Newsletter Round Robins

How do I make sure I am set up for success with my submitted book?

Newsletter Round Robins.

Have you heard of it?

I bet you’ve heard of newsletter swaps more often.

The purpose of a newsletter round robin is to let authors join forces to promote each other’s work, reaching new and similar audiences. But a round robin won’t work well for you if you are a sweet writer who joins a round robin with a dark romance author, or if you’re a horror author joining forces with a romcom author.

The aim here is to connect with audiences that closely align, allowing you to maximize your reach with readers who are more likely to enjoy your work, engage with it, and follow your future releases.

This type of collaboration boosts visibility at a consistent pace, helps you to gain new readers as well as find community within your niche.

How Does it Work?

In this unique setup, each participating author will feature other authors' books in their newsletters on designated months. This process will continue throughout the year, rotating among all the authors who have joined to take part in the collaboration.

And no, we’re not talking about that itty-bitty section on the bottom where you usually do your swaps, trying to fit in as many as you can with the smallest image you can while still being visible.

Some round robins will require you to utilize a newsletter strictly for the collaboration itself—not being thrown in as an addition to your regular newsletter. So read the instructions of the invitation/form carefully.

How do I know I’m doing it right? What kind of link am I submitting exactly?

Whether you’re established or just getting started, I’m going to walk you step-by-step on how to make sure your book is available with an opt-in landing page through BookFunnel in preparation for your newsletter round robin.

BookFunnel

There’s probably no way around it. You’re going to end up with an author resource like BookFunnel or something similar along your author journey.

Maximize the collaboration by not only gaining new eyes on your work, but also gaining new subscribers.

I hope by now you all know how to add a new book by going through the very large and noticeable orange button on the left hand side that says “Add New.” Follow the prompts. It should be pretty self explanatory, but if it’s still confusing you, click HERE for BookFunnel’s help page.

So now you have your book inputted. It’s time to create the landing page. Click “action” at the top right hand corner.

Here is where you really need to pay attention. You will be given multiple options for different types of landing pages, and each one has their own unique uses. But for the purpose of your newsletter round robin collaboration, you will be clicking the first option that states “An email signup page to collect new readers.”

Make sure you click the orange button to choose your option.

You will be rerouted to a creation page. Name your landing page whatever you like to help you remember what it is for. No, the readers will not be seeing this part (the first arrow).

If you have the midlist plan, you may be able to integrate BookFunnel direction to your newsletter host, making for easy email transfers and newsletter automation flows. But if not, that is okay too. It’s not too difficult to manually download CSV files from BookFunnel and importing them to your newsletter provider.

If you want to see what your landing page looks like, click on the plus sign for “Landing Page Settings.” This is where you can change the look of your landing page by choosing different color schemes.

After choosing a color, you can click on the “preview” button to see what it looks like in real time.

When you are done, scroll to the bottom of the page and click NOT the orange button, but the one next to it. “Save and Close.”

You should now be brought to your actual landing page on the back-end. The arrow is the link you should be utilizing for your round robin submission to make sure it takes the reader to the page you created specifically for this collaboration.

And that’s it! You’re ready to submit for your first newsletter round robin!

Once the round robin begins its course (many of these consistently going throughout the entire calendar year), you can then go to your BookFunnel to check and see your download stats over the course of time.

This can be found on the same landing page you created.

What do Round Robin’s Look Like in Newsletter Form?

Depending on how you structure your newsletter, it can look different from someone else. But here’s an example:

How well does this kind of collaboration perform?

Well, I can tell you from experience, I’ve had subscription gains every time a participating author sends out their newsletter. As I wrap up two collaborations, I can confidently say I've gained nearly a couple of thousand subscribers at the very least, all while keeping the unsubscribe rate low after sending out follow-up emails.