Frequently Asked Questions

Because email is a shared-IP business. We send all author email through a shared Amazon SES sending pool, and one author who imports a 100,000-address scraped list and blasts it can torch deliverability for every other author on the platform. The caps mean: bring your real, opted-in subscribers; we will deliver them. Don't blast strangers; we are not the right service for that.

Free: 100 lifetime imports total. Author: 1,000 per rolling 7 days, 10,000 lifetime. Active: 5,000 per rolling 7 days, 50,000 lifetime. Pro: 25,000 per rolling 7 days, 250,000 lifetime. The embeddable signup widget is uncapped — that's the encouraged growth path.

Re-confirmation makes the imported list the same kind of clean as a list you grew from scratch with double opt-in: only people who actually want your email are on it. That single thing — list quality — is the biggest factor in whether your emails land in inboxes or in spam folders.

On the Free tier, re-confirmation is mandatory; you cannot skip it. On paid tiers, you can skip re-confirmation if (a) you attest the imported subscribers actively engaged with you in the last 90 days and (b) your account is at least 30 days old. Submitting a false attestation is a Terms violation.

Your account is automatically suspended and all your pending campaigns are cancelled. We'll email you so you can review the situation. The thresholds (rolling 7 days, after at least 100 sends): hard-bounce rate ≥ 2%, or complaint rate ≥ 0.1%. These are tighter than Amazon SES's own thresholds (5% / 0.1% sustained) so we suspend internally before AWS suspends us externally.

If you're suspended for a technical reason (one specific list went bad after you imported a stale CSV), we will, in good faith, work with you to clean it up and restore service. If you're suspended because you imported a purchased or scraped list — that's a Terms violation and the suspension is permanent.

EPUB, PDF, DOCX, and plain text. We extract up to ~250,000 characters of clean text — enough to cover most novels and a sizable chunk of even very long manuscripts. The original file is processed once and not retained.

It doesn't generalise. The first step pulls out structured material from your manuscript — themes, characters, comparable books, tone keywords, and verbatim quotable passages. Every email is then constructed around those specifics, with explicit instruction to open with a concrete moment from your book rather than generic enthusiasm. You can edit any draft, regenerate any single slot, or keep the lot as-is.

AuthorMailingLists has three kinds of campaigns. Pick whichever fits what you're trying to do — they can all run at the same time on the same list.

• One-off email — a single email you write yourself. Send now, schedule for later, or save as a draft. Optional A/B subject-line testing. Use this for announcements, news, sale alerts, anything time-bound.
• Sequence from a book — a fixed-length series the AI drafts from one of your books. Choose a template (5-email launch / 12 weekly themes / 3-email re-engagement) and review before sending. Use this for a coordinated push around a launch or a finite re-engagement run.
• Always-On (Evergreen) — a continuous engine that auto-generates one fresh email on your chosen cadence (weekly, biweekly, monthly), drawing from your book catalogue. Set it once; it keeps going forever. Use this so your list stays warm without you having to think about it.

One door, one place: Campaigns → New campaign. That opens a hub with three cards (One-off / Sequence / Always-On); pick one and the form for that subtype loads. The destination is the same whether you start from the Campaigns page, a book detail page, or a list detail page — the relevant field is just pre-filled for you.

• Click New sequence from a book detail page → that book is pre-selected.
• Click Enable Always-On from a list detail page → that list is pre-selected.

Manage in context, create at the hub.

Once you enable Always-On for a list, a background worker handles the rest:

1. ~24 hours after you enable it, the AI drafts the first email — pulling a theme, a quotable passage, or a tone hook from one of your books.
2. Depending on your approval mode, the draft either ships automatically, ships after a 24-hour review window, or waits for your explicit approval.
3. After it sends, the worker schedules the next one for cadence-period later (7 / 14 / 30 / 60 days).

The engine keeps a 90-day anti-repetition window per list — it won't reuse the same theme, hook, or quotable passage within 90 days, so subscribers don't get the same angle twice in a row.

Drafts are generated one day in advance, not weeks ahead. That means you can change cadence, edit which books it draws from, or swap approval modes at any time and the next draft will reflect your new settings.

Three options when you enable or edit an Always-On campaign:

• Review or default-ship (24h window) — recommended default. The draft sits for 24 hours; you can edit it or cancel it, and if you do nothing it ships on schedule. Best of both worlds: hands-off when life is busy, but you always have a safety window.
• Auto-ship — the draft generates and sends without any review pause. Pure set-and-forget. Use this once you trust the output and don't want any friction.
• Review required — the draft waits indefinitely until you approve it. Nothing ships without your explicit click. Use this for high-stakes lists where you'd rather miss a send than send something you didn't see.

You can change the approval mode at any time from the list detail page → Always-On panel → Edit settings.

Two ways to get to the editor:

• From the Campaigns page — find the Always-On row, click the Source cell ("all books" / "2 books") or the Edit button on the right. Either drops you straight into the source-books picker with the panel pre-expanded.
• From the list detail page — scroll to the Always-On panel and expand Edit settings — cadence, approval, source books.

Tick specific books to limit the rotation to just those, or leave them all unchecked to draw from every book in your catalogue with extracted themes. Changes take effect on the next draft generation (within ~24 hours).

