Write Good or Die

your list clean. What this means is you should check for bounces, disabled accounts, old email addresses that are effectively "dead," because someone changed their email service—and check your list of subscribers regularly. It's usually fairly painless to do this and might take you a few minutes a week if you keep up with it.
    8. Do not abuse the subscribers. Use your newsletter to give information that benefits your readers. This would include updates about your writing, anything you're doing of interest at your website, and more. Remember to benefit the readers. Do not send bulk invites to anyone. Instead, let people know you have a newsletter sign-up at your website. Share this on message boards as you would any information. If you use a social networking site, let the friends in your network know about the newsletter, as well. No tricks, no abuse, no sharing your list with anyone.
    All right, this is just a basic outline for the author email newsletter. Go subscribe to various writers' newsletters to see what they're doing. Some of the writers are very personable and chatty while others simply announce a book when it comes out with a brief, nice note. Still others get more elaborate. The more valuable the information you offer readers, the more subscribers you'll get.

    Douglas Clegg— http://www.douglasclegg.com
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31. EIGHT FEARLESS FORECASTS FOR THE FUTURE OF EBOOKS
    By Scott Nicholson
    http://hauntedcomputer.com

    I haven’t had a good laugh at my expense in ages (or at least since this morning when I snorted coffee while browsing “No Hope For the Human Race), so it’s time to make some outlandish predictions about the future of ebooks.
    First, let me qualify by saying many of my hunches about the digital evolution have been close to the mark. That’s mostly because I predict things are happening faster than any of us realize, I believe every six weeks is an entirely different epoch in ebook evolution, and I am quite convinced I don’t know anything and therefore will only make outlandish predictions instead of putting forth the effort required to figure out what is actually happening. Call me lazy.
    In late 2010, I predicted free books and lending libraries would be widely available by 2015. I was four years late, as Amazon made it happen at the end of 2011. But I was also prepared, as I gave away hundreds of thousands of Kindle books and got thousands of library loans.
    When the lending library, KDP Select, and the barrage of free books began, I predicted it would be dead before summer. Now summer is here and many authors are leaving the Select program because—gosh, who would have guessed?—having 4,000 free Kindle books every day pretty much killed a lot of consumer incentive to actually pay for books and probably left a Steve-Jobs-ego-sized hole in the Amazon ebook revenue stream.
    I also figured last year was the era of the 99-cent bestsellers, and that Amazon would eventually feel confident enough of its dominant market share to “encourage” higher prices, and current changes to those brilliant Amazon algorithms suggest that free won’t help you much and cheap won’t help you much, either.
    So, I got at least two things right out of the hundred predictions I’ve made. Consider me an expert,
    Now, as a self-appointed genius, I unveil my Ridiculously Unlikely Armchair Observations for The Ebook Revolution.
    1) The revolution is over. Indie is not cool, it’s commonplace. The stick-it-to-the-man ethos is now the hallmark of bitter writers who wish they had sold out to the Big Six when the Big Six still had money. Indie is not only mainstream, it’s Main Street. The only people who express the slightest bit of surprise about modern indie success are publishers, who had been paying no attention whatsoever.
    2) The Golden Age is also over. Sure, ebooks will still be around, but those halcyon days of slapping up a file and making six figures a year by clicking a button and getting your cat to write a five-star review are over. For readers, the choices will continue to proliferate, as will devices, distribution methods, and price ranges. But today I am declaring that by 2015, most ebooks will be free, ad-supported, or delivered through a subscription service or lending library. It just makes too much sense for it to turn out otherwise.
    3) Half of today’s indie writers will quit in 2013. Yes, it’s going to get harder. The rest of 2012 will serve as the gauntlet, and only the committed