“Cold Email is Spam!” I Have to Disagree.

Part II. Check older blog posts here.

“Cold email is SPAM!” “It’s dead with no chance of resurrection." I have heard this many times. I have to disagree. Everything I have achieved on the book promotion journey - I have accomplished through cold emailing.

I reached out to journalists, reporters, and radio show producers. It went very successfully although I had to use different strategies to receive responses. Almost every reply led me to amazing results. Cold emails and an appropriate approach brought my book to be a subject for discussion on world radio stations or a feature story on the pages of magazines.

In my book From Zero to Self-published Hero (Chapter 11), I provide email templates that you can use for your book promotion. You will learn how to compose a winning pitch letter and where to send it.

From my perspective, journalists always look around for the next big thing to deliver it to the world as one of the firsts. My goal was to help them discover a compelling story that I had.

I was gathering information online, reading magazines, doing my research, learning, and looking for the names and contact information of journalists and reporters. I only chose those who covered similar topics. It took a lot of time going through reporters' works and articles, but I wanted my story to be relevant to that particular journalist.

In my database, I have about 500 contacts of reporters who may be interested in creating an article and broadcasting a life story like mine.

To get a journalist interested, I needed to write a catchy email. But that was not all. The most important thing was the subject line.

Would you agree with me if I said that the subject line is the most fundamental part of the cold email? It is a significant item that appears first in the sight of a recipient. It seems to me that one of the greatest mistakes is making it trivial and boring. That one-line sentence has to be catchy, intriguing, or even shocking if you will. In my case, it was not hard to do since my story was pretty extraordinary already.

Some time ago I had read an article about the impact of eye-catching electronic mail on the human brain. I found it interesting, that truly effective subject lines affect the psychosomatic system of recipients, causing increased activities in the brain and psychological reaction. Based on these emotions, he or she decides whether or not to proceed further and whether to open an email and read the rest.

Many think that a great subject line is 95% of the success. There’s no doubt that the subject should directly or indirectly indicate that the intrigue will be disclosed further in the body of the email, therefore the recipient must read it. Questions that were raised in the receiver’s mind by looking at the subject line must be properly clarified and answered in the body of the email.

At the beginning of my journey, my first subject line looked pretty simple: a logline showing the main conflict of the story. You can check the examples in Chapter 11 of the book From Zero to Self-published Hero.

As time passed by, I gained more media attention and participated in a few more radio interviews, resulting in more magazine articles. I could incorporate those eye-catching references in the subject line.

I prefer to keep the letter for journalists and reporters short, simple, and to the point. Journalists probably receive hundreds of pitches a day. I assume they want to read through them as fast as possible. My email looked like a brief story description, followed by a short bio and my contact information. Most of the time, I included links for them to view other publications about my story.

Your successful cold email is just a few pages away. Check my book From Zero to Self-published Hero to discover all the secrets to cold emailing success.

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By the way, you can find my other books’ links below. Some of them are free to download.

The first in a trilogy, a literary award winner: Girl, Taken - A True Story of Abduction, Captivity and Survival. It’s my personal story of kidnapping and abuse survival.

The second in a trilogy: What Did Not Kill Me, Made Me. It’s a story of hope and achieving happiness against all the odds in life.

Thank you for your time and stay awesome!

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