Tammi LabrecqueCritiques

A great primer and even brush up for running your newsletter. I've had mine (Newsletter) for a while now with a list of "One day I'll do..." and reading this kicked everything into gear for me.

Brilliant

This book was well written and informative. Highly recommended for authors and aspiring authors who are trying to build their newsletters

I'll be honest, I'm not a fan of non fiction books. Most I pick up are full of fluff and the meat they do provide I can google quicker. So I tend to roll my eyes when I see another one be raved about. This one was recommended to me, and I started at chapter 4 and read to the end.

I have to say it's one of the best laid out non fiction books I've read. Zero fluff, and it cut to the chase with all topics. Mailing lists are my huge weakness, and this book lays out a great plan for a mailing list, and how to correct your current one.

I would recommend it to anyone, not just writers. She give great tips and tricks that can be applied to any mailing list.

Authors – both indie and trad-pubbed – need to do their own marketing. And most authors suck at marketing. One of the best tools at our disposal is email marketing - but again most authors suck at this.

This this plain-language how-to guide for authors delivers exactly the content indie authors need in implementable steps interspersed with the author's trademark good-natured snarktasm.

Really useful book on how to use email marketing – and how not to do it.

I am a complete novice in regards to author mailing lists and was keen to read this to enlighten myself and begin to understand how to go about creating an engaged list of subscribers.

It was clear to me that Tammi Labrecque is indeed a professional as she used terminology I was not familiar with and I struggled to follow along in some places. By the time I reached the middle I had a list of questions, but reading further resolved the majority of them - and a few more I had to go away and work out for myself as each email messaging service provider works differently. The only question I still need to work out is how to create an 'onboarding' sequence of emails, as I did not understand how to do that at all even though it was discussed and referred to many times in the book. And things like getting subscribers to 'whitelist' your emails was again discussed and referred to and considered necessary, but there was no step-by-step about how to do this, although there were links at the end that provided more understanding. In some places I missed (& needed) a step-by-step guide and explanations of terminology.

By the end, I was left a little overwhelmed with how much I would need to do to create an engaged subscriber list. And I also wondered how someone with only 30 people on their list and zero budget would achieve that as I didn't feel that this book was completely aimed at the beginner. This would be a much better book for those that have been using a mailing list and sending out newsletters but not really achieving engagement. But I knew it was up to me to decide what level of commitment I wanted to give as it was clear it would be time consuming no matter how I looked at it.

All that aside, the book flows really well and Tammi is engaging and funny and I really enjoyed reading it. She also provides a huge list of links at the end to help the entire process, which is invaluable in itself. I will definitely be referring to this book multiple time. And I would recommend any author who wants to create a list of engaged newsletter subscribers to read it too.