Email Lists Vs Social Media: Boosting Your Book Sales As An Author

Serious authors treat their email list as their most valuable asset, yet many overlook list building while wondering why their book sales stall. While social media algorithms can bury your content and jeopardize your visibility, an email list provides a direct, permission-based connection to your readers. Juliet Dillon Clark explains why your email list vastly outperforms social media for engagement, click-through rates, and long-term sales. She shares how to nurture your audience, turn cold traffic into dedicated readers, and build a system that supports your broader business model. You’ll learn how to implement a strategy that moves beyond begging for clicks and builds authentic, sustainable authority in your niche.

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Email Lists Vs Social Media: Boosting Your Book Sales As An Author

Email Lists As A Business Asset

In this episode, I’m going to talk about the importance of your email in promoting your books. I’m noticing a lot of people are not doing it when they’re coming to us saying, “My book is not selling. What’s going on?” Before we get started and jump into that. I do want to mention our August training is going to be Domingo Silvas. You may have heard of him. He was on a previous episode talking about his new program that is Praxis AI Media. He’s going to be demoing it for us. You can see all of the amazing things this has to offer.

I got in on the founder’s level. I was happy with the fact that the average person could go over and there’s voice print there. You can ask questions about my book, and my voice will answer for you. I also love that you can put your coaching links in there. You can put your books in there. If you have a book that has been translated into another language, they can do it in that language, too. They’ve created an incredible voice system. They weren’t happy with ElevenLabs, so they created their own and it is amazing. You can sign up for that. It’s at BreakthroughEvents1.com. That will be on August 7th, 2026, and it is something that you shouldn’t miss.

Why Email Outperforms Social Media

Let’s talk about that email. Serious authors out there treat their email list like an asset. For non-fiction authors, it’s part of what you would do when you sell your business. You also sell your list. List building is probably the number one thing that I would say fiction and non-fiction authors can’t skip, but they do. They don’t understand why books don’t sell. A few reasons why you need to do this. First of all, your email list vastly outperforms your social media when it comes to selling books, to clicks, and engagement.

With book launch experts, they’re reporting that email can be dozens of times more effective than social media posts. Why is that? Let’s discuss a little bit about why you need that email list versus social media. Let’s say you wanted to be someone who posts on LinkedIn or on Facebook. The first thing is, your posts are probably getting lost in the feed because so many people post about things inside of those two platforms.

The second thing is and this is the big one people don’t realize. You don’t own your social media. You own your email list. Everyone that you get into your email list is somebody that you’re communicating with on a one-to-one basis. When you’re over on social media, one false move and the person who does own the media, whether it’s Microsoft on LinkedIn or Mark Zuckerberg, over on Meta or Facebook. Whatever they’re calling it. They can shut you down and they do or they can change the algorithms so you’re not visible.

It’s very important to be able to get those people into your email list. The email list is also permission-based. What that means is you have an opt-in with it. You’re not going to get a bunch of people who aren’t interested in what you have to offer. On social media, you might get rude remarks or different things going on, but the fact that those people opted in makes them a much warmer and more responsive audience.

That means they’re more likely to buy, review and share with others if they liked your book. All of this is very important. For any of you who’ve ever published a book, you know how hard it is to get reviews. It can be difficult or costly. Also, when you send a broadcast, you get a much higher percentage of your list that sees it compared to that organic reach that is out on social media. You might get some likes. You might get some shares, but you’re probably not going to get buys.

Cleaning Your List For Higher Engagement

That’s something that doesn’t happen much on social media. The main reason is, a lot of times that is cold organic traffic. It is important inside your list because it’s warmer to keep track of that open rate inside and what’s going on and to keep your list clean. You don’t want a bunch of people sitting around taking up space. One of the most brilliant things that I’ve ever seen when it comes to your list is someone, I know who started around the same time I did who goes through every couple months.

She’ll offer a free book, but then as her open rate goes down, she will go through and she will send those people who haven’t opened in a while a notice that says, “If you don’t respond, we’re going to delete you. You’re welcome to come back in later.” That can seem scary for authors because generally, your list isn’t that big and it’s harder to build a list. You don’t want to let go of those people. Here’s why it’s important.

One of the things she did over time was, as she let go of those people that were unresponsive. She was gauging where people read inside of her list. As she let people go, she got a very clean list of readers. As she went along with those blasts for new books, which she puts out several books a year. She got more book sales because of that clean list and where she bought them. She not only went from being an Amazon bestseller to now being a USA Today bestseller, and then was able to co-write a book and become a New York Times bestseller.

