Rebuilding a Mailing List from Scratch
My list of 150+ readers is gone. It's all my fault due to a simple oversight.
Over two decades ago when I started my site for my writing, I knew it was important to have a mailing list. Here in 2025, newsletters and mailing lists are everywhere. But in the mid-2000s, everyone was simply promoting to readers via social media. Over and over again, I heard how it was important to build a list and have a direct way to speak to your audience. So that's what I did.
Of course I've bootstrapped everything I've done with my writing career and settled on the free plan offered by MailChimp. And that was it. For years and years I sent an email whenever needed (quite rarely) to announce a new book or some achievement I'd think readers would want to know.
MailChimp decided not too long ago to raise prices and put some hefty limits on how much email you could send. Even me, with a tiny list would hit a paid tier and to me, it wasn't worth it. For months I got the "your account will be deleted" emails and I ignored them because I could rebuild my list again in the future. Except I couldn't. You see, I never backed up my list. Cue facepalm emojis.
About three months ago I thought I should figure out a way to rebuild said list and went digging for an export. I did export it, right? Google Drive? Not there. Three other Google Drives I have? Nope. iCloud drive? Zero search results. My personal writing files and folders on my computer? Zilch. Over the course of three hours I learned the hard truth: I never actually backed up my author mailing list. Every name and email was gone into the ether.
Now I have to rebuild my author list from scratch.
Well... almost. In all my archival digging, I had two reprieves. The first was back in the day MailChimp would send me a "you have new subscribers" alert that contained the info for who subscribed. Because I'm a digital packrat, I kept some of those. After sifting through the emails I landed on 12 subscribers. Not great, but it's 12 more than zero.
The second reprieve came from the sheer luck of connecting my new newsletter system to GumRoad, which is how I've personally sold my eBooks outside of the big sellers for years. It's an incredible platform and unbeknownst to me, it had the emails of everyone who'd bought my books! BAM! When I connected GumRoad to CoverKit (now simply called Kit), it imported all my "customers" which is wild.
Now my list is totaling 107 people. On paper that sounds great, but I'm absolutely sure some, if not many, of the emails on that list are stale. In addition I'm sure there's people who don't want to be subscribed. Part of my rebuilding of my list is to also clean it from email addresses that aren't valid or from people who don't want to be on it. This is still in addition to those lost from my original list who never bought any of my digital items on GumRoad.
So... if you're reading this and received my Aaron Crocco Newsletter years ago, please go to the homepage and re-subscribe. You're probably not subscribed anymore. It takes a few seconds, then you confirm your email, and you'll be set. If you try to subscribe and it says you're already on the list, then thanks for buying something of mine years ago and I appreciate it.
Data loss for me, especially as someone as technical as I am, is simply frustrating. This experience has reminded me once more that if I think data is going to be deleted, I REALLY need to make sure I have a backup. I lost a ton of data years ago by cleaning out my Google Drive and never verified the files were intact. Fun fact: they weren't and many things I had on GDrive have been lost forever.
Hard lessons are learned usually from our own mistakes. My hope is to recover from this one as gracefully as I can.
Thanks for reading.