driver and add significant value to your work.
Although I keep them both separate, my newsletter is the main avenue for growth in my business, and those subscribers funnel into my mailing list. Some of them decide to become paid members of my community, but even more buy my books and other products. Building a sustainable business in 2025 and beyond means having as many avenues as possible to exploit and monetize your work. Newsletters are another avenue to explore that can add considerable value to your business over time.
Russell Nohelty
Russell Nohelty (www.russellnohelty.com) is a USA Today bestselling fantasy and non-fiction author who has written dozens of novels and graphic novels including The Godsverse Chronicles, The Obsidian Spindle Saga, and Ichabod Jones: Monster Hunter. He is the publisher of Wannabe Press, co-host of the Kickstart Your Book Sales & Six Figure Author Experiment podcasts, and cofounder of the Writer MBA conference & The Future of Publishing Mastermind. He also co-created the Author Ecosystem archetype system to help authors embrace their natural tendencies to find success. You can find most of his writing at theauthorstack.com. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and dogs.