The thing that comes easy might just be your big thing, which came up in a recent conversation about selling. It’s easy to get stuck in the mindset of “this is easy for me, so it must not be valuable.”

Sometimes I feel like these blog posts aren’t my finest work. But then I’ll include one in a newsletter and get five email replies like, “this was so good!”

But the filters of perfection and safety hold us back, or the idea that our work has to be hard. Maybe trust in the “easy thing” and see where it lands.

You made a product, a service, an offering, an album, and now you want to sell it, and damn – selling is hard.

None of it is simple! None of this is plug and play!

Trust, people, communities, communication, being associated with other people, and the lending of credibility, building our own credibility, reputation, alignment – WHEW! These are things that help the sale, but it’s a million different factors that get you to the finish line.

And like Stephen Dorr said on a recent call: experiments.

No one woke up one day and had it all figured out, or watched the right YouTube video and arrived at the answer – they tried things, tested things, over and over again to discover what worked for them.

Cody Cook-Parrott is having a summer sale, six classes for $99. Lo-Fi Ghosts sells their monthly mail club like this, and the Catdrool Club is sold like this. Darla Jackson is “offering up 100 tiny rabbits at a Summer Sale rate.”

And those are just some sales-page examples – everyone has their own way of marketing and promoting and reminding people of their offerings!

A great comment from Laura Van Buskirk, “knowing your angle that actually gets results and that part of the process takes elbow grease and experience to figure out.”

Do you want to cut three hours of screen time from your day? Walk / run 10+ miles per day! This evening I will have done this for 60 days, coming in at just over 675 miles (1086 km), about 11.25 miles per day.

No, I don’t do it all at one time, I chip away at it with multiple walks per day, like Tara Dower who set the Appalachian Trail southbound FKT (Fastest Known Time) in 40 days and 18 hours, or Alex McCormack, riding 3,826.47 km (2377.65 mi) over seven days.

Okay, I’m not just like them, of course! But my walking practice (something I picked up from Cody Cook-Parrott’s “The Practice of Attention” (affiliate link) is something I can do everyday, as a nice little challenge to myself.

What’s something you could do for three hours everyday?

Substack rolled out an AI detection system using Pangram, and it’s kicked up more questions than answers.

​This is well beyond “did AI write this?”

​Did we opt-in to have all our writing scanned? Is our work used to train AI models? Where does that data go?

​When (not if) the detector gets it wrong, what are the consequences for the writer? Can we appeal?

​And underneath all of this, what kind of culture are we building? Are we putting our trust into the hands of Pangram? Are we building a paranoid creative surveillance state on an AI service? And who’s paying for it?!

​So many questions.

​We won’t settle all of this in an hour. This is a room to bring your reactions and feelings and talk about it with other people figuring it all out. There’s no right answer here, or perfect outcome, but we can get together with others as we look ahead.

Thursday, July 30 at 2:00 PM EDT → https://luma.com/fro6y0r8
Monday, Aug 3 at 9:00 AM EDT → https://luma.com/xo7xogcm

It was only recently that we were expected to always be available. This from Nicholas Bate (via Patrick Rhone):

“Life was shaped, from edge to edge, by scarcity and by natural limits. The shop shut. The night fell. The letter took three days. You were, for long stretches, simply out of reach.”

We drove across town to pick up groceries without a phone. We drove across state lines. We drove in snow storms and heavy rain.

Without a phone.

Yes, of course the phone comes in handy in emergency situations, but now everything is seemingly an emergency sitatuion, from breaking news, shipping alerts, album announcements, Slack notifications.

When are we ever out of reach?

I got to join someone else’s community call and talk about topic everyone wants an answer to: “how do I pull back from social media and still find work / clients / opportunities?”

In other words, “all the work / clients /opportunities are on social media, and if I leave, I’m ruined.”

I usually ask folks if they’ve tried renting billboards when they ask me this. They look at me like I have three heads, and then I tell them I’m joking. How about sky writing? Print ads? Hand bills? Direct mail?

There are 1,000 different ways to “reach” people, and 10,000 different people explaining those 1,000 different ways.

That leaves us a million variables, and then we look up and realize that we’re just talking about the marketing, when so often we forget to talk about the offer or the product or the market or the demand.

People ask a variation of this question almost weekly. They wrote a book, made an album, created a workshop, and then… well, how do we actually sell it? How do we let people know? And most importantly here at Social Media Escape Club, how do we do it without dancing for algorithms on multiple platforms?

This will be the focus of our Escape Pod Zoom calls this week.

This won’t be a super mega comprehensive how-to guide, this is a room full of people with varying levels of experience talking it through, feeling less alone, and leaving with a few to-do items for the coming week.

Thursday, Jul 23 at 2:00 PM EDT → https://luma.com/yqrrwriq
Monday, Jul 27 at 10:00 AM EDT → https://luma.com/z2i9e3cj

Our friend Amelia Hruby, PhD is moving their Substack operation over to Ghost. They go on to explain that inactive subscribers won’t be automatically ported over, leading to this curious point from Amelia:

“you know where most of those inactive subscribers come from? 👉👉👉 The “Substack Network.” Which means that a lot of the amazing growth Substack is promising me (and bragging about in my stats dashboards)… is mostly resulting in inactive subscribers.”

I wrote about this experience (Substack Follows The Enshittification Playbook), and it aligns with what I’ve seen: the majority of the subscribers I’ve gained from Substack are inactive. And while newsletter open and engagement stats are not 100% accurate, there are patterns (and gut feelings).

Substack is definitely social media – the allure of growth, of audience – it’s there, and I’ve benefited from it. But that’s how enshittification works – it’s smooth and easy and amazing at the start for the user, and then it’s not.