Congratulations! Leanpub seems really interesting, and to a greater and greater extent, I'm itching to try it out for my next book. I love reading stories like

Congratulations! Leanpub seems really interesting, and to a greater and greater extent, I'm itching to try it out for my next book. I love reading stories like these. A consistent theme that comes up in many of these success stories is the importance -- if not quite the all-importance, then perhaps the primary importance -- of email marketing. Your list is your launchpad. It's also your church: it's where your customers and followers are inspired, and from which they go out into the world to evangelize. It's your customer support lifeline. It's a compelling data set, to be analyzed frequently. It's all of these things. By and large, the most successful self-pub, blogging, and Kickstarter projects I've seen have been those with well-cadenced, legitimately interesting email updates. (As a very successful blogger once put it: 'I'm not writing a blog; I'm writing a mailing list. The blog is lead-gen.') Email marketing sometimes gets a bad rap because of its vague associations with spam. Good emails are not spam. They're not auto-blasts. They are important communications to a base you have been cultivating and nurturing by hand. If you've got a modest, but high-quality list, and you're sending high-quality emails, you're in a better position than someone shotgunning crap at a larger, lower-quality list. Good emailing is non-scalable, hard work.