I just sent the following email out to my old newsletter subscribers. It was, uh, less than successful, so I’m posting it here as well in case a few more people might see it. And also as a sort of lazily-written announcement. New newsletter subscribers are just as welcome as returning ones 🙂

Hola!

I think it’s been three years since I last sent an email to this list, so you may have totally forgotten it existed, I know I’m not even sure this is the correct address to mail this to. I hope it is though, and that even if you’d forgotten you’d subscribed to this list once upon a time you haven’t forgotten me. I hope that for a lot of reasons, one of which is that I’m resurrecting the ole newsletter.

Yeppers, and it’s going to be better than ever!

For one thing, I won’t be sending it out every month. Forcing myself to send it on the first of each month just didn’t work. The result was a few newsletters the point of which was, “Well, I have nothing to say really…” *sigh* So, yeah, no more of that. From now on I’m only going to send out a newsletter when I have a reason to send out a newsletter. A good reason. A reason like I’ve got an anthology that just opened to submissions, or one of my books has been released. I’ll also send out occasional newsletters with exclusive content (stories, poems, excerpts) I’ve written and special offers (discounts or giveaways), but no more “Uh… so it’s the first of the month…” letters. Nope.

Secondly, I’m shifting to using MailChimp to manage the mailing list. Partly I’m doing this because it’s pretty (do you remember the old sign-up forms? Man were they UGLY), but also partly because they give me all sorts of fun toys and HTML-based templates I can use to make the newsletter look nice and be easier to read than the older, .pdf versions.

The only downside to this change is that it’ll require you to re-subscribe to my newsletter. In theory I could import all the email addresses from the old newsletter into the new newsletter manager but I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to do that for two reasons. The first is that I’ve lost the password to get into the admin area of this newsletter list…

…I wish I were joking.

Worst of all? There’s no password retrieval system that I can find. So that’s fun >_< The other reason, which would be relevant even if I hadn’t lost my password, is that I don’t want to presume you still want to receive my newsletters. It has been several years since I sent one. People change, could be you’re no longer interested. Obviously I hope that’s not the case, but you never know, right? So if you’d like to subscribe to my new and improved, super spiffy newsletter you can do that by clicking right here:

Rhonda’s New Newsletter

The only thing you need to put into that form is your email address and if you have any troubles email me at rhonda@jofigure.com . Do not try to send an email to me by hitting ‘Reply’ to this email though, because within hours of my sending this I’m going to delete this old mailing list (I haven’t lost the password for that!) to complete the shift to the new system. I really hope to ‘see’ you there 🙂

Best,
Rhonda