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Hi! I'm Holly.

Let's talk about multi-author promos and the rules.

Published about 2 months ago • 3 min read

I'm veering off the planned sending schedule today for a bit of a spicy topic but one that I think is incredibly important and was highlighted by one of our members, Zee Irwin Romance.

Hands up if you use BookFunnel to either participate or run multi-author promos?

This post is for you and it's really important that you look for solutions from a place of growing your business, not making things harder, because for some, this information will feel overwhelming and scary and potentially very frustrating but it's actually going to make your newsletters better. So stay with me here.

Did you know that it's against most global laws and regulations to run a promo, collect subscriber's names for a multi-author offering and give those names to everyone inside the promo or anthology? Even using the language 'Click here to subscribe to all the author's newsletters' does not cover you. The reader must subscribe to each author individually in order to comply with global regulations.

Each individual author must be subscribed to, not all of them with one click. There must be explicit consent for each enrollment.

And honestly, this is a good thing.

On Feb 1, Google made it more difficult for bots and spammers to email our readers. One of the markers for deliverability is that you haven't been marked as spam more than 0.3% of the time.

If you stop and think about it, the times when you're most often marked as spam happen when the reader is coming in from a multi-author free promo. We all know this. And we all lament it. However, adhering to global onboarding rules will go a long way to alleviating this undesired result.

Did you also know that if you continue to ignore this practice, that you run the risk of being removed from a service like BookFunnel?

Here's a link to their FB post on the subject matter. (You must be a member of their group to read it.)https://www.facebook.com/.../Book.../posts/3646787058866250/

By extension, this is true for any collaborative project and there are ways around it, but they ultimately mean a bit more work for you as an organizer and as a participant but also means a much higher quality of subscriber. One who opens and clicks and buys.

There are many companies like BookFunnel out there offering to facilitate list-building projects. Make sure you read their terms of service and understand your data collection obligations. And start to rethink the value of your subscribers that are coming from these list builders. Or if you're organizing group collabs with other authors, make sure you're adhering to global laws.

You'll want to do this in order to stay compliant with the law, to ensure your emails are less often marked as spam and therefore to have emails that land in inboxes more often because the Googles and the Yahoos love the trust they can assume based on your reputation.

Here's a screenshot of the BookFunnel post for reference:

Author Zee Irwin has graciously offered an example of how she navigates this with her multi-author anthologies.

From Zee:

In my Love Beach Group we've decided to put the Preview anthology out free without signups for a limited time for April, which was limited time to begin with. But some authors still do want to list it on their BF, so we're allowing authors to do what they feel best. I sent the epub to those authors wanting to list it themselves, while also listing the preview anthology free with no email collection on Bookfunnel with a link for all to share out.
Here's the way we re-worded the landing page on Bookfunnel.

Note the P.S. at the bottom (where we hope readers will actually read through to the P.S. HAHA - most probably just click the download button.

https://dl.bookfunnel.com/38i60f56qw

Okay, thanks for reading until the end. I'm always available for strategy chats about how to use BookFunnel to its fullest extent because it is my preferred tech tool for safe book signups and delivery and I'm really happy they created the trigger for this conversation.

Happy Emailing,

Holly

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