How to Grow Your Author Email List (and Why It Matters More Than Ever)

Ricci Wolman: [00:00:00] But the most important thing that we’ve learned is that the prize needs to be something that is specifically appealing to readers of your genre. So if you set up a giveaway where you say, you can win these five books and a $500 Amazon gift card, you will get a lot of subscribers, but the quality is gonna be really low.

Ferol Vernon: Welcome to the written Word Podcast. Podcast. For authors who want to build successful writing careers, I’m Ferol Vernon and here with Ricci Wolman. This is the written word, media Pod. Hello and welcome to the Written Word Media Podcast. I am Ferol, one of the co-founders Written Word Media. With me always is Ricci, the other co-founder of Written Word Media.

Today we are talking about how to grow your email list, how to get things set up, and how to get those readers on your list. Ricci, how you doing this morning? 

Ricci Wolman: I am doing great. Good to see you Ferol. Beautiful day here in North Carolina. 

Ferol Vernon: It is. It is. We are lucky. [00:01:00] Spring is on our side. Okay, well let’s jump right into it.

Today we’re talking about email and, and for those of you that listened to the last pod, we talked about kind of getting set up what is an ESP, how to do email marketing. Today we wanted to talk a little bit more about how to actually get those email subscribers, those potential readers onto your list.

And you know, today we’re gonna go over both tactics, how to set some of this stuff up, and strategies and how to think about this. And I think this is something that every author. Needs to have is an email list. They need to know how to manage it. So I’m excited to talk about this because I think this is one of the most important and often overlooked things that authors are, are dealing with today.

Ricci Wolman: That sounds great, and I agree. You know, email marketing is basically the foundation on which written word media is built. Um, it’s how we really help authors and it’s a marketing technique and technology that continues to give the best ROI to authors. And so I, I said this in the last part. I, I really encourage authors to [00:02:00] start setting up their author list early.

Um, the earlier you start, the quicker you actually have this asset that you can start reaping and getting rewards from. 

Ferol Vernon: Great. So let’s, let’s start there. So we talked last time about getting an ESP. If you haven’t listened, go check out that pod. But once I’ve got sort of that set up, what’s the first thing I need to do to start getting emails onto my list?

Ricci Wolman: So that’s a great question, and it’s one of those situations where going from zero to one is a lot harder than building from one to two and two to 10 and 10 to 20. So the good news is that for an email list, you can really start by adding friendlies onto the list. Family, friends, existing readers who maybe have given you their email address or have emailed you in the past, you can go ahead and send that link to those people.

Or if they really are friends and family, you could just upload them to your list or enter them yourselves. This is very different advice we give [00:03:00] when authors ask if it’s okay to send all their family and friends to Amazon. Sending, sending readers who don’t read your genre to Amazon can be super confusing.

But actually just starting to build your list, um, and putting some of those friendlies on your email list is totally fine because you’re not training an algorithm on anything. Nobody’s gonna get confused. And it really helps when you’re starting to send on a regular basis to know that somebody’s out there listening.

So you can absolutely start by putting your friendlies on that list. So that would be step one. 

Ferol Vernon: So, okay, so step one, I’ve got friends, family, if I have beta readers, anybody I’ve ever interacted with, signed up at any kind of event, all that kind of stuff. So I put those emails on my list. Okay. Then what’s next?

Because that’s sort of a, let’s say I’ve got, you know, 10 to 20 people on my list. I’m starting from zero as an author. I put those, what’s called 15 people on there. What do I do next to try to make sure that, yeah. So the next step, this whole thing is working is you wanna make 

Ricci Wolman: sure that. Your subscribe list is everywhere on your [00:04:00] existing assets that you have.

So if you have a website, you’ve got your subscribe page. If you have a social media presence, you wanna make sure that somewhere in your about it says, Hey, sign up for my list. Um, on Facebook, you can actually, if you’ve got a Facebook page specifically, go up to the top right corner and change that button to say, subscribe to my list.

