The advice was to solicit for e-mails on my blog. I haven't done this in the past for several reasons. First, I thought that it was intrusive and that I had no right to ask people for their e-mail. Second, I thought that I didn't have any reason to need a person's e-mail since my site has a contact form and people are able to comment on my blog posts. Third, I thought that I had no worthwhile content to send someone that they couldn't see via Facebook.
Well, I now see the error of my mistake as they say. Asking for someone's email address is something that people do almost everyday and totally not invasive unless you force them to give it to you, say before they can view the content of your website. Also, sure my blog readers can get in touch with me via my contact sheet or by commenting on a blog post, but that doesn't mean that I can reach out to them in any way with important news like book release dates or author events or cons I'll be attending, which is useful content that I can send them. Now I will still be posting such things on Facebook and Twitter (and Pinterest when I remember), but social media is fleeting, and when you have over 200 FB friends, a lot of stuff gets lost in the feeds of new babies, cute cats, and pics of people on vacation in interesting places.
So there it is, what I'm doing, why I haven't done it before, and why I'm doing it now. So if you want to make sure not to miss any important information or dates, please sign up and I promise minimal emails.
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