Collective wisdom suggests that you should build an e-mail list where you can share all your book news. I have previously tried giveaways with Goodreads and from my website, but with very limited success.

When I saw the above website, I was really keen. It was a small one-off fee to help pay for the Amazon voucher and I could just about fit one of my books into the category. Over all I was really pleased as the giveaway attracted over 2,000 entries, some of which would be duplicated via Twitter, but anything was better than nothing. After removing all the duplicates, I had 890 e-mail addresses (5 were deemed to be invalid) to import into Mailchimp. This meant I still qualified for Mailchimp’s free service.

In order to prevent people being bombarded with e-mail newsletters Ripley asks you to put your name against a date for the following month. The idea is that it cuts down the amount of people who will immediately unsubscribe.

In my e-mail newsletter I explained who I was, what I write and the fact that I only do an e-mail about once a quarter. Personally, I don’t like people who e-mail every week, unless it is tips and training for authors.

To my dismay 62 immediately unsubscribed and I received a warning message to say this was higher than average and if it continued I would be reported for spam. As you can imagine this was deeply distressing. I can understand some people only want to enter competitions and don’t want to receive any contact after that, but this does cause a problem for those who receive the list. It would be better for those who only want to be entered for the ‘competition only’ to be filtered out and only genuine e-mails forwarded. Perhaps if I had been able to offer more freebies they may have stayed, but I don’t have the financial resources to do this and what happens when the freebies run out?

I would like to do another competition and would recommend Ripley of you have an YA/NA novel as she was really well organised and did a good job, but the cancelled subscriptions have put me off. I wanted to look at a big organisation like Instafreebie, but I worry the cancellation rates would be even higher.