When I started blogging two years ago, I was terrified of asking people to subscribe to my blog. I thought no one would want to read it, especially when many well-written blogs were available to choose from.

A year and a half later, when I started the newsletter A Whimsical Writer, with Substack, the same phobia gripped me. So many experienced writers have newsletters in Substack; why would anyone want to subscribe to mine?

I couldn’t have been wrong.

People subscribe to your newsletter because they like you, your story, your unique style of writing and want to stay in touch with you. They like the solution you are proposing to their problems.

To build an online business, the most intimidating thing to do, is to build an email list. How to find those people who should be on your email list? There are so many limited beliefs attached to this inhibition. 

Let’s have a look at a few of them.

I need thousands of subscribers on my mailing list.

When we look at the size of established writers and online business owners, we feel threatened and inadequate. 

I will never be able to get thousands of followers, we think, and we curl up and don’t even try.

Then came Kevin Kelly’s 1000 true fans concept, and people started feeling encouraged. 

But the truth is you don’t need even 1000 people to get started. You just need one. 

Yes, you heard me right. You need only one person to subscribe to your newsletter to get you started. 

That one person soon becomes ten, and then twenty, then fifty.

I started my mailing list with just ten people. Five of them were my family members and four my writing group buddies, and one my gym acquaintance. Now and then, he (my gym acquaintance) would leave encouraging comments on my articles, and that was enough to keep me going.

In fact, in the early days, when you are learning your craft, it is better to have only a handful of subscribers. That way, you are not paralyzed with fear whether your work is good enough to publish, which incidentally is the second limiting belief.

My work is not good enough to share.

Each writer, each content creator, and each creative person is gripped with this fear at some stage in their creative lives. Some, like me, are permanently plagued with it. 

At some stage, you have to learn that your work will never be good enough. It will be the best at that point-in-time. You will continue to get better, and that is the whole purpose of being creative. You are constantly learning and improving. That shouldn’t stop you from sharing what you are producing at that point in time. 

Think of your work as a gift to your subscribers when you create something with the intention to gift it to someone you do your best and without the fear of being judged on the quality of it. 

All this process to start a mailing list is too hard.

For every new starter establishing an online business is too hard. There is a lot of advice available, but rather than making it easier to follow, it makes it overwhelmingly hard.

Most people start an online business as a side hustle. They have too much to do. When they can’t fit everything, they have to let go of some things. Most of the time, it is building a mailing list. 

Why? Because it has got many ducks to align.

I stood found building a mailing list too complicated. 

Until I sat down and simplified it. 

Here is my three-step process to build a mailing list.

Step 1: Research

The first thing to determine is who your audience is. 

Not everybody is your audience. 

You will be wasting your time if you think you are writing for everybody. You are writing only for a small set of people. 

In my case, they are the new writers who are learning the art and craft of writing and trying to make a living from their writing. 

Once you figure out who your people are, find out what problems they are facing that you can help them solve. 

I was a new starter too, so I knew some of the problems new writers face. But what really helped me was actually talking to a few of my followers and finding out first-hand what problems they were facing that I could help solve. 

Step 2: Create a solution

Then pick just one of the problems, and think about what you can create to help solve that problem.

It could be a cheat sheet, a checklist, an ebook, a workbook, a newsletter. Anything that you can give your audience to have a quick and valuable win 

Whatever you might decide to create, keep it simple. 

It shouldn’t take you days or weeks to create. You can use some of your previous articles and create something useful out of that. 

Step 3: Share your solution with your people wherever they hang out.

This is the most important step, which many people don’t reach because they get overwhelmed either at step 2 or have no idea where their people hang out.

It took me a while to figure out that many new writers hang out at Medium. They also hang out on social media such as Facebook and LinkedIn. Yours might hang out at Instagram (many artists do) or Twitter, or Quora or Reddit. 

Keep in mind that they will not be able to come to you to subscribe to your mailing list because they don’t even know you exist. You will have to go to them and offer them your solution for free in exchange for their mailing address.

And they will happily do so if your solution truly promises to address their problem. 

Tom Kugler’s tagline promises to solve the problem of infrequent writers on Medium. 

Tom Kugler’s Get my free 5-day Medium writing course right here. It’ll teach you how to write five posts per week and become a top writer on Medium.

My own tagline I hope attracts the new but hesitant writers.

Want to build a career in writing but don’t know how? Subscribe to my newsletter, A Whimsical Writer, and take tiny steps each week to get started.

Summary

Three myths associated with building a mailing list are:

• I need thousands of subscribers on my mailing list to succeed.
• My work is not good enough to publish.
• All this process to start a mailing list is too hard.

The three simple steps to start a mailing list are:

1. Find out who your people are and what problem they are facing.
2. Solve one of those problems and create a freebie.
3. Share your solution with your people wherever they hang out.

Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash

Social Media is a double-edged sword. On one side, it provides community and friends who might never have met in real life, people who “get you” even if they live on the other side of the world.

On the other side, it can be a toxic environment and a huge time-sucking black hole engulfing hours and hours from our day.

Love it or hate it, social media is a powerful tool to build your brand and organically grow your business.

Yesterday I wrote an article Should Social Media Be A Part of Your Authorpreneur Strategy. which evoked an interesting question from Dr. Preeti Singh. She asked, “Thank you for writing this wonderful post on social media and how it is useful to use for business. So you suggest that we should be socially active always.”

Since the response is not just a one-liner, I decided to write a post about it.

When telephones started going mainstream in the 1950s, some people wouldn’t use them. There were all kinds of stories associated with them, from ghosts to health hazards.

Then came TVs in the sixties, and people wouldn’t have them in their homes because they might be harmful to the eyes. They were called the ‘idiot box.’ My own father refused to buy one because he said it would interfere with my studies. My brother and I would go to neighbors’ houses to watch whenever they were showing good movies or serials like Star Trek or Six Million Dollar Man. We bought our TV only after I passed our matriculation exams in flying colors.

In the late eighties, microwaves came, and as a pregnant mother, I was advised to avoid them because waves generated by them could be harmful to the unborn baby.

In the nineties, when everyone was into mobile phones, the big scare was that too much use would cause brain cancer. Then they were associate with traffic accidents, sleep loss and child predators.

Yet all these technologies are here and have blended with our lives.

Social Media is going through the same early push-back phase. But one thing is for sure — it is here to stay.

We need to learn how to use it well and how not to let it take over our lives.

How should you use social media well?

Like a ballerina, I would say.

Walk lightly but leave your mark.

A ballerina performs on a vast but mostly bare stage, with a simple costume, balances herself on the tips of her toes as if walking on air, and yet she makes an everlasting mark on the hearts of her viewers.

This is how I want you to be on social media.

How can you do that?

Let’s have a look.

Limit the time to be on social media

If you are thinking of using ‘growing your brand’ as an excuse to be on social media all the time reading and responding to all the rubbish people put out there, you are missing the point.

Savvy businesspeople are not the consumers on social media; they are the creators.

I only go on social media for fifteen minutes towards the end of the day, and I wouldn’t recommend you being on it for any longer. At the most, make it 15 minutes twice a day. But no more than that. Quickly scan if there is anything worth your time, leave a few comments, and get out of it within the time limit.

Don’t forget social media apps are designed to be addictive. They are based on endless scrolling. It will take you hours to be up to date with the amount of content published on them each day.

And they are strewn with advertisements.

When you feel you are trapped in the cycle of endless scrolling, think about what your end goal is.

It is to tread lightly like a ballerina and make your mark.

Spend more time on developing content.

As an authorpreneur (or entrepreneur), keep in mind, your job is to provide value to your readers. That is the only reason they will remember you and follow you because you are either solving their problems or entertaining them.

When you are on social media to build your brand, you are a creator, not a consumer.

Concentrate on creating value with your content, and you will people will recognize you and want to engage with you.

Engage with other people.

Another reason people will recognize you when you either respond to their comments or leave them a comment. In both cases, you are engaging, which is the whole point of social media — engagement.

Not only the recipients like it but social media apps like it too. They will send more connections your way and circulate your post to more people with similar interests helping you grow your network.

Know what your ultimate goal is when you are on social media.

Your ultimate goal is not just building your brand but building your mailing list.

All those contacts on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram are no good if one day those platforms decide that they don’t like the kind of content you produce and kick you out of it.

Like Facebook did in Australia just a couple of weeks ago. I wasn’t able to send the link to my newsletter to my social media followers because it had the word “news.”

Your mailing list is your ultimate tool to grow your business. Fifty subscribers on your mailing list are better than 5000 on any of the social media platforms. Because you can write to them directly and offer them your products and services.

PS: I am concentrating all my efforts on LinkedIn. At the moment, its algorithm is allowing organic growth. However, it won’t last forever, and surely, in not so distant future, it will start urging users to advertise like Facebook and Google,

I think there is a small window of time to use it to build a healthy network. I am running a live webinar course to help develop a LinkedIn strategy for writers. Find the details here.

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Want to build a career in writing but don’t know how? Subscribe to my newsletter, A Whimsical Writer, and take tiny little steps each week to get started. And have some fun along the way too. Here, have a peek before you subscribe.

Photo by Macau Photo Agency on Unsplash

The year was 2012, and I was en route to Vietnam with my family when I opened a Facebook account to share holiday photos. I hardly posted any.

Transferring photos to a computer and then to Facebook was too tedious. My Facebook account stayed dormant for six years.

