The Nitty-Gritty

IN LATE May, writer Catherine Baab-Muguira e-mailed a lengthy newsletter to her Substack subscribers, who number fewer than a thousand, detailing how much she was paid for her first book and how much she spent, in terms of both time and money, getting it published. At the end of her 3,400-word post, she included a one-paragraph postscript asking readers to preorder her book, Poe for Your Problems: Uncommon Advice From History’s Least Likely Self-Help Guru, published in September by Running Press.

In the days after she sent out the newsletter, preorders briefly powered Poe for Your Problems into the top 100 in its category on Amazon, one spot behind talk show host Ellen DeGeneres’s Seriously…I’m Kidding (Grand Central Publishing, 2011). This, in turn, boosted Baab-Muguira’s book’s visibility, leading readers who had never seen her original Substack post to preorder the book, creating a small but self-propelling wave of early interest in Poe for Your Problems.

None of this especially surprises Baab-Muguira, whose work in digital marketing for the financial advising site the Motley Fool has taught her the power of e-mail. “It’s the gold standard in marketing, for very good reasons,” she says. “It’s a very intimate form, and you can encourage people to take the actions that you want whether it’s ‘Buy my newsletter’ in the financial world or ‘Please consider preordering my book’ in the literary world.”