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A review by lkmreads
Newsletter Ninja: How to Become an Author Mailing List Expert by Tammi Labrecque
informative
lighthearted
reflective
fast-paced
3.5
This is one of those hard to rate books. Like, do I give it 3 stars? 4? 3.5? I don't know.
The advice in it is good- well, I don't know if it's good as in, I haven't actually tried it yet, but it all sounded very reasonable and mostly along the lines of what most advice online seems to say (not counting some advice that was contrary to what some people say, but... ).
It did go a little deeper than the average blog post, so I give it points for that. But at the same time, I feel like it didn't really go deep enough into other things.
Presumably I'm reading the book because whatever I'm doing is clearly not working, so you kind of want something a little deeper than general ideas (which were good and helpful), and I get you can't really address every possible case in the book, but some parts seemed to gloss over a bit to much on generic that it bordered on unhelpful, while others at least tossed some random examples.
It also felt a bit out of order. As in, it started speaking about the onboarding process, then after mentioning the first email it sort of skipped to things you should probably know before onboarding (like your bait/cookie/lead loss), and then we skipped to how to keep people engaged or re-engage them, and though it was, again, solid sounding advice, it took me all over the place. I also seem to recall it mentioning we would discuss forms "later", and then never discussing them? 🤷
It would have certainly benefitted from better organization, I think. Perhaps with things more explicitly in the order you would do them if you were setting up from zero.
Also, I kind of expected some small samples for onboarding, maybe not word for word, but a bit more than what was given; there were none. I mean, ok, I give them the freebie on mail x, and what do I do with the next however-many emails? Was this to have people buy the course? I don't know. Would the course actually offer the answer? I also don't know. Yes, I get it, introduce myself and books... I still don't really know how. Introverted, somewhat asocial or awkwardly social people who don't like mailing lists themselves won't know how to (Author or not), it will always feel awkward (more than to regular people), and they (we) will always need more help.
As in, I'd totally buy an "Author newsletters for socially awkward people" book.
All in all, leaning towards being a helpful book with lots of sound advice, but needed a bit more. We'll see if book 2 expands on those.
The advice in it is good- well, I don't know if it's good as in, I haven't actually tried it yet, but it all sounded very reasonable and mostly along the lines of what most advice online seems to say (not counting some advice that was contrary to what some people say, but... ).
It did go a little deeper than the average blog post, so I give it points for that. But at the same time, I feel like it didn't really go deep enough into other things.
Presumably I'm reading the book because whatever I'm doing is clearly not working, so you kind of want something a little deeper than general ideas (which were good and helpful), and I get you can't really address every possible case in the book, but some parts seemed to gloss over a bit to much on generic that it bordered on unhelpful, while others at least tossed some random examples.
It also felt a bit out of order. As in, it started speaking about the onboarding process, then after mentioning the first email it sort of skipped to things you should probably know before onboarding (like your bait/cookie/lead loss), and then we skipped to how to keep people engaged or re-engage them, and though it was, again, solid sounding advice, it took me all over the place. I also seem to recall it mentioning we would discuss forms "later", and then never discussing them? 🤷
It would have certainly benefitted from better organization, I think. Perhaps with things more explicitly in the order you would do them if you were setting up from zero.
Also, I kind of expected some small samples for onboarding, maybe not word for word, but a bit more than what was given; there were none. I mean, ok, I give them the freebie on mail x, and what do I do with the next however-many emails? Was this to have people buy the course? I don't know. Would the course actually offer the answer? I also don't know. Yes, I get it, introduce myself and books... I still don't really know how. Introverted, somewhat asocial or awkwardly social people who don't like mailing lists themselves won't know how to (Author or not), it will always feel awkward (more than to regular people), and they (we) will always need more help.
As in, I'd totally buy an "Author newsletters for socially awkward people" book.
All in all, leaning towards being a helpful book with lots of sound advice, but needed a bit more. We'll see if book 2 expands on those.