You have to outweigh it. You have to let go of those people who got in and maybe don’t open anymore. it’s so hard to build a list but I get it. I do it myself once in a while. I’ll go through a clean and I’ll lose 200 people and be like, “The truth is, you never had those 200 people to begin with if they weren’t opening your emails.” This is something you have to remember about the value. You’re probably thinking, “Why does this pertain to me? I’m a fiction author or a non-fiction author. Tell me how this works for me.”

Strategies For Fiction Authors

First of all, with fiction. You are 100% discovery driven. An email lets you connect with readers who took a chance to buy book one or took a chance to download your free book. As you’re writing, you’re able to nurture them as well. How do you nurture them? You nurture them with content. Do you have a weekly blog? What is that blog about? Do you have a podcast? Do you have a video? Do you have short stories about your characters?

The list makes it much easier for you to stack up pre-orders and fill ARC teams or your advanced reader copy teams. Get early reviews. Hit ranks thresholds faster because you’re not starting from zero every single time. We ran a campaign where we gave The Fortune Teller’s Daughter away for free. We built a pretty good list from that. Normally, it would take much longer to build. We put 250 new people in our list in one month using that strategy.

Now, that can be a little bit scary. If this is your first book, you don’t want to give away your first book. You want people to buy it. It just so happened that The Fortune Teller’s Daughter for me was an older book that I rewrote, because I’m a much better writer than I was back in 2010 when it was released. It’s completely changed, rewritten, and better show versus tell. We went through, and we renamed or re-titled the book and put it out, so I was willing to give it away.

What if you’re not willing to give it away? I don’t truly believe that giving people a chapter of your book is ever a good strategy because most of the time, people aren’t going to read that one chapter and go buy the book. You probably aren’t giving them something super compelling. If you’re a non-fiction author, then write a shorter novela. Maybe it’s a very short prequel to the book you’ve written, like what happened before. Maybe it’s like a 1.5. A book between your first book and your second book. Either way, you need to start building all of this early.

Maybe that novela, you build 1, 2 or 3 of those and give those away to build your list in anticipation of that first book release. I can think of some cool things to do with a novella. Maybe it’s a short story that involves your characters. Maybe it’s a character building out of one particular character in the book. If we’re going to write a novella from mine, I would probably write about how Detective Lindsay Carter became a detective. What did she do? Solve some cases when she was a homicide Sheriff’s Deputy in Los Angeles.

There are all these little things you can do to give away and get people interested and warmed up for that first book. If you’ve already released your first book or even your second book in a series. This is a great way to warm people up for that third one. It’s to give one of those away. Also, what it does is it turns those flyby readers from promos like BookBub and Facebook Ads in three days. You can invite some long-term into your later series, your box sets or your special project.

Building A System For Series Success

I do want to offer one thing here. If you are going to put a series together, have a brand guide first. The reason I say that is because you don’t want all these different covers that don’t look like they’re tied together. You want your website to be branded as well. If you start out this whole series with a brand guide and then keep everything on your website flowing with the same fonts, same colors, and same design. If you look at my fiction books, you’ll see it’s usually a two-word title.

I have one that’s in red. The last word is in red on the scroll. You can clearly identify all of my books very quickly. How do you invite people into this list? You need an opt-in. You need a landing page, or you can do that if you drive traffic to your website. You can also drive traffic through something like book funnels. I find book funnels to be very helpful. I did it. That $250, I did in conjunction with Facebook Ads. When I said I did that $250 in a month, it was more like two weeks. What did I spend? I know how to use my GoHighLevel. You should have a system.

If you’re a series author, you need a serious system. We use GoHighLevel. It’s $97 a month. I built out my website. I build out landing pages. I built everything over there. When I use those ads and book funnels together, I spent about $400 to get those 250 leads. You can’t beat that. I literally had a video ad that I made that had $0.9 per click on it. Those are ways to do that. The other thing is for your ARC or your advanced readers.

Those are people that you can invite for your next book to be your advanced readers. I know a lot of people shy away from that as well because they say, “I need those people to buy my books.” You need them to be advanced readers because what is going to drive traffic to those books is if you can get those reviews and get them in early. My thing that I’ve done, I’m building in advance a team for Bad Lie. I built one early and the reason I did that is because Bad Lie is a mystery but it’s a golf mystery. For me, my audience is probably half men and half women but I mostly market to the women.

Golf is a little bit different, so I built an advanced reader team of men this time. Men who play golf. Let me tell you. I try to get men to read. Not all men do. It was a little more difficult than I thought because it is a big book. It’s almost 400 pages, but it’s an awesome book. I built in elements to it. Men like golf. Women like golf too but probably more men. It’s a tech thriller. That police procedural a little bit as well. I had a lot of elements in there. It was a little bit different audience so that advanced reader team was important this time.

