So, I was just talking with Tobias Buckell about mailing lists over on Twitter, as one does, because Twitter is a very strange place and sometimes you just have conversations with people whose books you own like it’s a perfectly normal thing.  Here’s the thing: This sale is on day three and I am already powerfully tired of talking about it.  I was thinking earlier today about Warren Ellis’ email mailing list, and about how lots of authors I know (by “know,” read “am aware of”) have such things, primarily because they control them and there’s no way for, say, Twitter to decide that I have to start paying them a nickel every time I want a Tweet to be potentially visible by all 5000 (!!!) of my followers.

The other thing is that, despite my apparent enthusiasm for it, I actually don’t really enjoy turning my blog into a promotion machine for my books.  I feel like it’s necessary, which isn’t the same thing, but I don’t like it.  This is my blog.  It is for swearing.  Not marketing.  I’m not threatening to pull all book-related stuff from here, because that would be crazy, but I figure if I could somehow get several hundred people signed up for a mailing list, an email or two to those people might be a bit more effective than spreading promotion all over my blog, and it would certainly be easier.

So I’ve done two things tonight.  I’m actually pretty happy with what the sale has done for my numbers already, so I’m gonna cut way back on promotion here and on Twitter– because I’ve sent Amazon some money to promote it themselves.  I have a number of reservations about their new ads system, and I’ve seen some indications that writers don’t think it works very well, but to hell with it; it’s worth a try.  I’ve targeted other books specifically: stuff by Andy Weir, John Scalzi, and Douglas Adams, mostly, with a few other geek favorites thrown in.  It’ll run concurrently with the sale until the sale is over or my budget runs out, whichever comes first.  We’ll see if anything changes.

Here’s the second thing.  My first poll!

To be clear: The mailing list’s primary reason for existence would be promotion, and its use would be– I cannot stress this enough– minimal.  I mean, it’ll ramp up around when the new book comes out, or when there are sales, but I can’t imagine more than a couple of  mailings a month at the most.

Let me know what y’all think.