Pick a book that has finished theme extraction, then pick a template:

• 5-email launch — for the week or two around a release. Builds anticipation, hits launch day, follows up with social proof.
• 12 weekly themes — three months of newsletters, each one drawing on a different theme from the book. Good for new lists or sustained engagement.
• 3-email re-engagement — a short, low-key sequence aimed at warming up cold subscribers before you give up on them.

The AI drafts every slot up front (1-3 minutes). You then review the drafts, edit anything you want, and bulk-schedule them into a list. Sequences are fixed-length — they finish when the last slot sends, unlike Always-On which never stops.

Yes — all three controls live on the list detail page, in the Always-On panel:

• Pause — stops generating new drafts and stops scheduled sends. Existing drafts that are mid-review window stay where they are.
• Resume — picks back up on the same cadence, scheduling the next draft from "now."
• Disable — turns it off entirely. No more drafts; no more sends. You'd need to re-create it from Campaigns → New campaign → Always-On if you want it back.

Pausing does not count against your monthly email cap — the cap is based on what actually ships.

Yes. A list can have one Always-On engine plus any number of one-offs plus any number of sequences targeted at it, all running together. The sender, footer, and unsubscribe behaviour are identical across the three — they're just different ways of generating the email content.

The only thing the system protects you from is sending two emails to the same subscriber on the same day from the same list. If a one-off is scheduled and an Always-On draft would land the same day, the Always-On draft is bumped to the next morning so subscribers don't get two from you in one inbox session.

Because deliverability is the product. A clean confirmed list lands in inboxes; a bloated list with stale or fake addresses ends up in spam — and once you're in spam, even your good emails go there. We default to confirm-by-email (with optional override for highly engaged lists you're importing).

Hard bounces flip the subscriber to bounced; complaints to complained. Both are automatically suppressed from future sends. We surface bounce + complaint counts on every campaign, and we auto-suppress chronically unengaged subscribers (no opens in 90+ days, after at least 120 days on the list) to protect your sender reputation.

Not on launch. Emails currently send from a shared authormailinglists.com domain that we manage. Per-author DKIM-delegated sending domains are planned for the Pro tier.

Three things: (1) we charge by emails sent per month, not subscriber count — your list can grow without your bill changing; (2) you upload your book and AI generates a year of marketing emails grounded in your actual themes, characters, and quotable lines; (3) genre-segmented lists are first-class — your romance subscribers never get your sci-fi releases.

Free — 500 emails/month, 2 lists, embeddable widget, double opt-in. Our footer branding on every send. Author $5/mo — 10,000 emails/month, 5 lists, AI generation, sequence templates, ConvertKit + CSV importers, no footer. Active $12/mo — 40,000 emails/month, 20 lists, A/B subject testing, engagement-based segmentation, native Mailchimp + ConvertKit importers, priority support. Pro $29/mo — 150,000 emails/month, unlimited lists, priority deliverability, dedicated support.

The cap is total emails sent — subscribers × sends. So Author covers a 2,500-subscriber list emailed weekly, or a 10,000-subscriber list emailed monthly. Pick your shape.

Yes. Cancel from your dashboard; you keep paid access through the end of your current billing period, then drop to the Free tier — your subscribers and lists stay intact. Upgrades are prorated; downgrades take effect at period end.

No. We use Anthropic Claude via OpenRouter for theme extraction and email drafting; OpenRouter's default policy with Anthropic does not retain or train on your inputs. Your manuscript text stays in your account database and is not shared with other authors or used as training data.

Tick the A/B box on the campaign composer, write Subject B, set the test percentage (10-50% of the list, default 30%) and the winner-decide window (default 4 hours). We send both subjects to evenly-split halves of the test cohort, measure open rates, then send the winning subject to the rest of the list automatically.

You get a one-line <script> tag per list. Drop it into any page on your website (WordPress, Squarespace, plain HTML, etc.). Visitors enter their email; we send a confirmation email; only confirmed addresses become mailable. Cross-origin safe, no jQuery required, mobile-friendly.

Yes. ConvertKit imports via API key (paste from kit.com → Account → Account Info). Mailchimp imports via OAuth — read-only access, we only pull subscribed members. Both flows default to re-confirmation emails for imported addresses, which we strongly recommend; you can opt out for lists where every subscriber has actively engaged in the last 90 days.

Yes. By design the widget already inherits two things from your site automatically: the font and the text color. Drop it onto a serif site and the field labels render in serif; drop it onto a dark theme and the heading text shows up light. No configuration needed.

For colors that aren't inherited — the button color, the button text color, and the input border color — each list has its own controls on the Embed code page (Lists › your list › Embed code › Customize appearance). You get:

• Three color pickers with both swatch + hex-text input
• Six one-click presets (Neutral dark, Coral, Bootstrap blue, Forest green, Royal purple, Outlined)
• A live preview that shows how the widget will look on both light and dark backgrounds
• Toggle to use a clean system font instead of inheriting (rare, but useful if your site's body font doesn't play nicely with form inputs)

The default is neutral dark — a charcoal button on a transparent background — chosen because it sits cleanly on virtually every author site without tweaking.

Changes take effect within ~5 minutes (we cache the widget JS at the CDN edge for that long).