Email spam. We all get it. We all hate it. What might be surprising is how many in the industry of book publishing are not just receiving spam but also sending it.

But what exactly constitutes email spam? Wikipedia says,

E-mail spam, also known as unsolicited bulk email (UBE) or unsolicited commercial email (UCE), is the practice of sending unwanted e-mail messages, frequently with commercial content, in large quantities to an indiscriminate set of recipients.

The two keywords there are “unsolicited” and “indiscriminate.” Lately, I’ve been getting quite a few emails that I think qualify as both, from unexpected sources. Some are promotional emails for a service or website concerning books in general or romance novels specifically, but most are advertisements for new book releases. I’m not talking about author newsletters that I’ve subscribed to or done anything that would have given my permission to be subscribed. No, these emails are arriving at our business contact emails (i.e. various “contact@” emails), addresses that we list on our sites but have never subscribed to any kind of mailing list. I’ve never been spammed by an author directly, but I have gotten such messages from publicists and directly from publishers themselves—big NYC publishers who, in my opinion, really ought to know better than to send unsolicited emails. So authors, be careful who you hire and make it clear to those who do promotions for you that you don’t want them to send unsolicited emails on your behalf.

Now, I’m not saying that no one should ever send an unsolicited email of a commercial nature. I’ve received commercial/advertisement emails that I didn’t feel was spam, and before writing this column, I had to figure out exactly what I would consider spam and what I wouldn’t. Here’s where the “indiscriminate” part comes into play. First of all, if the email doesn’t address us, our business, or our website title by (the correct!) name, then it’s an indiscriminate advertisement. If it does use the correct salutation but has no relevance to us or the services we offer, it’s indiscriminate advertisement. One example of this is an unsolicited new book release announcement to the contact address at AccessRomance, a community site that only promotes the books of its own authors (the ones listed on the sidebar). We don’t do reviews. We don’t create buzz on books that we personally liked on this site. We promote our authors, and that’s it. So when our contact address somehow ends up on a publicist or publisher’s mailing list, that means said publisher or publicist took it upon themselves to decide that we might be interested in spreading the word on this product product (they were wrong), and so they went to our site, found our contact email, and added it to their list.

Folks, this is called spamming. I’m not going to name names, but within the time span of a couple of weeks, I got three such emails from the same person at a NYC publisher. After the first one, I informed him that it was unsolicited and asked to be removed from his list. I had to reply to two more of his messages with the same request before the emails finally stopped arriving in my inbox. I’ll admit I was probably a bit rude to him, but the subject of spam does seem to get people unreasonably riled up, doesn’t it?

And it’s that excessive anger on the part of spam recipients that can easily get authors in trouble when they send out newsletters. As a company that runs hosting on our own server and also sends out newsletters for a huge number of authors, we get hit by the spam deluge threefold. Firstly, we’re in a constant struggle to prevent spam from being sent to our hosted clients, including ourselves. Secondly, the spam attacks on our mail system, contact forms, message boards, and blogs use up resources and cost us money. And thirdly, we have to make sure that the newsletters we send out don’t get marked as spam, the end result of which could be blacklisting by email service providers such as Yahoo! and AOL, preventing all of our authors’ newsletters from being delivered to those subscribers.

To stop that from happening, you have to play by the rules. Email service providers are under tremendous pressure to block spam, and because of that, they can be merciless on anyone that their customers tell them are spammers. If you have a website hosted by a big company, you most likely agreed to Terms of Service that stated you can’t send out newsletters to a list without a double opt-in. (You did read the Terms of Service, right? Yeah, I didn’t think so. No one does. But trust me, it’s there, and it’s something you should be concerned about if you send out newsletters.) So, what’s a double opt-in? It’s where subscribers, after submitting the form to join the mailing list, get an email asking for confirmation, and only after they’ve clicked the link in that email are they actually subscribed to the list.

This method generally doesn’t work for authors that want to build up a mailing list by running a traditional type of contest, where the entries are collected either manually or automatically in some sort of database, and the emails are then manually added to the author’s newsletter list. We currently do have the ability to ask all those email recipients to confirm their subscription, but this is an ineffective way to build a list, because very few actually click on that link.

There are ways around all of this, however. Here’s what we’ve done to make sure we play it safe and are still able to help our authors grow their list numbers:

1. Never, ever add an email address to a list without proof of consent. If you run a contest where you add entrants to your mailing list, make it crystal clear in your contest rules that entrants are giving you permission to do so. But that alone is not enough. You need proof that this person actually entered your contest. This means you must have some sort of log that shows the time s/he entered the contest—and from which IP it was done. That’s the kind of evidence an email service provider would require to unblock you if you’re ever mistakenly identified as a spammer. We know this from experience and recently had to produce that proof to a provider that had blocked us. That subscriber had entered our client’s contest almost two years ago, so make sure you get the proof and then keep it!

This, of course, means that you can’t go about adding emails to your list willy nilly. Some authors collect email addresses when they’re at conferences, but verbal consent is not proof, and I personally would not trust anyone to remember that they gave you such permission. People frequently mark as spam the newsletters that they somehow agreed to receive, and the only party that gets in trouble when that happens is the one that sent the newsletter in the first place. If you have no proof of consent, the safest thing to do is to go for the double opt-in and send out those confirmation request emails.

2. Use content specific subjects. You want your newsletter to not look like spam. Include your name and/or the name of your book, etc. This is a good rule of thumb for your personal emails, too. An email titled “Hi” has a high probability of being caught in a spam filter.

3. Provide contact information. At the bottom of your newsletter, you should include information about who was responsible for sending the newsletter, including a snail mail address and a contact telephone number. On behalf of our clients, we use our business contact information for this purpose.

4. Make sure users can unsubscribe. The bottom of the newsletter must contain a clear and visible link to where the user can unsubscribe. It should be readable and easy to find.

5. Run a newsletter list contest. I’m a huge fan of this option. Instead of collecting entries manually or in a database, have entrants subscribe themselves to the mailing list, and then draw winners from that list. It’s a win-win solution. With this method, there can never be any doubt that the entrant knew s/he will be subscribed to the newsletter. If you use the right kind of mailing list program (phpList is awesome), you’d have no problem producing proof of consent. You never have to manually add a list of emails from your contest entries, and entrants, as long as they stay subscribed to your list, are eligible to win all future contests without having to re-enter.

As with most things in life, how not to become a spammer really is just a matter of respecting boundaries and following the golden rule. For bulk emailing such as newsletters, make sure they’re solicited and that you have proof of consent. For more targeted, specific advertisement (such as that done by my special friend from the aforementioned NYC publisher), make sure it’s personalized and pertinent. And for goodness sake, never just assume that someone else would be interested in what you’re trying to sell, because trust me, if they didn’t want that email, they probably won’t end up buying the book.

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This article was originally posted on Romancing the Blog.