Big mistake!

2012 was the golden year when it was possible to build a large fan base on Facebook organically. Many savvy entrepreneurs took advantage of it and grew a big following, taking advantage of the Facebook algorithm.

I came back to Facebook when I started a blog in 2018 and linked it to my Facebook account. My articles automatically got posted on Facebook. But I still never went on it to check if anyone was commenting on them.

My eyes opened to the power of social media at the start of this year, when I started publishing a small article and a sketch on Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn every day.

Suddenly my follower number started growing quickly, and I realized I have a powerful tool in hand which I don’t even know how to use properly.

What kind of social media user are you?

Today everybody has a social media account but did you know there are three types of social media users.

• Social Enthusiast: This is someone who loves every platform and preaches why it’s necessary for online growth.
• Social Freebird: This is someone who shows very sporadic interest in social media and jumps from platform to platform, lacking consistency in content.
• Social Slacker: This is a person who knows that social media is important but lacks the interest or knowledge to commit to using it.

I was no doubt a social slacker until the start of this year when I became someone close to Social Enthusiast.

In January this year, I took the challenge to post something on Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn each day.

The 100 days of practice challenge originated in the visual arts community and was made popular by the #100daysofpractice.

The idea is that every day for 100 days, artists would post a photo on Instagram of something they were working on. It didn’t have to be a polished or finished product. The idea behind the challenge was two folds — when you track your progress and watch your work progress, it motivates you to put in more work.

I applied it to get better at posting content on social media. For someone who was not active just two months ago, my fanbase grew to 250+ on Facebook, 500+ on LinkedIn, and 99 on Instagram. Tiny numbers by any account, but they mean a lot when put into context.

This is what I discovered after 61 days of posting.

You can’t afford to ignore social media.

Social media may not help you sell books directly, but it can help you build your author brand.

Here are five reasons you can’t ignore social media.

Organic growth

Ask any entrepreneur who is just starting, and they will tell you how difficult it is to grow a customer base. It is even more difficult for writers who are mostly introverts and do not have much marketing exposure. Advertising works, but it requires marketing budgets. Authors don’t have that luxury, especially when they are just starting. Social media provides a way to grow a following organically.

Direct contact

Social media makes it possible for authors to directly communicate with fellow-writers, the publishing community, and their readers in real-time. Many authors communicate regularly with their audience on social media. They answer questions, teach their craft, share their creative process and take feedback directly from their readers. You can’t do that anywhere else.

International reach

Social media opens the international market to the writers who previously could hope to see their books published in a handful of countries. The book signing, mostly, used to be limited to the author’s home country (unless you are a mega-author). With social media, your reader base is all over the world, which is phenomenal and hard to overlook.

Author brand

Today, even well-known authors are expected to be reachable on social media. J K Rowling, Stephen King, James Patterson, Neil Gaiman, Elizabeth Gilbert all have social media accounts either on one platform or another. They use the platforms to build their brand, to keep communicating with their readers.

J K Rowling is the queen of Twitter; she uses the platform to send out the wittiest tweets that keep her fans entertained and engaged. Neil Gaiman’s Facebook page gets an insane amount of comments and shares. James Patterson is active on Goodreads. He not only goes in there and lists what books he’s reading, but actually makes it a point to pick up self-published books and read them and leave comments. Elizabeth Gilbert does live videos on Instagram and has over a million followers on the platform.

In nutshell

We all know that social media is important. The question is, what are you going to do with that information to build your author brand.

In my newsletter, A Whimsical Writer, I teach how to build your author brand step by step and have fun while doing it.

This week’s focus is on what social media platform is better for writers. Subscribe and have it delivered to your inbox.

Photo by Merakist on Unsplash

We are living in the best time ever to make a living with writing. The internet makes it possible to sell your written words directly to a global audience.

But there is only one catch. It won’t happen by itself. You will have to have a strategy.

The strategy is the last of the five pillars of authorpreneurship.

In the last four articles, I wrote about mindset, time, skills, and stamina. If you haven’t read them yet, it is worth reading them first before continuing with this article, as it ties all the elements discussed before.

Success comes by design, not accident.

The word “strategy” originated on the literal battlefield. It derives from an ancient Greek word referring to the art of setting up military resources in preparation for war. In addition, more than a few business experts have compared strategic planning to a chess match, in that it usually requires you to concentrate not only on the field of play before you, but on numerous moves ahead. — Keith Krach

When I embarked on my writing journey, I had no idea what I was supposed to do. I did things in the “monkey sees; monkey does” manner.

I followed whatever advice I could find ( I must admit there is no shortage of that).

Soon I discovered not all the advice applied to everyone.

Yes, there were some common pathways, but everyone’s journey was different. Certain things came naturally to me, such as inspirational writing, teaching, and fiction writing. But then there are things that I can’t bring myself to attempt.

