Interesting article. I may have to check out your link because, even as a long-time marketer, I really don’t see myself being able to build up a meaningful email list. I have 3,000+ FB friends, and I guarantee if I ask them to sign up, I’d get like 5— 3 or 4 of which would only do it to be nice.

Email used to be a huge deal (and I guess it still is), but I rarely sign up for anything. I just get so damn many emails that the thought of being on another list is rarely something I’m eager to pursue. But, back in the day, the recipe was: Offer something cool for singing up. Yep, I did that… offered people a recipe book for signing up to my wife’s web site. She had 10,000 people sign up to get the free book, and now we were paying like $50/month just to keep our list. Our problem was, we didn’t have anything to actually sell them. So, we sent them follow-up recipes & stuff like that for a while, all for free. Then we finally got the idea to sell them seomething, so we came up w/ a product, and blasted the email out. Man o man, people complained & carried on as though they were insulted by it. It was really off-putting, and a huge hassle. (Just sharing a horror story, as I’m sure you’ve got much better ways around these problems.)

Anyway, I’m currently struggling w/ whether to put in the effort to go traditional or not — and, for the same reasons you mention. I guess I’m kind of a control freak. I don’t want anyone changing a damn comma in my novel! Yet… the thought of self-marketing isn’t so thrilling. Hmmm….