Hey,

When I look at the year ahead, I spend way more time thinking about challenges and opportunities in the tech sector, rather than anything the "publishing industry" might be doing.

Is this the year that Twitter dies? Will Threads actually take off after what might be described as a false dawn? What changes will Facebook surprise us with?

I don’t know the answer to any of these questions, quite frankly.

I have opinions – if you’re curious my guess is… maybe, maybe not, and lots, respectively – but opinions are worth little when planning for your author business.

What you need is insurance. A Get Out Of Jail Free card. An ace in the hole.

Social media sites, ebook retailers, and ad platforms regularly make changes to their algorithms which can hugely impact authors’ visibility, their books’ discoverability, or plain old profitability.

Retailers can suddenly decide indies are flavor of the month but then the following quarter decide that we are bothersome pablum. Ad platforms can reel us in with author-friendy policies, but turn the screw once they know we have become reliant.

And then each year brings brand new challenges which has everyone scratching their heads – for example, this year Google has decided to kill cookies, and no one in tech or advertising knows how that’s going to work, or how much it could change the entire internet as we know it.

But you don’t need a better crystal ball. You can have insurance against any possible outcome here.

Money is definitely one bulwark which can protect you, but if your primary income stream gets poleaxed by some algorithm change, suddenly all that money buys you is a little extra time to find a lifeboat.

There is a better way to protect yourself against… whatever the hell happens in 2024.

Build Your Own Castle

Having a readership is great – and helps a lot when the storms come. Having money is great too, for obvious reasons.

But it definitely behooves you to think strategically about how you can convert more of that readership into an actual platform – and especially emails on your mailing list.

This goes for writers starting out, or bestselling authors.

I try to take every moment of potential fretting about an Amazon change or a new Facebook rule, and turn it into a plan to grow my list and deepen engagement with existing subscribers.

Because you never know when change is going to get all up in your business.

Imagine BookBub stops accepting your books for Featured Deals. Yeah, that would suck… and I speak from experience.

You know what’s better? Building your own damn BookBub.

When Facebook throttles organic reach for your Page again, or does the same to that Group you poured so much time into, it’s a huge pain. Especially when you invested time and money crafting specific content tailored for that platform, or invested money in ads to kickstart engagement on your page, or to generate follows. (Ask me how I know…).

But you know what’s better? Having the email address of those followers so you can contact them wherever you like – at virtually no cost.

You may have experienced the frustration of Amazon one day deciding not to send out New Release Alerts to your followers anymore. And perhaps the even greater frustration of trying to contact them about it (why are they like this?). I have felt that pain too, believe me.

But you know what’s better? Knowing I can guarantee a new release email going to all my readers at the day and time which suits me best, providing a reliable foundation for a chart-busting launch.

Are your ads getting more and more expensive? Sucks to be you… and me. My bank balance knows exactly what you are talking about.

But I also know that the best marketing dollars I spend – by far, and it’s not even close, not even in the same universe – are any I spend on email marketing.

So my primary focus this year – as with last – will be on growing my list (and continuing to foster engagement with existing subscribers).

There are some challenges with doing that in 2024, and I am not blind to those.

Some of those challenges are imminent – and we will be talking specifics in a newsletter coming your way very soon – but all are manageable.

Especially if you already embrace best practices in email marketing.

In fact, for those of you who already take that approach, I think your competitive advantage with email marketing could grow considerably this year.

AI Carumba!

I didn’t mention AI above, which is quite the glaring omission.

That’s partly because I find the topic – and especially the discussion around it – quite tiresome, if I’m going to be honest.

It has the potential to be hugely disruptive – in good ways and bad, like any major change. I don’t like some of the fearmongering. I also don’t like some of the dismissive positions on authors’ rights – the primary thing we should be defending.

For me, the legal questions and rights issues remain very much open ones; we’ll see how they play out.

One thing I do know is that the human touch will become more important than ever, which can only increase the importance of email marketing – especially when done the right way.

I’ve lots of exciting things planned for 2024 – I’m planning to triple the size of my lists this year, for example. An ambitious target, for sure, but one which I think is doable.

Feel free to follow along as I share what I’m doing. We’ll get into specifics on how to tackle all these challenges (and opportunities!) next time.

Dave

P.S. Writing music this week is M*rrisey with First of the Gang to Die.