The other thing is it’s a great way to announce new books that are coming out of your list for non-fiction. It’s also a great way if you’re participating in book swaps to send out a blast to your list about, “I’m participating in this new book promo for the month of July. Check out all these other new books.” You’re helping promote other people as well. As I said, ask for early reviews on launch week because re-verified reviewers push you up in the rankings very quickly. Now, I took all of my advanced readers and one of the criteria I told them is, “I’m giving this to you in advance. My only criteria here is that you write me a review and you go buy my Kindle copy because it needs to be a verified review.”

The Non-Fiction Business Model

You can see I had a plan in place for months before this happened. I think that is one of the big takeaways from having a list and building this early. Most of these finish your book and then you start, then you’re frustrated because nothing’s happening. I just told all you fiction authors why you do this. Now, let’s talk about those non-fiction authors. For non-fiction authors, that non-fiction platform and audience also carry your business.

If you’re riding a book for credibility for your business to be a speaker, a coach, or one of those things. You need to have that audience built in advance. Not only are you releasing a book, but you have to have what’s after it. Why do I say that? A book royalty is probably going to be between $1 and $3. Even if you self-publish, because you have to pay the distributor. There’s all these people you have to pay like the printer.

By doing that, that next step is probably a coaching program or a package of some sort. That’s where your real money comes from. The book is your credibility builder. It gives you on stages where you sell those programs. It gets into your podcast, where you sell those programs. You can kind of see snowballs there. Also, publishers want authors who can reach readers directly. If you’re a nonfiction or even a fiction author, and you have an agent. You’re going to have to prove that you have numbers that can substantiate something like a book contract.

We worked with an author who works for almost a year to build 38,000 downloads of his show. Six months in, the agent is now pitching his book, but he needed to be able to show that he had built content, follower, list, all of that. A list also supports your broader business model. Your courses, consulting, and speaking. One of the things where you build your list as a non-fiction author is through your content. You must have content, whether that is a blog, article writing, a podcast, or a YouTube channel. You need to have a call to action on every single piece that you do.

I want to get into one of the things here. I just touched on it lightly. Before I go there, a leadership or wellness author with 5,000 or more engaged subscribers and a steady newsletter often looks more appealing to an agent or people out there who are buying books than someone that had a great idea but no audience. Keep that in mind as you’re moving through this. The next thing I want to post on or talk about here is why this is important for an agent. I know so many of you guys come to me and you say, “I want an agent. How do I get an agent?”

When I tell you the criteria, you explode. You’re like, “I can’t do that. I can’t list the build.” List building is difficult and it takes time. It’s not something you do after your book is done. For non-fiction, agents and publishers, they explicitly look at your author platform, which is basically how many people can you reach and move to action now? I just mentioned that we have an author who has an agent. The agent sent him to me to build a platform because she thought he had a great book. We built over months and he worked his rear end off, 38,000 downloads on his podcast.

He was thinking about starting a Substack. It was a little too much. We’re working right now on book funnels. We made some mini eBooks based on the book and we’re driving traffic to it via Facebook. You have to be able to look at those. That’s what agents are looking for, what audience can you bring to the table? Traditional publishers don’t do a lot of promotion like they used to. Many agents say that for borderline projects, your platform is the tiebreaker that decides whether they take you on or they even say yes to your proposal. That is very important, too.

Unfortunately, for fiction authors, a lot of times this doesn’t happen. You have to go out and sell your own books and prove that you have the ability to sell those books. We had a fiction author looking for an agent and she thought out and told them, “You sell 12,000 books in three months. I can get you a deal.” That is a heavy lift if you don’t have a platform. Keep that in mind as well. Even in fiction, having demonstrated leadership, newsletter subscribers, solid engagement, and having some sales history signals to agents that you’re a professional who understands the business side.

That’s what’s important here. It’s because if you’re a one-off author who says, “I’ve got this fantastic book. I want to do all these things with it.” If you don’t demonstrate that you understand the business side, an agent is not going to be interested in taking you on. It is important that you learn the business side of this industry. I would say 95% of the people I talked to opened up and started writing a book and they have no idea about the business end or that it’s brutal.

I’m going to share something with you guys that I heard on a show. I was listening to the Ruthless Show. Buck Sexton has a new book out. I’ve read it. It’s a good book that he said on the show and remember, he has this huge show that millions of people tune in to. He said it’s hard to sell books. Even he was surprised by how difficult it is to sell books, and he has millions of followers and a traditional publisher.

