As an indie, you are responsible for everything to do with selling your books: writing, editing, formatting, cover design, publishing, pricing, marketing and so on and so on.
Sure, some of these should be given over to professionals to do (such as editing, and cover design) but you are ultimately responsible for ensuring that everything associated with your book is working properly, and the only way you can do that is to test it, constantly.
Today, I accidentally discovered that my online newsletter signup form was defective. I've had a Mailchimp form for a number of years now, with 82 followers. (Seriously, if you aren't getting these sign ups signed up yet, you need a kick up the axle!). I've had 3 new sign-ups just this month, so all seems to be working OK, right?
Today, an associate of mine asked me to sign her up to it, as she is a bit of a technophobe and couldn't really do it herself. I found the online form, added her name and email to the obligatory fields, and for the full address box I just added her city, as I like to know where my followers are from. The address box was always 'optional'. I sent the form, but the thing bounced, stating that I needed to fill in the full address fields first ie it was 'obligatory'. I never set it like that, and when I went to my Mailchimp account to see what the issue was, it wasn't showing as a 'required field', so I've no idea what was going on.
If I were trying to sign up to follow me, and had been asked to complete a full address, I'd have had second thoughts and not bothered. So, all I could do was delete the field so that the issue vanished. Had I not discovered it so promptly, I wonder how many potential buyers the form would have put off from signing up, and therefore how many people/followers/fans/potential clients would have lost.
If you wish to sign up to my form, and get a FREE exclusive ebook as a thanks, click here!