And most importantly, you wanna put a call out to subscribe at the back of all of your eBooks. This is really, really important because every time you market your ebook, some percentage of authors who go through and finish it will get to that last page. And there you can just say, Hey, thanks so much for reading.

If you love this book, it would be great. If you wanna sign up for my email list, you can sign up here and you can actually put the link right there. And so over time, people who are reading your book are gonna sign up. People who come to your social profile are gonna sign up. So these are, you know, passive ways that people will join your list.

Ferol Vernon: Let’s just pause there for a minute. So a lot of times when I’m talking to authors, I talk about the back matter. So the back matter is just that [00:05:00] handful of pages at the end of your book, after the story ends, right? A lot. Sometimes there’s a thank you where the author sort of gives some shout outs to people to help them make the book, and then that’s a great place to ask.

Your readers to get on your list. And, and the reason is because somebody who’s just finished your entire story, like that person’s a fan, so they didn’t bail halfway through, they read the whole story to the end, and then at that point, right, that they’ve gotten that nice payoff ending, you say, Hey, do you want more like this?

Join my mailing list. And one of the things that, that when I talk to authors that they have a lot of concern about is like, does anybody actually do that? You know, does anybody tap on that little link? Especially if you’re reading on a Kindle? And the answer is, yes. We’ve seen this time and time again.

Readers will click on that link, even if it’s on a like ein Kindle, and they’ll load that crummy little web browser that’s in the Kindle and they actually sign up. And like we’ve seen authors get hundreds of emails through this method. And the other thing that’s really important to remember is that a lot of people are reading on an [00:06:00] iPad or a phone, and once they finish and they click, that experience is actually very, very seamless.

And so when everybody says like, oh, is that really important? Like it really is. Readers really do click on that. If you have a handful of books and you haven’t put a link to your signup page in your back matter, I would strongly encourage you to edit those books, add that call to action at the end of the books and rerelease them.

It’s a really powerful technique. 

Ricci Wolman: The other thing is it actually increases the return on any paid marketing that you’re doing. So say you’re buying an email promo and you run that promo, that advertising spend is now not only getting you book sales or page reads, but it’s also going towards building your list.

So it’s just a, it’s kind of a win-win across the board. It’s a no-brainer. Um, and it’s so easy to update, you know, your, your ebook content. So as you said, definitely the number one tactic to go ahead and do that. 

Ferol Vernon: So now let’s talk about this subscribe page for a minute, because we talked about putting a link to that page in the back of your books, right?

Putting a link to that page on your Twitter profile, your Facebook [00:07:00] profile, like all the places where you are as an author, but like what should that page look like? What should be on it? What are techniques to make a good one? So let’s talk about that a little bit. 

Ricci Wolman: Yeah, so at its most basic form, the subscribe page can literally just be a couple lines that say, Hey, please sign up to hear about my upcoming books and my journey as an author.

And it can just literally be like an email box sign up. And if that’s all that you can do, that is totally fine. I do think sometimes authors, and this is actually anybody in marketing can get stuck where a perfect becomes the enemy of good. Where you’re like, oh, the page needs to be fancier. I wanna do this, that, and the other, and then the page never goes up.

So I think it’s fine to just start simple with just a simple, please sign up for my email list. Here you go. The technique that’s most used in order to increase your conversion rate or get more people to sign up when they hit that page is to offer something. In exchange to the reader, and this is called a lead magnet, and what this is, is you offer maybe a [00:08:00] free ebook or a free novella to the.

Reader who is signing up. And then in your welcome email when you say, Hey, welcome. You then say, Hey, here’s the link to the free novella that I promised. And so the subscribe page in that scenario would just be like, Hey, I’d love it if you signed up for my email list. You’ll get a free novella or free copy of title of my book.

