Category: Email MarketingCategory: Email Marketing

Today’s newsletter is sponsored again by Jelly. Instead of sharing an email login for customer support duties, get your team on Jelly, a shared inbox solution with plans starting at $29/month for your whole crew. Use code ESCAPECLUB15 to get 15% off Jelly for your first year.

1. PROVIDE A GREAT NIGHT OUT

I found this clip of Quentin Tarantino railing against the current movie industry, via Ted Gioia’s “The Infrastructure of the Recording Industry Is About to Fail.”

Making movies is a much lower priority. Films are just too risky—especially anything fresh or different or daring.

It’s gotten so bad that filmmaker Quentin Tarnatino now says that he would rather write a stage play…

What I love about this bit is giving the audience a great night out.

Yes, it’s always about the art, of course.

But putting your art into a new setting (in this case, Tarnatino doing theater), makes for a great experience for the audience, which is energy, which is what any artist wants to feel when displaying their work.

Below you can see olivia rafferty performing at a museum in front of a T-Rex.

Playing in a museum on a Friday night is not the same as playing a bar on a Friday night. Put your work in front of different crowds and see what happens.

Where can you showcase your magic in a new way? How can you go about displaying your work in front of people more willing to accept it?

2. REGISTER FOR MY ABOUT “ABOUT PAGES” WORKSHOP!

◼️ Feb 13th at 2pm EST

◼️ FREE with a “Pay What You Want” option if you’d like to support this work.

3. RECREATE EVENTS IN YOUR SPACE

Tim McFarlane Studio was part of Tiny Room For Elephants (TRFE) in Philadelphia, PA in years past. It was an event that combined multiple artists making work while musicians and DJs and producers performed live at the same time.

Tim brought elements of that into his own studio by inviting local producer / musicians into his studio to make music while he made art.

Read all about it here.

Are there ways you can combine your work with someone else’s work?

4. MAKE YOUR OWN TWITTER

I read Hacker News because I have a geeky computer background (anyone remember the HotDog HTML editor?), though honestly these days I don’t understand 80% of anything on there.

That said, when I saw ‘The Debian Publicity Team will no longer post on X/Twitter’ I knew I had to check it out.

Turns out they made their own Twitter-like feed on their own website, where they can post all their bits and bops (they called it “micronews”).

You can have a section on your own website, with your own domain name, where you can post your thoughts, and dreams, and links to cool things, and embed fun videos.

Don’t make your fans visit toxic platforms to find your regular updates, but instead invite them to your website.

Today’s newsletter is sponsored by Jelly.

Stop sharing one email login for your entire team and start using Jelly, the simple shared inbox solution built for small teams. No overkill, no per-user pricing—just teamwork made easy. Plans start at $29/month for your whole team. Use code ESCAPECLUB15 for 15% off Jelly your first year.

---

I haven’t posted to Substack Notes in a week.

Instead of a quick post, I’d write it out and put it on my blog, or send the link to a friend.

Rather than post a nice photo, I’d text it to someone I haven’t talked to in awhile.

Instead of posting, I’ll spend time writing emails, or getting taxes in order.

Instead of posting, I make some more coffee and read my Star Wars trilogy book.

Like Noah Kalina said in a recent Hotline Show video:

I was out taking pictures and I made a picture that I really like. I was working on it and I was like, “This is so good.” And I was like, “What am I going to do with this?”

My natural inclination is to want to post it on the internet, but why? I almost feel like it’s embarrassing to post things on the internet now.

Think of all those heart-felt posts to David Lynch we saw on Substack since he passed away. What happens to all of them 10 years from now if Substack doesn’t exist? What happens to them 10 days from now?

Imagine if they lived on your website, or in a zine you made with friends. A compilation cassette, with photocopied J-cards and limited to just 50 copies.

A silk-screened poster. A hand drawn bumper sticker. A phone call with an old friend talking about Twin Peaks, or starting a David Lynch night at your library.

We need to stop living a post-first existence.

We’re writing our messages on the beach, knowing the ocean will come in and wash it away. We post to keep the algorithms from getting mad, to remind our audience that we have things to say multiple times per day, throughout the week, month after month.

