Greetings,

I'd like to formally welcome you to FRIDAY!

Okay, okay, maybe that has less resonance during this slow-motion apocalypse, but I'm going to drink wine in my kitchen and no one can stop me.

Next week is the release of Amazon Decoded, but this week I have a bunch of things for you. First up, an exclusive 20% discount from BookSweeps. 

Just enter my special code - BANANAHAMMOCK - at check-out, and you should see that price-change kick in. This will save you a hefty $10 on what are the best list-builder promos around, and the BookBub promos aren't bad either.

That's an affiliate link, but regular readers will know that BookSweeps is, by far, the best way to boost your email list outside of standard, organic means. Most list-builder promos either end up with low-quality sign-ups, or very few of them. BookSweeps works very hard to deliver top-quality sign-ups, and lots of them too.

How BookSweeps Works

The way it works is simple: they run regular themed giveaways for readers, where prizes are things like a new Kindle and a bunch of books - all themed by genre. To enter the competition, readers sign-up to participating authors' lists - it's all proactive on the reader side, which keeps those sign-ups top quality (and you on the right side of things like GDPR).

All you have to do is sign up, choose a themed promo which suits your genre, and then let them do the rest. It really is that simple, and they handle everything in a very pro way. They give you graphics for sharing - which is optional but encouraged - and make everything just so easy for you. I highly recommend these promos.

Anyone that does a BookSweeps promo comes back for more, which means that these promos sell out FAST every time they release a bunch of them. So if you are interested, jump on it now.

And for regular readers who are coming back for more, I have a very nifty trick for you below involving a little bit of email automation, to make sure that you don't add any duplicates to your email list, and annoy your subscribers by putting them through your welcome sequence more than once.

It's a very handy trick to learn, and one you can adapt in all sorts of ways. But before we get to that... 

From the blog this week: this is a big story, one which is going to run and run, and could have a huge impact on the publishing landscape. As with any change, it's always good to get ahead of it and protect your business. I have some tips on how to do that here. (Spoiler alert: it involves email).

Lovely Paperbacks! Available Globally!

A lot of you have been asking about this, so I'm very happy to announce that Let's Get Digital is now available in paperback from Amazon and Barnes & Noble and any other bookshop on the planet, if Ingram are to be believed. Get yer links here.

I'm trying out something new on the distro front: using KDP Print to publish to Amazon, Barnes & Noble Press to reach B&N (and you can walk into any B&N and order my book, apparently), and then Ingram Spark to reach the rest of the world. Apparently if you give the ISBN - 978-9187109485 - to any bookstore, anywhere, they'll be able to order it in for you, if that's your jam.

At least, that's how I think it works. I might need a few thousand of you to test that...

A Nifty Email Trick: Conditional Automations

If you haven't explored the world of email automation, you might be missing a trick. The most obvious form of automation is a welcome sequence - a series of emails which fires when a subscriber joins your list.

Every author should have one of these in place, or else you will find that all those new sign-ups you worked so hard to get will very quickly become disengaged and stop opening your emails. Dead weight, which you pay for, and which harms your deliverability overall.

But there is so much more you can do with automation. I recommend exploring this MailerLite primer on automation (affiliate link) to see all the possibilities here, but I want to show you one quick trick today and I suspect we'll return to the topic in the future.

When I launched my course Starting From Zero one of the limitations of the course platform/the plan I was on was that I had to manually export all the student emails each day - and it wouldn't even let me segment out the new students. 

And when you have 2,500+ students in the space of a week, you definitely need to rope in some friendly email robots to automate some of the tasks here.

I have an automation which welcomes people to the course - a variant of my standard automation for this list. But because lots of people on this list (that's you guys!) will be taking this course also, I needed some way to weed out those people.

This is where a conditional automation, or branching automation, can save your bacon - and I'll show you ways that you can use it in a moment. 

Anyway, here's a pic of my welcome sequence. The first "branch" weeds out anyone who has already been through *this* welcome sequence and just dumps them back into the main list again. And then the second "branch" checks if they are existing subscribers, in which case they'll just get the course welcome email, but not the rest of the welcome sequence, as they would have seen that already when signing up beforehand.

And then anyone totally new to this list, won't see any of these shenanigans and should just get a nice, smooth onboarding sequence.

So how is this useful to you? And how does it help with BookSweeps promos in particular? Well, BookSweeps is pretty good at reaching a lot of fresh people with each promotion, but you will get some repeats, and if you just dump those into your welcome sequence, readers may experience that firing again for them, which is not good - that's a quick route to becoming a disengaged subscriber, or one that actively chooses to unsubscribe.

A simple conditional automation will sort that out for you. You just need to put one "branch" at the top, before any of the emails go out, checking if they are already on your list. If that's a Yes, then they get kicked out of the automation. If that's a No, the rest of the welcome sequence fires.

If any of that is confusing, that MailerLite primer is very useful to go over. Once you wrap your head around it, this is surprisingly easy to set-up, and a very handy trick to know, which you will find all sorts of uses. And I'll explore more ways automation can help you in future emails. Maybe I'll even do a few videos on the topic - although you will see some of that in my free course too, if you're curious.

OK, I've gotta run... to the kitchen.

Dave

P.S. Writing music this week is Lisa O'Neill with John Joe Reilly.