Please sign up here. And there you go. And there are, you know, book Funnel, um, is a technology that will help you manage the lead magnet. So it’s really easy to download. You literally, you know, can look at what their solution is, but that does tend to increase the conversion rate and the number of readers who will sign up if they feel like they’re getting something free in exchange.

Ferol Vernon: Yeah, I think that’s great. Uh, the other thing that I’ve heard authors do is setting up a lead magnet. Sometimes like when you Google Lead Magnet, you get like all this crazy stuff. It’s like can be totally overwhelming and Book funnel has a great product and you know, if you wanna go check it out, that’s great.

But there’s also simpler ways to do this. So if, [00:09:00] you know, we talked a little bit last week about your welcome email. That’s the email that sort of says like, Hey, thanks for signing up my list. So if you imagine you’re a reader, you finish the book, you tap sign up for the email list, you enter your email, and you hit go, and then you get a welcome email.

And something I’ve heard of authors doing for their lead magnet is literally just writing in the body of that email. So instead of creating a lead magnet as a published entity or thinking you have to do it, it’s like, Hey, sign up for my email and get like a mini chapter from this character’s point of view.

And then you just literally write, you know, a thousand words, 2000 words from a, a certain character’s perspective in the body of the email. And then you don’t have to sign up for any crazy technology and you quote, have a lead magnet because. The reader is getting some content in their inbox after they sign up.

So I think there’s all these different levels of proficiency, right? You can at the easiest. It’s just like, Hey, sign up for my list, and then that’s it. And at the maximum it’s like, Hey, get a free book by signing up for my list, which as you said, will [00:10:00] increase your conversion rate. And there’s all these things in the middle.

And I think the thing that. That we would encourage authors to do the most. It’s just to get started, right? Don’t worry about getting, like doing the advanced like stuff. Start small and slowly improve it as you, as you go on. 

Ricci Wolman: Yeah. Another kind of in the middle technique is to have a giveaway that you run on a monthly basis or an every three month basis, because the thing with a giveaway is you only need to give away one price.

So you can say, Hey, sign up for my email list and be entered to win a signed copy of my book. Right. And then people sign up, and then at the end of the month you pick a winner, and then that winner, you mail out a signed copy of your book. It’s a little bit of logistical work, but you don’t have to deal with creating an electronic lead magnet.

And then it creates an additional bond with your reader because now they’ve actually got a physical signed copy of your book. So that’s gonna be, you know, a fan for life. So that’s a really great technique I’ve seen as well. 

Ferol Vernon: Yeah, so, so let’s get into that now, because the passive stuff that we talked about is like, [00:11:00] get your signup page, link it from your socials, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, whatever.

Link it from your back matter of your book. Right? So now that stuff’s all set up as people are sort of encountering me online. They’re get, they’re getting added at some kind of rate to my email list. But we talked a little bit about giveaways and you know, I think what authors also wanna know is like, okay, now I’m set up, but how do I like.

Get more emails, right? How do I actually poke the bear? Do something like what can I do? What activities can I take to drive up the number of subscribers on my list? And, and giveaways is obviously one of those things, Ricci, 

Ricci Wolman: yeah, and I’ll talk about giveaways in a second, but I do wanna set expectations here, which is, you know, with the passive methods that we’ve talked about, you’re not gonna see 10 people signing up for your list every day.

It’s gonna be a really slow drip, right? It might be. One a day, it might be one a week. It is gonna be slow. And it’s, it’s a little bit exponential. Like the bigger your list gets, the quicker it’ll grow. But in the beginning it is gonna be a really slow [00:12:00] single digits. You’re adding readers and so. Sometimes that can feel discouraging for authors, but don’t be discouraged because if you’re just seeing a drip drip, even if it’s one a week or one every two weeks, it means that your, your engine is set up right.

And then as you start to do more active marketing, that engine is gonna, you know, really start humming for you. It doesn’t mean you’re doing anything wrong if when you get all your passive stuff set up, it’s slower than maybe you had imagined it might be. Yeah. So then moving on to giveaways. So a giveaway is a lead magnet we just talked about.

