Ann Kroeker, Writing Coach

You may already use a system to collect emails so you can communicate directly with readers who want to hear from you. If you’re unfamiliar with email marketing systems, they offer a powerful way for you to interact with your audience. If you have a new book coming out, for example, these are the people who would want to know about it. If you’re doing a poetry reading, you can send a note and readers in that city will be glad to hear about it and might make plans to attend. If you have a special price on an e-book, you can let them know about the sale. If you haven’t started yet, I highly recommend you begin building an email list comprised of ideal readers. Start List-Building with MailChimp I started out with MailChimp and used it for years. MailChimp was free, and free sounded like a good place to start. I liked MailChimp’s option to pull content from my website’s RSS feed so people could automatically receive my latest blog posts. I chose from one of their many templates and tried to tweak the code, bu