Your strengths and temperament play a big part in ensuring your success. Your strategy should be based on these two factors first and foremost.

Decide what kind of a writer you want to become

According to my understanding, there are three kinds of entrepreneur writers:

1. Content Writers
2. Non-fiction Writers
3. Fiction Writers

Although there are no hard boundaries and most successful writers write all three kinds, they choose one form as their primary form.

You need to figure out what will be your main focus initially. Not all writing is the same.

A fiction writer might also write non-fiction books and produce regular content. As a content writer, you might embark on fiction writing. That is fine. You will initially have to decide on what you want to use as your primary form of writing.

There is a long learning curve for all three kinds of writing. And each one has different ways of making money.

The income source for the content writers is — freelancing, copywriting, blogging, ebooks, online courses, affiliate income, consulting, coaching, and professional speaking.

Non-fiction writers tend to make money through writing books either on one niche or multiple niches. They also heavily into brand-building through content marketing. But their main aim is to set themselves up as an authority in their field, providing consulting and coaching, and professional speaking.

Fiction writers write genre fiction. Genre fiction (such as thrillers, fantasy, romance) has a cult following, and new books are always in demand by readers who consume everything their favorite writers write.

Once you have figured out what kind of writing will be your primary source of income, you can look at other factors.

Think of yourself as an entrepreneur

This takes us back to the first article of the series, where I talked about the mindset.

It is hard for writers to think of their work as a business but consider for a moment:

Entrepreneurs create value from ideas. — Joanna Penn

If you agree with that, then writers are the ultimate entrepreneurs because we take our ideas and create articles, books, ebooks, print books, audios, and videos. We use a variety of ways to take our words and turn them into value. That value may give readers entertainment, information, or inspiration. It creates value for us as creators too, in terms of income.

Once you reframe your identity as an entrepreneur, you will only be able to devise your vision and mission statements and set your business goals.

Your vision statement will paint a picture of what your authorpreneur business would look like in five years or a decade or two, while your mission statement is your overall, lasting formulation of why your business exists and what it hopes to be.

It includes the goals you want to accomplish and an outline of how you intend to fulfill them.

A strategic plan needs a clear statement of your authorpreneur business purpose. Its reason for existing in the first place. Why did you start an authorpreneur business? What are you hoping to accomplish? What products or services are you offering? What value are they going to bring in people’s lives?

Focus on creating scalable income

In most jobs, you work for a certain number of hours, and you get paid for those hours. If you don’t work, you don’t get paid. Your work is not scalable, as you’re paid once for the hours that you work.

With a scalable income, you create once and sell over and over again.

Let’s say you spend a year writing a book. The book can sell 100 copies, 1000 copies, or one million copies. Or it may earn money 70 years after you are dead. So your time is spent once, but the income from that time can continue for many years.

Your strategy should include creating content and books that earn you scalable income rather than a one-off payment. It might be a small trickle at first, but that will increase in time as you add more to your portfolio.

Most of us need to have a balance at the beginning as we need money to pay bills. But when you sit down to work, ask yourself — Is what I’m doing scalable?

Concentrate on developing multiple streams of income

For many people, their job is their only source of income which they can lose any time. In today’s world, nothing is stable, corporations least of all.

The same principle applies to making a living with writing. It is important to make sure that you have more than one source of incoming cash. If you have just one platform, one book, one course, or one publisher, you’re likely to find yourself in trouble.

As we live in a fast-changing world, and global internet penetration is expanding every month. To make a living from writing, it is important expanding your horizon. Your strategy should include that.

Create author business plan

A business plan might sound like a dry, soulless thing to write as a writer but think again.

Business is creative.

Everything you can see around you was once an idea in someone’s head. A business mindset took that idea, converted it into a product, and made it available to the general masses to use and benefit from it.

If you can reframe business as creative, then you can also frame a business plan. You are actively shaping your future writing career. What could be more creative than that!

If you can articulate what you want, you can turn it into reality. It becomes a goal.

A goal could be achieved if you take consistent action towards it for a long time.

But a business plan is more than a goal or a dream.

A business plan has a high-level strategic focus on several levels such as:

1. Business Summary
2. Financial Goals
3. Products
4. Publishing Strategy
5. Marketing

Once you have a business plan, it becomes a stepping-off point for the next stage of your authorpreneur journey. It provides you a clear direction—something you should regularly view and update.

I hope this article series is helpful in understanding and preparing you for your authorpreneur journey.

I would love to hear your views in the comments section.

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I am forever indebted to Joanna Penn for leading the way. Her books How To Make a Living With Your Writing and Your Author Business Plan made it so easy to understand a business that is becoming so very complex each day. Much of the material in this article has come from her books.