That’s a, you know, a really easy thing to do to entice readers to sign up. The other thing that you can do is join a giveaway with other authors. This is a very popular technique in the community and it works really well. And there are a bunch of providers, including acid written word media, who will do this for you.

And so how it works is. You pay to join a giveaway with usually 15 or 20 other [00:13:00] authors, and then the prize pack for the reader is 15 or 20 of those free books plus a Kindle. And then either the group as a whole puts in money and does paid marketing, or if you’re using a service like ours, we take care of all of that.

And what happens is over this period of time, 30 or 60 days, ads are being run to that giveaway. The prize is really big. It’s really enticing to the reader, and you tend to add significant number of readers. When the readers enter the giveaway, they get to opt into your email list specifically. So that is, and it’s an effective way to build your list and.

What we recommend is as those uh, subscribers are coming in, you’re adding them to the list every week and then messaging them versus waiting till the end of the giveaway. So to be a little bit more specific with our subscriber search giveaways, how it would work is you pay $75. You say, this is the book I’m willing to give away.

We then pair you up [00:14:00] with a group of other authors, and then over a 60 day period, we’re running a ton of ads to that page. And on average, you’re gonna see anywhere from 250 to 600 subscribers being added to your list over that 60 day period. Now the number varies greatly, and that is really dependent on genre.

So what we find is smaller genres maybe sometimes tend to get fewer subscribers. And it’s not always smaller and larger. It’s, it’s kind of, it’s kind of interesting. We’re doing the same kind of marketing, but sometimes you, you know, you just kind of hit a vein. So I think we recently ran like a fantasy romance giveaway that was super popular and a got on average, each author got 600 subscribers.

And so those authors and then coming into their portal at Written Word Media and they’re taking those new subscribers every week, adding them to their ESP, that subscriber gets the welcome email and now you’re starting to really, you know, build your list more rapidly. 

Ferol Vernon: Yeah, and I [00:15:00] think, you know, like Ricci mentioned.

You know, we’re one of providers, so there’s, there’s other options out there to run giveaways. You can self-organize with other authors, which is a little bit more work, uh, but a little less money. So if, you know, you can trade your time or your money, however, whatever’s important to you. But I do think that like doing these giveaways, like.

Think about who’s clicking on these ads, right? And who’s joining these ads. These are people who, when they see that there’s free books being given away, like they’re excited by that, right? And they’re joining and they enjoy, like looking at all the different books and picking the authors that they want, whose list they wanna join.

So like, these are really good subscribers. It’s a good group of people. Now, not all of them will become fans for life. But some of them will. And I think, like we talked about earlier, the bigger your list gets, the more your flywheel starts turning. And now all of a sudden, if you started with maybe just those 15, 20 people we started talking about at the beginning of the pod that are like your friends and family.

Now you’ve got, you know, maybe 200, maybe 300 people you got from a giveaway you ran with us. And you [00:16:00] know, maybe some portion of those people stays with you for a long time. It’s a really good way to get out of the gate, especially if you don’t have a big author community, which you know. Being an author can be a lonely, a lonely endeavor sometimes.

And some authors have a really vibrant community, which is amazing and helpful. Uh, other authors are just getting started. They maybe haven’t met other authors that they can do this stuff with and and I think that’s really where written word media can be super, super helpful for those kind of authors.

Ricci Wolman: Absolutely. And if you decide to self organize, you know, you could do a smaller group, you could have four or five authors who get together and you’re giving away, you know, five books in a, in a Kindle. You just need somebody in the group who can run the ads and send traffic. The trick here is you gotta send traffic to the giveaway page.

You have to set up the giveaway page, which is another, you know, web asset that you will need. But the most important thing that we’ve learned is that the prize needs to be something that is specifically appealing. To readers of your genre. So if you set up a giveaway where you say you can win these five books and a $500 Amazon gift [00:17:00] card.

