Professionalism. Legitimacy. Looking Good On Paper. That’s how you convince people you aren’t some weirdo in a shed scamming email addresses. The truth of the matter is people judge books by covers all the time. And if you are an author or other smol creative type, people expect all your cogs to be pretty. Have an ugly cog? A rack room website? A questionable way to sign up for a newsletter? You’ll go in the “spam” bin of consumers faster than “dear beneficiary emails”.

Becoming a successful author creative is more than writing creating decent books products. If you want to be taken seriously, you have to have the pretty cogs. As a veteran in this publishing circus, I can tell you there are an overwhelming amount of cogs to choose from these days. Some of them are an excellent deal and well others suck your time and money. A lot of the services are necessary to up your author game, but that doesn’t always mean you have to pay through the nose. Without further ado, I present the bare bones of shiny cogs you should put on your list of purchase.

• SendFox: Why do I want this? You need an email list. I don’t care what your uncle’s cousin’s best friend back home said about selling books in the Wal-Mart parking lot either. Social Media is great, but you don’t own those platforms. You say something a bot doesn’t like, whoops you are cut off from your fans during your big launch. But not if you had a legitimate email list. Bonus: SendFox is becoming a major player with many integrations being available to make your life easier. (Check mine out at sendfox.com/shannonmcroberts)

• SleekBio: Why do I want this? You need to be locatable on the internet. I don’t care if you don’t know how to build a website. If you can internet, you can use SleekBio. It used to be you had to have a dot com to look good, but these days ACTUALLY having a good looking is more important than having fancy web addresses. Why pay someone through the nose to make a fancy website when you could make something just as pretty. I mean how many shortened links do we click on in a day? Nobody is going to snub you for using a landing page. Bonus: SleekBio and SendFox work well together with seamless integration. (Check mine out at sleekbio.com/shannonmcroberts)

• KingSumo: Why do I want this? Now you have a book, a newsletter service, and a snazzy little mini-website. But, how do you get people to sign up for your newsletter? No, the answer isn’t to spam the link like a stuck .wav file in an AOL chatroom or to buy a list out the back of someone’s van. You my friend can run an awesome giveaway with a few simple clicks while also collecting those precious emails in a GDPR compliant manner. No piecing together several free services or using confusing software. Bonus: KingSumo and SendFox integrate so all those emails get sent to your list and drip sequences.

Now, I know what you are thinking. These all sound great and appear to play well together, but what’s the bottom line? How much will this cost out of pocket? At the time of writing this article, SleekBio has a lifetime deal starting at $19.00. KingSumo has a lifetime deal for $49.00. SendFox starts at a lifetime deal for 5K subs at $49.00. (In comparison, MailerLite who I used to use, charges $30.00 a month for 5K subs.)

So for like $117.00 plus any applicable tax you could have a mini-website, an email service for up to 5K subs, and you can run giveaways to build your audience. And the payment is like a 1 time fee…upfront…no strings attached. These items may be cheap, but they are APPSUMO Originals, which means APPSUMO creates and supports these items. Also, several high profile people use these services….which means you don’t have to worry about the product going belly-up!

Ready to check out how to get these amazing products? Visit APPSUMO over at http://fbuy.me/v/obsidianpoetpress_1 (Yeah it’s an affiliate link and if you buy something, they give me store credit at no cost to you. Store credit helps me buy other things to test.)