I was so gratified to hear someone with that many followers say, “This is hard.” Imagine if you have zero platform, how hard it’s going to be for you to be able to do it. Simple is building that you can start. Let’s talk about that. You need to choose an email service. There’s lots of them out there, like Mailchimp. I happen to use GoHighLevel because it’s an all-in-one place where I can not only send out my emails, collect my list, but it has landing pages. I can build my website there.

I can build leads in there. I can send my social media out through there. If you look at all of those, I usually have my emails and my social media all scheduled 3, 4, or 5 weeks in advance. It takes a lot of pressure off me. I can just keep adding as I go along. There are a lot of other systems out there. I recommend the all-in-one because you don’t have five different logins and you’re not paying for five different things.

In order to get a Mailchimp with a landing page, you’re going to pay $25-$30. With social media, if you go to SocialBee, you’re going to pay for another one. Those all start adding up. I love that I have it all in one place as well. Create a compelling lead magnet. If you are someone who’s a non-fiction author, give people a checklist. Give people something like an eBook or something that they’re going to love like a video that they have to opt in to get it. For fiction authors, a novella.

I’m not big on the giveaway chapter of the book. I think I mentioned that. Maybe you do a character dossier or bonus scenes or alternative points of POV to what’s tied to your series. Also, put up sign-up forms where the traffic already is, like your website homepage. If you go over to my website, both JulietDillionClark.com and Superbrand Publishing will both have opt-ins. You can download a free copy of the Perfect Reader Playbook, which by the way, you should go do that. It’s at PerfectReaderPlaybook.com. It will tell you how to layer your marketing in a way that doesn’t make you just come out and say, “Buy my book.” It can instantly tell that you haven’t built a platform when you’re begging people to buy your book.

Key landing pages on your blog and on your show. Every single piece of content you put out there. Give that three things away. The back of your books is one thing. If you watched our panel in June, you saw Patrick Snow, who is an amazing book developer. When I gave him The Perfect Reader Playbook to endorse, he came back to me with great feedback like, “Why don’t you put something in back?” There’s something in there. I do that at the back of all my books now.

If you look at the back of Dark Granny, I believe it has Farmhouse Forgotten. Every book has the next book in the back now, so people know where to find me. Links on your social bios and podcast appearances. Don’t just give your book link like, “Go buy my book,” and you’re begging again. Give that free link away as well, so people can get on your list and get that free novella or download. Also, email regularly. I can’t even tell you how often I hear somebody say, “I have a newsletter. I email once a month.”

Consistency And Planning Your Launches

Once a month is not quite enough to keep you top of mind with readers. I would say for non-fiction, once a week and make it that piece of content. Whether it’s, “Here’s my blog,” with that call to action, that free thing or, “I have a podcast,” so it is something my podcast. I give away those three things as a call to action on everything. If you must, go every other week if you think you’re bugging people, but you have to have it more than once a month. You have to keep yourself top of mind and people engaged in it.

Treat your launches as listed events. A lot of times, we send out one email like, “My book is here,” and people don’t pay attention. In that weekly or every other weekly list, have some things for you to talk about the book. Why you wrote the book and what’s in the book that will interest people. I hope all of this helps. I am starting from scratch with my fiction novels, again. I’m very invested in that list. I have a big list on the non-fiction side because I’ve had my business since 2010 and I’ve been list building from 2016.

Every time I release a non-fiction book, I sell quite a few copies. The other thing that you can use this list for is reviews. Asking for reviews. It’s easier to get people to read your book than it is to get them to go over and publish a review. I will talk about that more at another time because I have been using several different things to get reviews. We’ll cover that later, but I hope this helps because this is a must. I talked to authors every single day who tell me, “I published a book. Why isn’t it selling? Why can’t people find it?”

A lot of times, it’s not your metadata. It’s not that the book is bad. It’s just that you didn’t build the audience around it and you’re out on social media begging and instead of offering value and connection to your potential readers. I’ll catch you in the next episode. By the way, when we talk about calls to action, go down below on JulietDillionClark.com. Download your free copy of The Fortune Teller’s Daughter. If you’re not into fiction, go over to the PerfectReaderPlaybook.com and download your free copy of the Perfect Reader Playbook. It’s that simple guys. That’s all you need to do.

Important Links

• BreakthroughEvents1.com
• The Fortune Teller’s Daughter
• Dark Granny
• BookBub
• GoHighLevel
• Ruthless Show
• Buck Sexton
• Mailchimp
• SocialBee
• Juliet Dillion Clark
• Superbrand Publishing
• Perfect Reader Playbook
• Leveraging AI To Boost Book Sales And Engagement: Domingo Silvas On Praxis Platform – Previous Episode

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