A quick glance in my crystal ball tells me you’re reading this in February, but—because of the crazy scheduling required to produce a magazine like Indie Author Magazine—I’m actually writing these words in November, having just returned from 20Books Vegas.
While I was there, I spent some time chatting with Chelle Honiker, IAM’s illustrious publisher, about newsletter topics I might write about, and we kept coming back to welcome sequences.
Welcome sequences are one of the most popular topics I get asked about, and that might be why we kept circling back to it. (It might also have been the gin.) These introductory emails you write about yourself and your books can be essential to keeping people invested in what you have to tell them. Except the thing about welcome sequences is that they are so individual that they’re hard to talk about except in the most general terms—because so much depends on your genre, your backlist, how often you publish, or where your subscribers come from.
I say “It depends” so much, I should just get it tattooed on my forehead.
Still, one thing is universal: Those first few emails will be the deciding factor in whether your subscribers stick around to become superfans or smash the Unsubscribe link.
No pressure, right?
So rather than talk about how long your sequence should be, or how many sequences you should have, or any of the tech you have to master to get readers through them, let’s talk instead about what to include in your first few emails, however many there are, in order to ensure that subscribers understand right from the start why they should care about you and what you write.
There are four key bits of info that writers should aim to include when introducing themselves to subscribers. Together, they comprise a sort of origin story or mission statement that’s unique to you.
The four basic elements are
If you don’t know those four things, you’ll struggle to set yourself apart from the pack—and you definitely want to set yourself apart from the pack. You’re trying to build superfans here, and you can’t do that by being just like everyone else who writes books like yours.
What you choose to reveal here is up to your level of comfort.
You can be specific enough to be relatable without revealing too much:
Or you can just let it all hang out:
This can be straightforward—you’re just letting readers know they’re in the right place and they’ve found someone who writes the sort of books they like. If your genre covers a particularly wide range, be sure to elaborate on the types of stories your readers will find from you: “sword-and-sorcery Fantasy with dragons” or “super spicy small-town Romance,” for example, instead of broad category names like “Fantasy” or “Romance.”
The usual answer to this is “Because I like it.” But let’s go a little deeper. (If you don’t know why you write what you write, maybe this is the time to dig down and find out.)
Here, you want to tell readers what’s special about your books as compared with someone else’s. You hinted at this already with your “why,” above. But now, when you lay out how you write something that fills that need, it will paint a picture for readers that will help them understand what they can reliably expect from your books—and potentially what matters to you most as a storyteller.
Now that you know the steps to the perfect welcome sequence, I want you to get these answers down on paper and refine them so they’re short, easy to remember, and repeatable. If you tell readers exactly what’s so great about you, you give them the language to tell other people what’s so great about you. You’re making yourself recommendable. And you will hear them use this language to describe you to other readers, and you’ll see it in reviews.
You can drop all four elements into one email—probably early in your welcome sequence for maximum benefit—or you can parse it out over a couple of emails; that’s up to you.
As with so much else in your welcome sequence … all together now: “It depends.”
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