I sent out my very first newsletter Tuesday! YAAY, me!

Yes, I was apprehensive about the HTML, links, and art posting correctly. I wondered if I was babbling (kind of like now), and if I was including all the pertinent information readers who chose to subscribe to my newsletter needed (and wanted) to know.

Yet, I wasn’t 100% sure I should even be sending out a newsletter.

Stop shaking your head at me. I know the value of a well-established mailing list of engaged readers/subscribers.

I understand total dependence on social networks for exposure, and engaging readers is foolhardy.

I know the readers who subscribe (and READ) an author’s newsletter/mailings are the strongest link in an author’s platform.

Still doesn’t mean I wanted to send out a newsletter.

Let’s face, we all get entirely too much email, and not all our email gets our attention. Newsletters/random mailings can be on the low end (or bottom) of the totem pole. A good morning for me is when I open my email and there’s LESS than a hundred emails waiting for me. And that’s just from one email address. No, I do not read them ALL, and I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in that.

And still, I put together a newsletter. I knew I owed it to those readers who downloaded “In The Best Interest of the Child”. The feedback on the book has been amazing, and readers needed to know WHEN book two, “In The Best Interest of the Child: Mother and Daughter” would be available, as well as print versions for both books. Readers also needed to know how to enter Felicia Denise’s Twelve Days of Christmas on Twitter and Instagram. And last, but not least, readers needed to know something about me.

So, I built, tested and sent a newsletter…after saying a silent apology for adding one more piece of email to the fray.

When I opened my newsletter email this morning, it was loaded. Of course, my first thought was, “Oh great! You screwed it up and they all bounced!”

But that wasn’t the case at all.

I’d forgotten I’d asked subscribers to reply with their birth dates for my monthly birthday celebrations. But they didn’t just send their birth dates. Many of those who have responded so far, introduced themselves, told me their names AND ages and about their families, and asked questions about my book AND me.

And…I was wearing the same big, goofy grin as I read their emails that I’m wearing now.

Now I’m on a mission to provide my subscribers with a newsletter that is informative, detailed, fun, worthy of their time…and only once a month.

Feel free to come along for the ride – Newsletter signup!

I can do this!