Authors: This System is Growing Your List for You!

I logged into our email list a little while ago and I got an absolute shock. There were people on it with massive platforms, like hundreds of thousands of people, real audiences, people who could move the needle for us in a single post. We had no idea they were there and our list was growing without us doing anything. If you have an email list, well, you will want to know what's happening. This video is For you. Hi, I'm Julie the Book Broad, founder of Book Launchers and your host here at BookLaunchers.tv. Book Launchers' mission is to help 100,000 books be discovered in the next 3 years. And today, part of that discovery is talking about email, specifically the platform we recommend to authors, KIT, and a set of updates they rolled out this year that I think most authors are going to completely sleep on if they don't pay attention. And that would be a mistake because these updates are incredible. Now, a lot of people are thinking about their email list and their email provider as a place to collect their list and send notifications like, "My new book is coming out. Podcast episode is live. Buy my thing." You build the list, you mail the list, you stare at the open rate, and that's it. And I get it. It's kind of how email has worked for years and years. But your list isn't an output, it's actually kind of an input. And the people on your list are not just buyers, some of them are the exact people who can put your book in front of thousands of readers that will be hard for you to reach on your own. The issue has been you didn't know who these people were. They were just names and email addresses on your list. And every one of those names looks the same, unless you have Kit and you see their new feature, their subscriber insight feature they rolled out this year. Because for the first time, I could see who was actually on our list. And I was stunned. There are people on our list running big platforms, big newsletters, podcasts, lots of downloads, audiences in our exact niche. People who, if they just start mentioning us, would send a wave of the right readers to my book or book launchers. And we've been mailing them the same as everyone else for years. But that was the moment I kind of went, "Oh my gosh, the discoverability we've been chasing all over the internet, some of it sitting inside of the list that we have had the whole time because we didn't see who these people were. But Kit has made it so we can, and that should treat how you treat your list. So Kit's unlocked a new level for us as authors and business owners. Your email list, which is a really big asset, whether you have 100 or 10,000 or 20,000 names, you now have the ability to spot who you are already connected with and they're interested in what you're saying because they're on your list. And you can now send them personalized emails to engage with them, build a relationship, and perhaps work together in some sort of a win-win situation. You can't leverage, thank, or partner with someone that you can't see. There's so much emphasis on list size and list growth, but what if we focus on the quality of who is there and build a depth to the relationships we have? So with Kit's latest updates, you can see who's influential on your list. That's a big one. But now we can actually do something about it. And this is where I think a lot of us are leaving reach on the table, because when you can spot the influential people, you can now reach out to them. You don't have to blast them with the same newsletter as you are blasting everyone else with. You can personalize it. And if you have an affiliate program like we do with Author Launch Kit and our Author Lab, you can invite them on in and they can promote it for you and they can get paid for their promotional efforts. If you have a course, same thing. If you're running an event, you can send them free tickets. You can send them copies of your book, or you can do something else creative that might be a win-win situation. Really what you're trying to do is give them something that's genuinely valuable and give them a reason to share you or your message with their audience. Now, 3, this was super cool. Your list is growing within Kit. And this one I didn't even notice, but Shane on my team flagged it and he said, "Kit has doubled the number of people who are subscribing to our newsletter every single day." So how did Kit do that? Didn't cost us anything, but when you sign up for someone else's newsletter, they now have the option of including other newsletters that that person might be interested in. And other people have included our newsletter in their list and voilà, it's doubled our growth every single day. Doubled. No cost to us. Just from something that Kit rolled out. Think about how cool that is. So if you're not using Kit, I highly recommend you head over and check it out. If you want to support the channel when you do that, you can use our affiliate link, booklaunchers.com/kit. Now every creator in your space with a list is now a potential feeder or friend for you. And the authors who plug into this early are going to compound an audience while everyone else is still paying for ads and begging for new people on their newsletter. One more thing worth knowing, especially if you are using AI in your business, and I know a lot of us are, Kit connects directly to AI tools like Claude through the MCP. In plain terms, your AI assistant can actually see your real subscriber data and help you act on it. We're using this for our brand new discoverability audit. But even more than that, as an example, You can ask your Claude to find every longtime subscriber who has gone quiet for 90 days, and then you can draft a warm note to bring them back in. The AI knows your business instead of guessing, and they can see your data and help you with your retention of your readers. If you do not know how discoverable your book is right now, you're guessing. So before you go and optimize your email list, let's find out where you actually stand. You can head on over to booklaunchers.com/auditmybook, and we will audit how discoverable your book is right now and show you exactly where the gaps are. And then you will know where your next move is, whether it's your email list, your platform, or something else. Most authors spend years trying to grow their list. The bigger opportunity is in learning who's actually on your list and getting it into the hands of the right reader. So let's stop mailing your list and start knowing it while you grow it. I'll see you in the next one.