[Week 21] The problem with most newsletters (including Substacks)

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Week 21: The problem with most newsletters (including Substacks)

Let’s be honest. Too many writers have no idea why they’re writing a newsletter or a Substack. They’re doing it because everyone else is doing it or they feel it’s necessary. As in: This is the thing you do now to market, promote, or brand yourself—you send emails. (Like me!)

A funny thing happens when people feel compelled to undertake tasks they’re not interested in. They find ways to express how the activity is a waste of time. Here are the types of statements-posed-as-questions I hear in classes—where people pay me to teach them about newsletters.

But isn’t email dead?
Young people don’t read email, though?
Everyone has a newsletter, why start one? (That’s true of books, too, but rarely do you hear someone in the writing and publishing community ask, “There are so many books published, why write one?”)

My initial instinct is to respond, Look, why are you paying me to teach you this if you don’t think it works?

But I know what underlies these statement-questions. Writers feel they must play this game—to get the deal or the sales or whatever they want—but their heart isn’t in it. They’re still bargaining and looking for ways out. And if this describes you, I would in fact run for the exit. This suspicion that you’re wasting your time, or your disinterest in the activity, is what makes failure likely. Half-hearted attempts do not work. (For those wondering, yes: the same thing applies to social media.)

Let’s say you’ve cleared the first hurdle. You’re not resentful, bitter, or suspicious. There still remains this issue of What is your newsletter about? And some writers never figure this out.

If you’re a famous writer, or even just a very well-known writer with an established audience, your newsletter is probably for fans and readers who want to know what you had for breakfast while on tour, what you thought of The Brutalist (I don’t recommend it, by the way), and how your new puppy is doing, with pics. They also want to know when a new book is coming out or where you’re appearing next. You can have a valuable newsletter like this. It will only grow as much as your sales (and/or platform), but it’ll be a good use of your time nevertheless. Directly reaching people via email who enjoy your work is a powerful asset that can’t be taken away from you and leads to better sales.

If you’re relatively unknown and unpublished, no one cares about the minutiae of your writing life, or your random musings, except maybe friends and family. Potential readers—the people who remain strangers—won’t sign up for such updates unless you’ve written and published the best thing they’ve read in the past month and they are on the edge of their seat waiting to see what you’ll do next. (That is uncommon.)

So what is the newsletter about?

It remains a conundrum for the unknown and unpublished, and a satisfying answer isn’t likely to come from me. It’s kind of like asking What should my book be about? Or What should I write about today? I have no idea. I don’t know what you should write, just like I don’t know what you should post on social media. And I don’t know what you should do with your spare time, or where you should vacation. These are highly personal questions where only you know what drives and sustains you. What questions do you lie awake at night pondering? What obsessions will you have for the rest of your life? What issues underlie your work that you want to explore in public? What can’t you stop picking apart until you die?

That is what a successful newsletter will be about—not marketing yourself, but obsessing. I obsess over writing and business, and I’ll never finish exploring it. To accelerate growth—to get more strangers onboard—focus on your particular weirdness. Write things in your newsletter that aren’t throwaway but that you consider part of your creative output.

Regardless: Most newsletter efforts won’t become valuable until you’ve been producing work for some time and gradually built up a list of people who are invested in your work and have seen you in action. We’re talking years here. Unfortunately, by that point, some writers will have decided the email newsletter is not worth it. But the newsletter list acts like an investment account. By adding pennies over days, you get dollars over years.

Exercise

Visit Substack’s homepage and check out its leaderboards. Avoid the well-known names and look for the people you haven’t heard of before. Based on the name of the newsletter alone, what does the writer’s interests appear to be? What is obsessing them in this world? A lot of Substacks won’t express this, but look for those that do. Here are a few examples.

Oldster: Exploring what it means to travel through time in a human body, at every phase of life
Telling the Bees: Exploring the intersection of books, sociology, and culture
Shelf Love: Community discussing romance novels and how they reflect, explore, challenge, and shape desire

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[Week 21] The problem with most newsletters (including Substacks)