Authors love to say email lists don’t work. But they don’t pause to question why.
In most cases, it’s because they’re working with a handful of ‘scenes’ with no ‘plot’ tying them together.
That’s why lists stall out with no new subscribers, crickets when you hit send, or readers leaving faster than they arrive.
It’s the result of treating the components of email marketing as isolated pieces, more like a checklist: sign-up form, reader magnet, welcome email, ongoing emails. There’s no theme connecting them to work together, and sometimes pieces are even missing.
A sequence that flows
Let’s look at this through a different lens. A standard piano has 88 keys. Each note makes a unique sound, but on their own they aren’t music; they’re just isolated sounds. Play those sounds together in a sequence, and they either make an awful racket of noise or a beautiful song.
An email strategy is quite similar, with individual pieces that need to form a sequence to have meaning. If you don’t intentionally connect them into a cohesive sequence, it all falls apart and becomes noise that people will want to block out. But when you get the sequence right, it becomes a delight that people want to be part of.
This means looking at the whole picture, the story it tells, how it all works together, and the experience it provides.
Just like your book.
There are more parallels between writing a book and marketing a book than authors (and even experts) realize. These are not mutually exclusive and different skill sets, contrary to popular belief.
Establishing a strong, effective email marketing strategy means figuring out your plot, through line, theme, purpose, arcs, and payoff.
Why business advice doesn’t fit fiction
Email marketing originated in the business world, and the majority of advice surrounding this strategy is steeped in business mentality. The problem is that mentality frames everything around selling a product. Stories are used to highlight pain points, relationships are built as a prelude to a pitch, and every email is expected to end with a hard sell. Everything ends up feeling transactional, which is why most of us don’t sign up for “email newsletters”.
The sooner you let go of that line of thinking, the sooner you’ll see a shift in how your email marketing works as a fiction author.
It’s not that email marketing doesn’t work for fiction authors. It’s that you’ve been thinking about it wrong, because all the information available was built for selling products, not fiction.
The gentle approach would be for me to say, “It’s okay, it’s not your fault, you didn’t know any better”. But the reality is, you do know better. Authors get really hung up on thinking that marketing is some magical talent that requires special knowledge that they lack. Even when everything about the advice they’re trying to follow feels wrong.
Look at it this way, if someone told you to open your first chapter with:
“I’m the author; my credentials are…, you should read this book if you love [trope], and I promise it gets really interesting by chapter seven.”
I trust you’d look at them like they’d grown two heads. It makes you cringe, and it feels wrong. So if you instinctively know that’s wrong, you also know all the ‘business’ advice about email marketing is wrong for you too, because you can feel it. It makes you cringe.
It’s time to start listening to your instincts.
Think story, not funnels
The way to do this is to stop thinking about email marketing as isolated pieces, and start thinking about the flow of the story they tell.
Business people describe this as a “funnel.” For most authors, this is unfamiliar jargon, and it leans into the transactional mindset of business email marketing.
Fiction authors should look at it like parts of a story.
If you think about it, marketing has story beats just like your novel does. There’s a hook, an inciting incident, rising action, a climax, and a resolution. Every piece works because it connects to the ones before and after.
The flow looks something like this:
Social posts → Sign-up → Reader magnet → Welcome email → Ongoing emails
Your social posts then continue to reinforce the narrative of your reader magnet, welcome email, and ongoing emails.
But it’s the connection between these pieces that makes them work, just like in your book.
- Hook: social+sign-up
- Inciting incident: read magnet
- Act 1 setup: welcome email
- Rising action, climax, resolution: ongoing emails
When all the pieces of your email marketing strategy carry the same theme and ebb and flow with one another, the result is a connected journey that attracts, nurtures, and retains loyal readers.
Email list alignment through extension
The good news is that creating a cohesive sequence for the pieces isn’t about coming up with all new content. It’s about creating alignment by extending what you’re already doing.
Once you map out the flow, everything clicks, and your email list becomes the stage where readers fall in love with your world.
Of course, email is just one part of the bigger picture. It connects to your social presence, your website, and how you position yourself as an author. The story-mapping framework I shared here is something I teach in more depth inside The Fiction Author’s Path to Presence, which covers the entire author ecosystem. Enrollment is currently closed, but you can join the priority list if you want to know when it reopens.
In the meantime, your best next step is my Mindset & Digital Foundations course. It sets the stage for everything in your author career journey and is available for pre-order at $47 until September 30th. The course launches on October 15th. And if you’re not ready for that yet, you’re always welcome to explore my other Resources.
Happy writing!
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