How Children’s Book Authors Can Build an Email List Using Unity and MailerLite – No Coding Needed

What could you do with 50,000 readers on your mailing list?

📚 Sell your next book with confidence
🎓 Launch a course for parents or educators
🤝 Collaborate with brands that align with your stories
🧠 Gather feedback and ideas for your next masterpiece

If you’re a children’s book author or illustrator looking to grow your audience and income, this post is for you.

Why Every Children’s Book Author Needs an Email List

A mailing list is more than just a digital contact book. It’s your direct line to readers and parents who genuinely care about your work. When someone signs up through your story app, they’re saying: “Yes, I want to hear from you.”

This connection allows you to:

  • Send updates about new books

  • Share exclusive freebies (like colouring books or activities)

  • Build anticipation for launches

  • Create a community of engaged fans

And best of all? It doesn’t need to be complicated or expensive.

What is a mailing list for Children's book authors?
A mailing list is your direct line to readers and parents who genuinely care about your work.

Tools You’ll Need

To make this simple and scalable, we’ll use three things:

  1. Unity – a free game engine to turn your storybook into a game app

  2. MailerLite – an email marketing tool to manage and grow your contact list

  3. My Unity Asset – a ready-made no-code signup form to plug into your story app

A Real Example: The Accent Story App

In my story-based game app The Accent, when someone registers, they instantly receive a bonus coloring book – automatically delivered via MailerLite. That’s the magic of a system that works in the background.

I later repurposed the story into a read-along video and sent it out to everyone on that list. Boom: instant engagement.

This setup started with just one thing – a signup form.

A Real Example of Unity and MailerLite in building email list in a story-based game app: The Accent Story App
How the process works in The Accent story app

Let’s Talk About Unity (Even if You’re Not “Techie”)

Think of Unity as a digital storytelling stage:

  • The stage is your app screen

  • Your characters are your illustrations

  • The props are buttons, music, sounds, and animations

The best part? You don’t have to build this stage from scratch. Unity allows developers like me to create assets – reusable tools that make development easier for non-tech users.

That’s exactly what I’ve built: a Mailing List Signup Form Unity Asset that you can plug into your app without writing code.

Step-by-Step: Connecting Unity and MailerLite

Here’s a quick breakdown of how the system works:

  1. Create a free MailerLite account

    • Free for up to 500 subscribers

    • GDPR-compliant, easy to use

    • Send instant welcome gifts automatically

  2. Generate your MailerLite API Key

    • Acts like a secret handshake between your app and MailerLite

    • One-time setup

  3. Import my Unity Asset into your project

    • Drag-and-drop prefab

    • Optional registration form

    • Includes a skip button so readers aren’t forced to register

  4. Connect the input fields and API key

    • Name and email fields

    • Terms & conditions for parent consent

    • Success or error messages

  5. Test the experience

    • Users can register, receive your lead magnet, and jump into your story seamlessly

Once it’s in place, it runs in the background, working while you sleep.

Want to Try It Yourself?

🧰 Download the Unity Asset Tool
👉 Get the Mailing List Signup Form Asset

📬 Just starting out? Grab my free lead magnet:
👉 8-Step Blueprint to Turn Your Children’s Book Into an Engaging Story-Based Game App

Bonus: Open Source Contribution

Are you a Unity developer who wants to improve or contribute to the asset?
👉 View the GitHub Repository

Let’s build tools together that help more storytellers succeed.

Final Thoughts

Imagine a parent downloads your app. They enter their email to get a bonus coloring book. A few weeks later, you launch your next book. And this time? You’re not shouting into the void—you’re sharing it with people who are already listening.

✨ That’s the power of building a mailing list inside your story-based game app.

Let your book live off the shelf. Let it be experienced, loved, and shared.

If you’re ready to grow your audience, income, and impact — now’s the time to start.

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From Storybook to Screen: The “Hidden Quest” Interactive Unity Project

From Storybook to Screen: The “Hidden Quest” Interactive Unity Project

What if your children’s book could respond, speak, sparkle – and let readers interact with your story in a whole new way?

That’s the idea behind Hidden Quest, a story I created and developed as a fully animated, interactive Unity project. Designed like a picture book but brought to life with voiceovers, read-along text, animated characters, and touchable scenes, it’s a complete demo of what a story-based game app can look like.

And here’s the exciting part: this project will be the foundation for a brand-new tutorial series I’m launching – designed especially for children’s book authors and illustrators who want to learn Unity and turn their stories into playable, interactive experiences.

Hidden Quest Storybook for Unity 2D Animation

Bringing Stories to Life: Creating “Hidden Quest” for Our Unity Animation Tutorial

Before we animate, we need a story.
In this next step of our Story-Based Game App Series, we’re focusing on the heart of every great children’s book: the narrative. To guide our upcoming Unity animation tutorial, I’ve created a short, four-scene story called “Hidden Quest” – a simple tale designed to feel just like a page from a picture book.
This story isn’t just for reading – it’s our creative foundation. We’ll be using it to demonstrate how illustrations can become animated, interactive scenes in Unity.
By starting with a story, we’re keeping the process grounded in what authors and illustrators already know – narrative, character, and visual flow – before layering on the animation tools.

MailingListSignUp Unity Engine Asset

Tool: Unity Engine Mailing List Signup Asset

One of the advantages of using a Game Engine like Unity is the ability it offers other creators to extend the platform by creating useful assets. These assets range from 2D and 3D arts, user interfaces to animations. To that end, Unity has an asset store where these assets can be gotten for free or […]