Category: NewslettersCategory: Newsletters

From strategist and facilitator Caitlin Mayance,

Hey brands, why you still sending out storyless emails in 2026? You have direct access to a personal inbox – no algorithmic nonsense – and you’re leading with a promo or tiny lil ad?! Come on

When the bare minimum is copy and pasting your pre-existing marketing materials and hitting send to ALL is your strategy, expect bare minimum results.

Some of the most fascinating stories are being told on rented platforms, while email newsletters are filled with recycled social media images and [$NAME] placeholders.

Roddy Bottum (of Faith No More fame) recently wrote “These Rooms,” which goes against all pragmatic guidance on what an email subject line or headline should be.

But this is art.

He’s promoting his current book tour (more art), and if anyone could get away with uploading the tour poster and writing, “hey, book tour is going great. Hope to see you out there,” well, it’d be Roddy. Instead he wrote about 1,800 before getting to the “point.”

Substack began as a place to send newsletters to email subscribers.

Substack has since become its own bustling social media space, complete with the communal unease and tension of trying to “win” on the platform. This gets people complaining about a lack of likes or comments on their posts.

We have to remember, though, that not everybody reads newsletters in the Substack app, or on the Substack website, which is the only place to “like” a post or leave a comment.

To do either, readers must visit the Substack website or open the Substack app, a platform optimized to increase paid memberships, whether yours or someone else’s publication.

Substack needs eyeballs, and every writer sending a newsletter is how they get ’em.

One way to get people to subscribe to your email newsletter is to get current subscribers to share it. This is what I told Greg Nichols of Onward Industries during one of my free “BREAK UP 💔 WITH SOCIAL MEDIA” 15 minute Zoom calls.

I suggested he could interview cool people he already knows that subscribed to his newsletter. Then, when their interviews lands in their inbox, they’re probably going to FWD it to some people. It’s not guaranteed you’ll get 100 new subscribers, but hey, we’re not playing the inflated social media vanity metrics game anymore, are we?

You don’t need 100 new subscribers every month, you need 10 who give a damn.

So upon talking about this with Greg, he asked if he could interview me, and I said heck yes!

“Throughout our conversation, I asked Seth to join me in a small exercise: making tiny handmade zines as we spoke. It was a quirky way to slow down, to craft meaning, and to pull our work out of the abstraction of ideas and back into our hands. That little parallel exercise ended up being deeply rewarding—less “arts & crafts” and more re-orienting to what matters.”

Watch the full interview (along with lots of quotes and commentary from Greg) here.

Just like making music, writing an essay, or taking a photo, your newsletter can be a masterpiece.

The facts of your work are important, sure. But facts aren’t art, you’re the art. You’re the painting, you’re the photograph, you’re the seven minute ballad with a curse word in the chorus.

Put some of that into your newsletter.