Welcome to AuthorSend. This guide gives you the lay of the land and walks through your first few minutes. If you'd rather dive straight in, each step links to a full walkthrough.
Find your way around
Your dashboard is organized around what you're trying to get done:
- Home — where things stand today, and what to do next.
- Author Tools — your books, reader magnets, ARC teams, book links, and writing projects.
- Create — Campaigns are the newsletters and one-off emails you send, each starting from a template, including any you've saved. Journeys are automated sequences that send on their own (a welcome series, a launch runway). Social is where you write and schedule posts.
- Plan & measure — Playbook is the marketing plan for a book, Calendar shows everything you've sent and scheduled on one grid, and Analytics shows how your sends performed, plus custom reports and audience-growth charts.
- Audience — Subscribers is everyone on your list, with tabs for Lists, Segments, Tags, and Blocked (anyone you can no longer email). Inbox holds the replies readers send you.
- Grow — Website & Pages (your author website and your landing pages) and Forms: the surfaces you use to collect new readers.
Account and workspace settings, including the images you reuse across emails, pages, and forms, live under your avatar in the top-right, not in the sidebar.
Your first few minutes
The first time you open your dashboard, Quill (your assistant in AuthorSend) walks you through four short steps:
- Where you're starting. Say whether you're moving a list, starting one, or have a book coming out, and give the name on your covers. Your sending address is made from it.
- Your books. Paste a link to one of your books, or search your name, and the rest of your catalog comes in with covers and blurbs. See Build from my book.
- Your look and voice. A logo, one color, and how Quill should sound when it writes for you.
- What's ready. Your website, made from your book, and the one thing to do next.
You can skip any step and come back to it. After that, Home shows one next step at a time, what's already done, and everything else folded under "more when you're ready."
Bring your readers over
Import a CSV yourself, or have us move your list, tags, and templates from another platform for free. See Import your readers — or, if you're leaving another tool, Switching to AuthorSend.
Write your first newsletter
From Home, choose Write it with Quill: tell Quill what you want to say and it drafts the email in your voice for you to edit. Send it to yourself first to see it the way a reader will. See Send your first campaign.
The first time you send to readers, you'll be asked for a mailing address, which the law requires in every newsletter. It doesn't have to be your home: see A mailing address that isn't your home.
Choose how your email is sent
AuthorSend sends from a shared AuthorSend address straight away. For the best deliverability, send from your own authenticated domain when you're ready. See Set up your sending identity.
Who AuthorSend is for
AuthorSend is built for any writer with an audience — novelists and nonfiction authors, but also coaches, speakers, newsletter writers, and marketers. Every plan includes the core toolkit (automations, segmentation, landing pages, a website, and the AI assistant); higher tiers add room to grow, a custom sending domain, and the custom report builder.