You will get a lot of subscribers, but the quality is gonna be really low because who doesn’t want a $500 Amazon gift card? Right? So anyone who sees that ad is gonna be like, oh, I’m going to throw my hat in the ring. I’d love $500 on Amazon, but they’re not really qualified. Versus if you do a Kindle E-reader, which is what we do with our giveaways, the only people who really want a Kindle E-reader are people who.

Like to read, right? And are going to use the Kindle to read the resale values, you know, low enough that it’s not really worth people’s time to try and win it and then resell it. So I’d just say be thoughtful about what you give away. Could be a Kindle, it could be, you know, sign copies of your books. If it is swag.

Make sure the swag has got something to do with the genre. Or being a book reader or you know, the characters in, in your. Novel or your world, but I would recommend against some kind of generic prize, like an iPad or a $500 Amazon gift card that doesn’t really qualify [00:18:00] somebody as a reader per se. 

Ferol Vernon: Yeah.

You wanna do something that the readers in your life would like, right? Not something that everybody in your life would, would like. So that’s the giveaways. And you can, you can go to written media.com. You can, you can figure out our subscriber search giveaways, which is super easy. You can get it done in a few clicks or you can find somebody else that does it to help you.

But if, if an author is looking for something above and beyond or something, just a different technique besides giveaways, what can they do to start driving traffic or start driving subscribers that’s not participating in one of these sort of sweepstakes based or giveaway based promotions. 

Ricci Wolman: I’m gonna give you two.

I’m gonna give you one electronic and one IRL as we like to say. So the, um, just running ads to your subscribe page or to your lead magnet. That’s another really effective way to grow your list. So if you are proficient in running Facebook or Instagram ads or TikTok ads, you could go ahead and just spend a little bit of money, five or $10 every [00:19:00] day where you’re telling.

Where you’re, you’re saying, Hey, sign up for my list, get my free lead magnet. That’s definitely gonna accelerate how quickly you will build your list. The, uh, non-digital tactic is in-person events. So if you’re going to a book signing at your indie bookstore, if you’re going to. Any kind of, you know, book fair where their readers are gonna be there, I highly recommend that you have a clipboard, probably two or three clipboards with a sheet of paper that says, you know, name, email address.

Again, you can offer a prize like sign up for my email address and someone will get a signed book at the end of the event. I’m, and have people actually sign up with pen and paper. And then at the end of that event, when you go home, you can take all those names and email addresses and you can add them to your list.

And so again, it just makes those expeditions. Or outings that you’re doing a little bit more worthwhile. ’cause if you come away with 20, 50, a hundred new people’s emails who have also met you in person, those are also gonna be really highly qualified subscribers to your [00:20:00] list. 

Ferol Vernon: Yeah, and and a fun tidbit here that I’ll share with the audiences.

You know, some people see like QR codes or like a fancy iPad, like at a booth at uh, you know, a conference or a signing or something like that. Like you don’t have to do that. And actually. You shouldn’t do that. Like we found the conversion rate on pencil and paper signups or pen and paper signups is actually higher.

So a greater portion of people that are visiting you will actually write their email address down, like with their hand and a pencil than will sit there and tap through something digitally, which is a little crazy to think about. But you know, we’ve seen that work time and time again. So don’t get stuck by thinking you have to have some sort of really cool modern tech heavy signup thing.

Like just go to a Google Doc. Type in the name of your, you know, thing, put a few lines in there and hit print, and then keep that with you to your, to your signing. And we found that to be really, really effective. 

Ricci Wolman: And again, if you’re giving away any kind of like fund marketing collateral, say you’ve got bookmarks printed, make sure that your website is on the bookmark [00:21:00] at the very least.