Our main artistic output should be enough, but instead we build an entire ecosystem of add-ons with automated email reminders from assorted platforms.

It’s not enough for our work to be inspired by our heroes. We nepost to remind the algorithms of relevant keywords to make it easier for the programs to pick who sees our 35 word tribute.

An hour long video interview isn’t enough. It must be broken up into bite-sized clips. Convert those clips to audio for podcast or audio embeds. Then we post all this work on the beach while the ocean has pulled back for a moment, hoping that our fans walk by at the right moment and see all our hard work.

---

We might have 100 subscribers that we email once a week.

Yet we’ll post throughout the week to hopefully reach 5% of our “followers,” a concept we scoffed at here on Substack, yet we keep playing the game.

But I’m hearing more people believe those 100 subscribers are enough. Make the work, hit publish, then go about our day.

Maybe sharing with 100 people could be enough.

Like I said in ‘The best work is boring work’ a week ago:

Maybe it’s not even called “marketing,” but it’s a return to the truest form of your work and practice that makes it easier for the work to speak for itself, which in turn frees you to get closer to the heart of who you are, which is probably the best marketing work any of us can hope for.

What if our practice became so deep and rich that the 100 people lucky enough to be on our email list started telling more people?

What if the magic isn’t about hitting an arbitrary subscriber count, but reaching the tipping point in our work where the magic can longer be contained, and it begins to spread without us needing to write messages on beaches?

◼️ P.S.Ditch Gmail and switch to Fastmail: get a free 30-day trial and 10% off your first year here (affiliate link).

1. PITCH YOURSELF

Social media isn’t the only way to build an audience – pitch yourself!

Tawny teaches how to do this, too. Check out their class schedule here.

2. ABOUT PAGE COLLABORATIVE WORKSHOP!

◼️ Feb 13th at 2pm EST.
Click here to add your name to the wait list and I’ll send you an invite link when it’s ready to go.

Admission will be free, with a “Pay What You Want” option if you’d like to support this work.

3. THINK ABOUT FOLLOWERS VS COMMUNITY

Consider this quote from Kato McNickle, from a recent Escape Pod Zoom call:

“What I’m hearing though is a conflation of audience, followers versus community, because followers aren’t about engagement. Followers are not comments beyond “oh dazzling,” “oh love it or hate it,” right? That’s that follower mentality. But think about whether which format you’re in; are you trying to stoke community? Because I don’t know that social media, when you’re talking about engagement, you’re talking about community, not really followers. Followers don’t owe you anything.”

Don’t lose sight of the people who are already on your list, the people who’ve already signed up and said “I want more of what you’re doing.”

Consider what might happen if you took half the time you spend on getting MORE FOLLOWERS and instead invested that time in the people right in front of you.

4. THINK ABOUT YOUR ARCHIVES

This came up in this week’s Escape Pod Zoom call; what happens to our website when servers crash? Or climate disasters lead to mass outages?

As we’ve seen recently (TikTok?!), platforms come and go. My first music blog is only archived on the Wayback machine going back to 2013 (so everything going back to 2001 is gone).

Print an archive of your work on newsprint.
Make booklets and / or zines.
Make prints of your photos.
Put your music to CDs and cassette.

Think of somebody finding a printed artifact of your current project a decade from now while they’re moving. Imagine getting that photo from a friend, with a “look what I found” message. Yeah. It can happen, and it’s great.

We don’t plan to catch a flu-bug, but we can plan to get the flu shot.

There’s no immediate reward to getting the flu shot, of course, but hopefully months later we make it to spring in good health.

I’ve been sick since Friday, and of course I’m looking for the shortcuts to feeling better. Friends have all sorts of recommendations, like liquids and rest. I’ve discovered there are 20 variations of NyQuil at my local CVS.

The best shortcut would have been scheduling that flu shot a few months back, right? Doing the small bit of work that would have a possible impact on the future, right?

