Back in the olden days of indie publishing, when the earth’s crust was cooling and it was a wild west of new information for self-publishers, I was fortunate enough to attend a conference in Austin, Texas, with this month’s featured subject, Tammi Labrecque.
It’s hard to remember back that far. So much has changed since 2017.
But she’s unforgettable, and I liked her immediately. She has strong opinions, and she’s able to perfectly articulate them. She speaks with authority, yet she’s utterly relatable, and she has the right answers for complicated questions about how to connect with readers in a format that baffles many authors.
When we were launching this magazine, she’s who I turned to when we were writing our email onboarding sequences. I sent the drafts over to her, expecting some semblance of an “attagirl”—I was a copywriter and marketer, after all. I was looking for validation.
With her usual pull-no-punches style, she wrote back: “Dear Lord, Chelle. They make me want to set fire to my computer.”
I died a little that day. But she was right.
And then she said, “You have all this amazing talent and personality wrapped up in your writers—use it. Write the emails from the perspective of Indie Annie.”
Which, of course, was a genius idea, as Annie is an amalgam of our team and philosophy and corporate persona.
There’s a lot of talk lately about artificial intelligence and how it will impact our industry. We’re planning an entire issue to cover it, in fact. But there’s one thing that I’m confident can’t be replaced when it comes to connecting with your readers, and that’s the power of your personality coming through. I’m sure you’ll understand what I mean when you read Tammi’s contribution as a writer to this month’s issue, as well as our feature about her.
I hope you enjoy them and learn as much from her as I have.
To your success,
Chelle