And a call to action to sign up would be ideal. So you can be like, Hey, you can find more about me at, you know, www.author.com. And don’t forget to sign up for my email. And you can either have a popup right on the the website or just don’t forget to sign up for my email at ortho.com/subscribe. 

Ferol Vernon: Got it.

Okay. So we’ve got the IRL thing down, like bring your clipboard, bring a piece of paper, get those, and then when you get back to your desk, whenever that is, you import those emails, you type them into a CSV and import it, or you enter them manually in whatever technology you’re using. What about ads? Let’s kind of circle back to that because that, that’s something you mentioned.

You said like if somebody has the proficiency, they can run ads, but what if they don’t have proficiency? Because a lot of authors that we talk to are either just getting started, they, they would prefer to write rather than advertise. So what are, what are some options there for those authors? 

Ricci Wolman: Yeah, so probably two options here.

So one option would be if you do have a social platform and you’re comfortable posting, [00:22:00] what you can start by doing is just posting an organic post. And I would recommend this anyway, like once a month. If you’re posting regularly, at least once a month. Once a month, I would do a dedicated post about signing up for your list, right?

Whether you have a lead magnet or not, you need to say, Hey, don’t forget to sign up for my list. So you get. New and exclusive news, you know, whatever it might be. Once you’ve done an organic post, if one of those organic posts seems to get like pretty good traction, you could always boost them if you’re on Instagram or Facebook.

If you don’t know you know how to boost, or even that is a little daunting and you don’t wanna have to manage your ad spend. Then again, there are services out there. We have one that will run ads for you specifically to your signup pages. So for our reader, reach ads. You can come in, you can say, Hey, I wanna spend, you know, 150 bucks and I want you to direct really qualified traffic to my signup page.

And then that spend would go directly to sending people to the signup page. And then you see those subscribers being added to your list. 

Ferol Vernon: [00:23:00] Yeah, so I think that’s a really, you know, our reader reach product will help you with this, essentially, like you think about your signup page sitting out there on your website, and then how do I get traffic to that page, right?

And one way is to buy ads and you can buy them yourself or you can pay somebody like us to do it for you. And I think, you know, again, this is a time money trade off. So whenever we talk to authors about this, it’s like, hey, there are authors out there who’ve taken courses who’ve figured out how to do the ads themselves and they’re making a lot of money and that’s great, but there’s also a lot of authors out there.

That would prefer to spend their time doing something a little different, like they prefer the writing or whatever. And we have a really easy option to help them run ads to that signup page. We can also run ads to their Amazon page to try to drive sales, but here we’re talking about how to drive signups.

And so I just wanna make sure everybody understands that’s like a, a, there are easy ways to do this if you have a little bit of budget and, uh, a little bit of desire to, to get this done. 

Ricci Wolman: Yeah, and I think my recommendation would be in the beginning when you’re trying to get your list to just like a certain level of [00:24:00] volume, it might be worth investing a few hundred dollars just to get there really quickly.

Because the other thing that happens is once your list gets big enough, not only is it actually generating revenue for for you, but once you get to a certain size, you can start doing newsletter swaps with other authors. Now. You know what a newsletter swap is, is that you mention an author’s books or signup page in your newsletter when it goes out, and then they mention you and no money, trades, hands, but you’re basically trying to, you know, port over subscribers.

From their list to yours and vice versa. The trick with this is, is that if you have no subscribers, you don’t have anything to offer in exchange. So you can’t really do a newsletter swap. But once you get your list to, you know, maybe 500 or a thousand subscribers, there are other authors out there who will have lists in a similar size who be willing to do some of these swaps for you, and that it’s an active way.

Um, it’s an active, unpaid way of trying to grow your list. 

Ferol Vernon: Alright, so we’ve [00:25:00] talked a little bit about our, our newsletter and like how to get subscribers on there. But let’s talk about kind of the end result, the goal, what’s good, right? If, if an author gets started on this, they follow some of our advice.

