By Alycia Morales @AlyciaMorales

As the days get warmer and the flowers begin to poke out of the earth, I tend to want to freshen up my home. Many know it as Spring Cleaning. Have you ever considered spring cleaning your writing career? For the next few months, I’m going to share some spring-cleaning tips for writers, covering everything from email inboxes to your office space to your writing itself. Let’s get started!

Your Email Inbox:

Email is something that drives many of us crazy as we watch our inboxes fill up and wonder where we’re going to find the time to empty it out. Top that off with the anxiety of missing an important email, and you’ll find yourself spending an entire day combing through your inbox. Here’s how to spring clean your inbox:

• Create labels for your important emails and things you need to save, such as receipts and client communications. These labels are like your file folders in Dropbox or on your computer. Move the important things you’ve completed into these files/under these labels.
• Look at the subscriptions you’ve signed up for (newsletters, blog posts, etc.) and make sure you’re still receiving value from them. If not, unsubscribe.

We know that as authors we need email lists and want to support our friends by subscribing to theirs. But if we aren’t making the time to open, read, and click through them, we aren’t doing our friends any favors, as it hurts their numbers for them to sit unopened in our inboxes and get deleted. Don’t be afraid to unsubscribe.

Once you’ve made this decision, delete all the related emails or file them. You can even label them and direct them to go into the folder, rather than your inbox, each time one is received.

• Do the same thing you did for subscriptions for advertising from all of your memberships, such as the stores you shop at, the streaming networks you subscribe to, and any non-writing related updates from politicians, colleges/universities, etc. If these are no longer serving you, or maybe you have access to them in apps on your phone, unsubscribe or change your subscription preferences to minimize email notifications landing in your inbox.
• Bulk Delete. Here’s what I do to make the cleaning process go faster:

First, move any email you’re finished with into appropriate folders.

Next, flag the emails you still need to work on or respond to. I use red for items that still need to be addressed, yellow for things I’m awaiting a response to, and green for finished correspondence I may wish to follow up on. I also have a flag for information I want to read or investigate.

Once you’ve done this, it makes it much simpler to bulk select emails and bulk delete them. You’ve already moved what needs saving and flagged what needs keeping. Now all you have to do is start selecting and deleting the multiple emails you wish to clear out of your inbox.

• You can do the same with your saved emails in your folders. I like to clean those out every few years. Especially those containing receipts for tax purposes. I save them seven years then delete them.

Your Newsletter/Email List:

As authors and professionals, we’re encourage to build a platform, and the most important part of that platform is our email list. Why? Because it’s the one thing we own, unlike social media, which is owned by a company who can delete your account or take down their product at any given point in time. (For example: TikTok) Who wants to lose all that content when you could be sharing it via email directly to your subscribers – your super fans?

But, it’s important to keep an eye on your email list and your subscribers. Because sometimes, subscribers can become cold. Meaning, they no longer are engaging with your awesome content. At that point, it’s time to spring clean your email list.

Deleting subscribers (in Kit, this means deleting all of their information) or unsubscribing them (removing them from your list, but their information remains in your subscription program, such as Kit) does three important things:

• It improves your deliverability, keeping you out of spam folders and pushing you into inboxes.
• It may push your open and click rates up within your email program. This allows you to see what your subscribers are truly interested in and may want to see more of.
• It may lower the cost of your email provider subscription, as your list will be smaller.

So, be sure to clean out your email list!

Next month, we’ll take a look at cleaning out our offices and work files. If you have questions about spring cleaning your writing business, feel free to let us know in the comments. We’d love to hear from you!

Alycia Morales is a freelance editor and writer. Her work has been featured in numerous magazines and several compilation books. Thanks to her mad editing skills, her clients have won multiple awards in several national contests. In addition, she’s the prior Conference Assistant for the Blue Ridge Mountains Christian Writers Conference. Alycia is currently working on a nonfiction project while characters are running around in her mind waiting to be released into children’s books and novels. Surviving the Year of Firsts: A Mom’s Guide to Grieving Child Loss released on September 17, 2024.

When she isn’t busy writing, editing, and reading, Alycia enjoys spending time with her husband taking hikes in the Blue Ridge Mountains of the Carolinas or running off to the beach with friends. She loves coffee, sweet tea, crafting, and watching crime shows.

Alycia can be found at alyciawmorales.com. She hangs out on Facebook and Instagram.