Not finding a promo that suits your book? You want to experiment with running your own. From personal experience, I can tell you that it does take a little time--people will sometimes submit crazily off-theme books, so you have to keep an eye open. But if there are other people on BF with similar books, it might give you a venue for them. If there aren't, it will likely flop, but there's no way to know without trying.

Thanks Bill. You're absolutely right. And it's only $10/month so no huge investment.

I recently changed my company imprint name and address. So my paperback was changed with just the title information. Now Amazon says the spine:
"Reduce the size of your spine text in your cover file. Spine text needs at least 0.0625" (1.6 mm) space on either side so that it doesn't wrap onto the front or back cover"

But it's the same cover???

I tried to increase the size of the book by 10 pages. That didn't work. Does the actual cover need to be altered? And why was it accepted before?

The substack option does sound appealing because it's free. But I get what you're saying about content. And since I don't want to contribute shorts at the moment, I'm not changing to it. But I bet a lot of writers are just simply using it as a free email service. I wonder.

I took a look at EmailOctopus. It's affordable, but still more than Mailerlite for my 2500-5000 plan. Mailerlite never forced me to change from their old plan so I still get the old pricing--could be more worth it it to change over if you're just building your readers/fans though.

Not finding a promo that suits your book? You want to experiment with running your own. From personal experience, I can tell you that it does take a little time--people will sometimes submit crazily off-theme books, so you have to keep an eye open. But if there are other people on BF with similar books, it might give you a venue for them. If there aren't, it will likely flop, but there's no way to know without trying.

I've had good experience with Mailerlite. Uptime is good, technical issues are few, and tech support is strong. I also like the newsletter creation process better than I did Mailchimp's.

I will briefly repeat what I've said about Substack in other threads. As Jeff and Lorri point out, Substack is really designed for a different purpose, so how you use your newsletter makes a big difference. If it really is a newsletter in the traditional sense--that is, if you just advertise new releases, sales, public appearances, etc., then that's indeed not the purpose of Substack. A Substack newsletter can include those kinds of announcements, but it's designed for the distribution of serial content. There's no reason you can't do whatever you want with it, and it is free, but keep in mind that at some point, Substack, which makes money through a 10% cut in paid subscriptions, might get fussy about people who aren't making any effort to get paid subscriptions (which you aren't going to get just from an announcement newsletter). In other words, you might have to switch at some point in the future.

For that reason, I'd recommend Substack only for people who want to publish serialized content. (If you think you have subscribers who just want the announcements, you can make the other content a separate section and give readers the option of signing up for it or not.) What Substack does very well is get eyes on your content, which appears not only in your newsletter but on your own personal substack. In other words, it's a combination newsletter/blog platform. If you do blog, you'll find that things you post on Substack will normally outperform things on your own blog unless you've built up a huge blog audience. I can get ten times the views on Substack without working up a sweat, but usually, it's even more than that. As all Substack uses are free, you can maintain an email list, create blog posts, create podcasts, and even create video, all for free. For new authors, it's worth at least trying because it's cost-effective. Be warned, however, that building subscription income is a time-consuming process. But if your posts lead logically to your published books, some of your Substack subscribers (even the free ones, who will be far more numerous) will buy your books. Building an audience also requires time--if you want people to interact with you, you need to interact with them). Interaction will probably be more productive than on other social media platforms.