On Friday, I made a mistake and have the email replies to show for it. I set up my first contemporary romance newsletter for Spanish editions of my books and, instead of sending it to the Spanish newsletter subscribers, I sent it to the English newsletter subscribers.

Oops.

This is actually a bit too easy to do with a suite of newsletters like mine. In a newsletter service account, the subscribers are all in one pool, so to speak. They’re divided into groups: any subscriber can belong to multiple groups or just one group. Subscribers are added to groups in different ways: for my lists, the subscribers choose to subscribe to a list. That’s the only way they get added – I never ever add people to my list without their consent, or add subscribers to different lists than the one(s) they’ve chosen. So, the newsletter service puts subscribers in the right group, based on the sign-up form they used or the link they followed. That all makes sense, doesn’t it?

For example, Heroes & Happy Endings is the newsletter for my Deborah Cooke contemporary romances in English. If you follow that link and sign up, you’ll be added to that group for my contemporary romances in English.

You could also subscribe to the newsletter for my historical romances, or the one for my paranormal romances, or for any of those in specific languages for which I have translations. You could have signed up for a guided toour of the Ravensmuir books, which is a newsletter sequence for my historical romance readers. There are a lot of groups on my newsletter dashboard and many subscribers belong to more than one.

Last week, I ticked the box for the Spanish contemporary romance readers group, but I didn’t un-tick the box for the English contemporary romance readers group. It was ticked because I copied the English newsletter to make sure the Spanish one was consistent, then changed out all the copy and links and images – but not the recipient list. It was that easy. I couldn’t call back the emails but I fixed the setting for future Spanish newsletters.

But here’s the wrinkle: if you thought you had been added to another newsletter list without your consent, you might have clicked on the Unsubscribe button at the bottom of the Spanish email. That would be a reasonable thing to do – except it won’t quite work out the way you might have expected. Because the newsletter went to the wrong list, if you unsubscribed from that Spanish newsletter Friday or Saturday, you actually unsubscribed from the English newsletter list. I know. It was a simple error with quite spectacular ramifications.

So this post is just to let you know – if you unsubscribed this past weekend in response to that newsletter, you won’t get any more English newsletters unless you sign up again.

Look up, way up, for that sign-up link.