One of my goals for 2021 is to ”start a newsletter.” I dreaded it when I added it to my list of goals at the beginning of the year, for several reasons. First of all, I personally don’t like having my inbox spammed with newsletters. And let’s face it, we receive a lot of them, from every place we’ve ever bought something online to newsletters for artists or authors we’ve decided to follow because we want to keep ourselves updated on what they’re working on. But since there are so many newsletters in my inbox every day, my eyes sort of glaze over and I press delete-delete-delete, and Whoops, did I accidentally delete something important?

And I didn’t want to be another irritant in people’s inboxes, so I kept putting it off, even though I’ve had many author friends trying to talk me into it. “It’s good for you,” they would say. “And it’s a way for your fans to keep up to date with what you’re doing.” I never questioned their arguments, but I still resisted.

Until one day when I scrolled past a post on Facebook, saying something along the lines of “I love author newsletters, drop your favorites in the comments.” And I scrolled through the replies and realized that there are a lot of people out there in the world who enjoy newsletters, who like getting news from people they admire and follow.

And that is what finally made me change my mind and list it as one of my 2021 goals. Albeit a bit gruffly.

And I’ve worked on it the entire first quarter. Not exclusively the newsletter, but it’s been listed every week on my to-do lists in my bullet journal. And I’ve done something every week, too, not just pushing it in front of me. I’ve studied other authors’ newsletters closely. Watched a YouTube tutorial about the technical aspects of it. Picked my writer friends’ brains about their newsletters. And of course, written a “reader magnet” — the story anyone signing up will get for free.

It’s been a lot of work, but maybe mostly because I’ve still been a bit reluctant. And I fully acknowledge that I’d never been able to do had it not been for the support of my newsletter-experienced writer friends, who’ve had infinite patience with my endless questions and grumblings.

And then, one day recently, everything was done, everything came together, and it was ready to go live. So I set it free and watched in wonder when people signed up.

And the most satisfactory thing I’ve done in a long time is scribbling a checkmark next to “Set up a newsletter” on my to-do list.

Should you be interested in signing up for said newsletter, here’s the link. You’ll get a free story with all the Nell Iris qualities you can expect from all my stories: short (7K words), emotional, and romantic.

Nell Iris is a romantic at heart who believes everyone deserves a happy ending. She’s a bona fide bookworm (learned to read long before she started school), wouldn’t dream of going anywhere without something to read (not even the ladies room), loves music (and singing along at the top of her voice but she’s no Celine Dion), and is a real Star Trek nerd (Make it so). She loves words, bullet journals, poetry, wine, coffee-flavored kisses, and fika (a Swedish cultural thing involving coffee and pastry!)

Nell believes passionately in equality for all regardless of race, gender or sexuality, and wants to make the world a better, less hateful, place.

Nell is a bisexual Swedish woman married to the love of her life, a proud mama of a grown daughter, and is approaching 50 faster than she’d like. She lives in the south of Sweden where she spends her days thinking up stories about people falling in love. After dreaming about being a writer for most of her life, she finally was in a place where she could pursue her dream and released her first book in 2017.

Nell Iris writes gay romance, prefers sweet over angsty, short over long, and quirky characters over alpha males.

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