My plan for this week was to have a tremendous adventure and everything would go perfect. I was tackling:
1. Web page
2. Domain name
3. Mailing list
4. Fix existing socials
Pretty much the basics of what everywhere says you need. Over and over. You HAVE to have it. So, as with most things in life, I tackled it with much more enthusiasm than forethought.
#2 was easy. Squarespace, domain registration. Credit card. Done. Also may be unnecessary at the very, very beginning but I'll come back to this.
#1 Squarespace, credit card. Done. Unnecessary? See #2.
#4 Fixing socials was the beginning of an ongoing game of whack-a-mole. I'm very lucky in two respects. I have an uncommon name. See my profile name here. Not the username. That's from like 12 years ago. Like tattoos, some usernames are regrettable.
The other way is I'm boring and uncontroversial. My Internet-ing over the years has been about my hobbies. Magic: the Gathering, Lego, Computer games, etc. I've occasionally been an opinionated jerk but only in RL. This means all my existing social accounts are ok for my author pages. Having been a teacher at a university for 20 years helped. All this combined with a profound lack of any desire to socialize on the Internet worked out great.
All this gets us to #3 and where I should have started: Having a mailing list and a way for people to find it and me.
Thanks to looking through Amazon at books in my genre (Cozy-adjacent fantasy) and related books (which includes a shocking amount of all flavors of erotica) I found an option. I hope this is linktr.ee. [Note: I'm putting peroids after all the other times I mention this because I don't know if links are allowed in posts and reddit keeps making it an autolink] I'm still figuring it out but the free version seems to do the basic stuff you need starting out. The authors page that lead me to it is this one (virgilknightley on link tree). His seems like a decent example of what someone can do to make use of this option. [I didn't include a link cause of the link issues but you can google it easy] You can also include a link for this in your social media bios. There's stuff about QR codes, business cards, etc. but I'm not that far along and not paying at the moment. The big thing I think, if this turns out to work well, is you get a link to stick it on all your other social media everything. You can include it in your reddit profile too.
After setting that up I figured a mailing list would be simple. A combination of my irritation, late night and lack of any desire to deal with it complicated this.
The two I planned on looking at were Kit and MailerLite. Kit got picked first because it looked like the free account was ok and I gave it a shot.
When I started my ordeal I made notes. I'm omitting these for your benefit. It mostly consists of me being whiny and complaining about how irritated I am between 1am and 7am one morning.
I got all the way through the Kit creation process including making the landing page three times because I forgot to see the "Submit" button when I found out you need a pay account to be able to create automations. An automation is, as you might have guessed, an automatic process to do something, like send a welcome email when somebody subscribes to your mailing list.
After a few choice expletives, I moved on to MailerLite. I made a landing page, did the whole deal. Set up a "Welcome subscriber" automation (you get a free one with them). When I went to subscribe to my mailing list, I couldn't figure out why I wasn't getting the welcome email. After much hunting and more profanity I found it in my SPAM folder. Gmail determined that I was trying to SPAM myself.
So. Much more frustrated I looked at MailChimp. This was a quick look. They don't offer a free automation so I went back to MailerLite.
After more looking around I found out if you're sending a mass email using a free email address like Gmail you pretty much get dumped into the SPAM folder. Not what you want at all from the mailing list to allow you to keep up with the people that might want to read your stuff. It turns out you need a professional/personal email address from a non-free domain.
Getting the domain name for my writing wasn't so bad after all.
At this point I totally gave up for the night.
The next day I decided to start fresh and gave EmailOctopus a try. Setting up everything was pretty straightforward. They allow you at least one free automation. I did the deal and set up a landing page and made my "Welcome subscriber" automation. The free email thing wasn't a surprise so I went to Squarespace and subscribed to the Google Workspace email service. I think it was like $7 per month. As an aside, self-publishing, along with everything else in life lately, wants me to subscribe to a monthly plan so they can slowly bleed me of money. Not particularly relevant, just pisses me off.
Anyway. Patience is a good idea when you go to set this up. It takes time for things to propagate, so if you want your @ yourdomain email, it won't be instant. Figure like 48 hours-ish max.
This is the point I'm at with all the inter-webbing. I got a mailing list that works. A welcome email that will be dumped into SPAM or not working until I get all the DNS stuff un-screwed, and a web page that is currently set to "private" because it took me about 30 seconds to remember how much I hated building web pages with templates.
I guess the best summary I can give for what to do when you very, very first start (where I am still) seems like, pick a mailing list provider. I'm liking EmailOctopus the most. I emailed some questions and they seemed nice. If not them then MailerLite because they both let you set up a "Welcome Subscriber" email with the free plan.
That's it. You can stop there for now.
For more try the linktr.ee. thing. It gives a free one stop landing page for all your other socials links.
Also a completely reasonable place to stop. A word of warning about linktr.ee. When you sign-up you get their pro pay deal free for some amount of time. If you make your page with them and it expires, double check your page. If you accidentally used pay features, when the trial time expires it'll make your page looked all jacked up. I did that.
Next would be the domain name so you can get a professional email address. You can register a domain name with Squarespace without getting web hosting. I had a friend recommend Wix as an alternate to Squarespace but I was lazy and went with easy. There's always some Squarespace promo code to save some money. Not a bunch, but any helps. Either search online or watch a few youTube videos. Somebody will pimp their affiliate link in no time.
So. Progress. Not as much as I'd hoped but I'm working on other to do list items as well.
Next session we will enter into the realm of the KDP author website.
If you have any questions I'll do my best to try and help. If you have suggestions, please, for the love of God, leave them in the comments below. 🙂
Source: r/selfpublish · by /u/SexMonkey7