What’s a list size where they can say like, Hey, I, I’ve had a little success, I’ve had some traction. Or like, what should authors be looking at to say, get some feedback about whether or not this is going well for me? 

Ricci Wolman: Yeah. So in general, bigger lists are better, but the metric I would look at, look at, instead of looking at the actual size per se, is what your clicks every week.

You want your clicks on your email to be going up. So if your email list is growing, but your clicks are staying stagnant or they’re going down, it means that the subscribers you have aren’t really engaging and. So having a bigger list is not necessarily helpful in terms of hard numbers. We asked this question in our annual author survey last fall, and I’m gonna look at that right now.

So what we found is that there was a very strong correlation between earnings and average email list size. The author is, I’m gonna start at the top [00:26:00] end. The authors that are, we’re bringing in more than $20,000 per month. On average had an email the size of 25,000. So at the very top end, 25,000, that’s a really great asset that’s gonna really be helping you to generate a lot of revenue.

And 25,000 might sound like a really big number, but it really is doable over time. If you follow these different techniques. You don’t have to get there tomorrow. But if you start today and you do some things we talked about, could you be at 25,000 in three, four years? I definitely on the lower end, or like let’s say in the middle authors who are generating, you know, five to $10,000 a month, their email list size is just under 10,000.

So significantly smaller, but they’re still, you know, making a really decent living off of their, their books. And then I would say kind of on, on the lower end, 5,000 email subscribers is what you really [00:27:00] wanna get at to actually. Feel like you’re gonna be generating a really nice return and a good recurring revenue every month.

So I would say your first, first goal, 5,000, then 10,000. Then 25,000. But like anything else when you’re trying to, you know, hit a goal, I would break it on down into smaller chunks. So just start off by saying, Hey, I have zero today. By the end of the month I want 30 and 15 of those can be family and friends, and then 15 can be through something else, and then the next month say.

Okay, can I double that number? Or by the end of the year, can I get to 500? So again, this is something that really compounds on itself. So instead of being like, I need to be at 5,000 tomorrow, break it down into small goals. And I would say if you can get, you know, a thousand subscribers in your first. Six months to a year.

That’s a really great goal and would be really something to feel good about if, if you can get there. 

Ferol Vernon: Yeah, I think breaking it down to smaller goals is, is such great advice because authors can get so overwhelmed. They look at some of these authors that are really successful and like, oh my gosh, how do I get [00:28:00] there?

That seems impossible, but like, like we talked about, if you’re running a giveaway with us, you get a few hundred there, right? You run some ads, you get a few hundred there and then like you’re almost all the way to that thousand for your year. Right. And you know, we talk a lot about goals on this podcast and we would talk to authors, you know, setting your goals for the year or for the quarter or something like, that’s really important.

And so I think, you know, set a number that’s, uh, ambitious for doable. Write it down and then try to hit that number. Don’t worry about trying to get to that 25,000 number or even that 10,000 number quickly, because that’s very, very difficult. It’s a slow burn and all you’re trying to do is add a little fuel to that fire to get it goat a little faster.

Ricci Wolman: Yeah. And to that point, the other very strong correlation is the authors who are making over $20,000 a month have also been doing this the longest. So the reason that their number is so high is because they’ve been building their lists for potentially 10, 12 years. Right. So just like compound interest.

The earlier you start, the sooner that you’ll get there. So it’s most important to start and in five, [00:29:00] 10 years you’ll look back and be like, Hey, I remember when I had 15 people on my list, but now I do have 25,000 people on my list. So you can absolutely do it, but like I said, like Ferol says, break it down into, you know, small, manageable goals so you can actually celebrate some wins along the way.

Ferol Vernon: Alright, so I think that’s a great, great place for us to wrap. Keep trying these techniques. You can do it. Set the goals, get it done. Please share in the comments with us on the pod, or reach out to us at info at Reward Media, let us know how your list building is going. And that’s it for us this week.

Ricci Wolman: Great. Have a great day.