Mike Newton
15-year marketing vet. Learning book marketing. Sharing the data.
I spent 15 years doing consumer marketing at companies like Discord, NZXT, Fellow, and Yunomi. Now I'm applying that same data-driven approach to book marketing — starting with the largest analysis of author email marketing I could find. I built Authormatic to do the research. This site is where I share what we learn.
The Backstory
My career has been in consumer marketing — email, growth, community — across gaming, hardware, and food & beverage. I've worked at companies where the data mattered more than the vibes, and where you could measure whether something actually worked.
I got into book marketing the way a lot of people do: I started writing. And then I started looking for advice on how to reach readers. What I found was a lot of opinions dressed up as strategy, and almost no real data. The @tiredbookdad thing started as me just documenting what I was figuring out.
I wanted data that didn't exist, so I built it. Authormatic started as a question: what are successful fiction authors actually doing with email? We subscribed to 1,126 author newsletters, read 962 emails, and mapped the email providers of 491 bestselling fiction authors. That dataset is the foundation of everything on this site.
I'm not claiming to be a book marketing expert. I'm a marketing professional who's learning this space and sharing the data as I go. When I'm wrong, the data will show it.
What I Bring to This
15 Years in Consumer Marketing
Email, growth, and community across gaming, hardware, food & beverage.
Original Research
1,126 newsletter subscriptions. 962 emails analyzed. 491 authors' email providers mapped.
The Authormatic Dataset
Proprietary data on what tools authors actually use and how they use them.
Not a Book Marketing Expert
Transparent about learning in public. Opinions are data-backed, not guru-backed.
What Authormatic Covers
- ■ Email marketing strategy for indie and self-published authors
- ■ Email Provider and tool analysis based on data. Not reviews, not affiliate links
- ■ Data-driven recommendations. If we can't back it with numbers, we say so.