Category: NewslettersCategory: Newsletters

People are getting tired of all the notifications from news apps, even to the point of uninstalling them from their phones. This from The Guardian:

Too many alerts could cause problems for the whole industry. The big smartphone software operators such as Apple and Google have routinely warned publishers about sending too many alerts. This has led to concerns that these platforms could further restrict or mediate their notifications in the future.

You couldn’t accuse most artists from sending too many emails. The general vibe is “I don’t wanna be too spammy.” So then many in the creative world end up sending once a month, or even more infrequent.

There is a balance to be found – for your personal bandwidth, and what your audience will tolerate. Everyone is different, and every audience is different.

But keep the “alert fatigue” in mind – it’s not that what you’re sending is too much, but you’re message, your post, your invite – it’s easy to get lost in the unending torrent of everybody else’s updates.

Kristen started her Awesome Ladies Project years ago by inviting a few people off of Instagram to be creative together on a Zoom call.

“I wanted to build like a an alt feed where people could feel comfortable sharing the art that they’re making. And that’s been the underlying bridge of everything that I’ve done is I want to have this place on the internet where people feel safe telling the stories that I’m asking them to tell because I ask people to do kind of vulnerable things sometimes and I want to make sure that they have a space where they feel like I’m not, you know, throwing them out to the wolves.” Kristen Tweedale

The internet is a big, wide open world. Building your own community is the opposite of that, where your work and the things you share exist in a smaller space, with the right group of people who can enjoy it in peace.

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If you’re a musician playing on stage and see several people walk out, you don’t stop and go, “Hey, here’s some pop tunes you’ll like!”

Seth Godin recently said:

“You might be able to get the folks in the back row to smile a bit if you play your hit song just like it is on the radio, but perhaps your objective is to please the real fans in the front row–by jamming on something new.”

Focus on the audience that stays.

The first song you write might not be your finest work. Nor your first sculpture, sonnet, play, or novel. But if you’re course-correcting at the behest of every audience member, you’re not making art, you’re doing color by numbers, trying to please the most people while excluding yourself.

Your direction matters most, so stick with it.

Recently, Joi Katskee missed a friend’s show. She asked about it afterwards, and they said they posted about it on Instagram, which we all know your social media followers miss almost everything you post.

She followed up with success story of her own art installation, and shared about the win on a recent Escape Pod Zoom call:

“I texted probably 15 people about the show rather than posting on Instagram, and maybe over half of them showed up. They were like, Yeah, I’ll be there. Thank you for the invite.”

Posting to the most amount of people always feels like the right move. But if no one sees it, what good does that do? Does it just let you off the hook?

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I don’t publish a paid newsletter, I host weekly Zoom calls with members. Substack’s ability to manage members is very limited, and they haven’t made any meaningful updates to their system in the four years that I’ve been using their platform.

That, along with other folks losing data without any help from the Substack team has made reassess how I want to run my business, which led to moving my paid subscribers to Memberful, who are owned by Patreon.

They were very extremely helpful, getting on Zoom calls with me to walk me through the process and answer my questions, which made the move that much easier. I’ve never had a Zoom call with anyone at Substack. Finding an email address to get the export process started was a challenge, too.

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