In our modern work, that could mean so many things:

• Replying to comments
• Answering emails
• Reaching out to collaborate
• Pitching ourselves on the podcasts and YouTube channels that make sense.
• Having that conversation with someone in front of the venue after a show on a Tuesday night
• A chance encounter at a dinner part
• Meeting someone on a Zoom call unrelated to the work you’re doing

Be less concerned with metrics, and focus on conversations.

It’s less about followers, and more about community, as Kato McNickle explained it so well on last week’s Escape Pod Zoom call:

“What I’m hearing though is a conflation of audience, followers versus community, because followers aren’t about engagement. Followers are not comments beyond “oh dazzling,” “oh love it or hate it,” right? That’s that follower mentality. But think about whether which format you’re in; are you trying to stoke community? Because I don’t know that social media, when you’re talking about engagement, you’re talking about community, not really followers. Followers don’t owe you anything.”

Modern marketing is walking into CVS and picking the fancy Honey flavored NyQuil, instead of doing the quiet work of just getting the flu shot months ago.

So, what’s the quiet work you could be doing right now?

Maybe it’s not even called “marketing,” but it’s a return to the truest form of your work and practice that makes it easier for the work to speak for itself, which in turn frees you to get closer to the heart of who you are, which is probably the best marketing work any of us can hope for.

Sarah Faith Gottesdiener and I talked about building a sustainable business with an email list, rather than relying heavily on social media.

Sustainable can mean a lot of things, but we found in our conversation that it means ease, calm, peace. Like sharing resources, and solving problems together.

This can mean having fun in putting together a newsletter each week, as it’s not just for “marketing purposes,” but it’s to bring joy and fun to your readers, as Sarah mentions here:

“There is this genre of newsletter that is really fun where you’re not quite sure what you’re going to get. You know, will it be a playlist one day? Will it be my top 10 favorite places to eat when I’m touring in Cincinnati? It’s like you don’t know, and I think that’s also kind of fun, too. It’s like, ‘what are they going to send me this time?’ Like maybe it’s a fun treasure trove or surprise box. That’s another way to approach it”

And when we share these adventures with readers, we bring in the right readers, those who appreciate our weirdness, our unique views of the world, or our excellent choices for our weekly playlist. Says Sarah:

“It’s much better to have a thousand people on your newsletter who really get you and really understand and are interested in what you have to share and say, than 10,000 who don’t know who you are, who are going to unsubscribe every time they get a newsletter from you.”

The rush for some subscriber milestone, or sales goal, or daily traffic – the constant seeking of more, instead of better. Seeking the right people to invite in, as Sarah and I discussed in this clip:

We’re not for everyone. Decide who enters our creative space.

This is why we don’t start bands that sound like everyone else, or we don’t make paintings or take photos or make podcasts that follow popular trends – we’re doing things our own way.

We’re making art and running our businesses the way we want to run them, so our newsletter – this means by which we reach our biggest fans – should be run in a way that reflects how we operate. Says Sarah:

“How can your newsletter be a playground? How can it be another fun creative outlet? Like, do you have a creative outlet that fits the container of the newsletter?”

A newsletter can be peaceful. You could send a newsletter once a week, instead of posting three times daily on Instagram.

Now, maybe you’ll lose some likes, and fall out of favor of the algorithm, but who are we serving here?

Are we spending our time in 2025 increasing shareholder value for Meta?

What if we saved the bits we would post on social media (yes, even Substack Notes) and published it in our newsletter instead?

Flip “Instagram eats first” to “my subscribers eat first.”

Save your witty rants, magical photos, and delicate thoughts for a weekly newsletter, feeding those who signed up to hear from you, rather than hoping a social media post “goes viral” and brings in 25 more subscribers.

Because what is enough?

That question came up in last week’s Escape Pod Zoom call.

The whole, “doing a thing, and then having to increase the visibility of that thing on social media” To what end? What is enough?

Could we trust our own audience, the network of creative people in our orbit, to share and talk about our work? It may take patience, as it might not lead to some “viral” moment, but is building our work on “going viral” a good strategy in the first place?

What if our work resonated just a bit more deeply with the people who already love our work? Could they love it more? What’s that look like, and how can we get there?