Category: NewslettersCategory: Newsletters

Had a great time talking with Claire Venus via Substack Live. We covered a lot in this hour long chat! Substack’s platform features and distractions:

We talk about the increasing features on Substack, like Notes and video, which creates an “attention economy,” which is often times what we’re trying to avoid!

The value of an Email List: Direct access to your audience is so important, and very much worth the time and energy.

Monetization and payments: The challenge in asking for payment, and exploring options like “Buy Me a Coffee” buttons instead of paid subscriptions.

Connecting beyond vanity metrics: We talked about building genuine connections with readers and other writers through personal outreach, and small gatherings, and how that can be more valuable than viral hits or ranking on arbitrary leaderboards.

Tenacity in reaching readers: Not all subscribers see every post or email, so it’s necessary to employ “creative bothering” (thanks Cody Cook-Parrott) and talk about your offering more than once to make sure your message reaches your audience.

Had a great time talking with Claire Venus via Substack Live. We covered a lot in this hour long chat!

Substack’s platform features and distractions: We talk about the increasing features on Substack, like Notes and video, which creates an “attention economy,” which is often times what we’re trying to avoid!

The value of an Email List: Direct access to your audience is so important, and very much worth the time and energy.

Monetization and payments: The challenge in asking for payment, and exploring options like “Buy Me a Coffee” buttons instead of paid subscriptions.

Hosting your own Zoom calls!

Connecting beyond vanity metrics: We talked about building genuine connections with readers and other writers through personal outreach, and small gatherings, and how that can be more valuable than viral hits or ranking on arbitrary leaderboards.

Tenacity in reaching readers: Not all subscribers see every post or email, so it’s necessary to employ “creative bothering” (thanks Cody Cook-Parrott) and talk about your offering more than once to make sure your message reaches your audience.

I’m always telling you to have an email list, but it’s only going to be helpful if your newsletter is worth opening.

Is your email showing up like those messy grocery store flyers we all get in the mail?

That’s the sort of noise we easily tune out, knowing we won’t really miss out on anything if we ignore it.

But those vinyl record deliveries, that package of zines, artwork, or art supplies we ordered – those feel different, right?

These are things we’re looking forward to. We ordered something, and then we keep an eye out for those shipping updates. Delivery confirmations.

But then we all get emails like this everyday.

”New merch in our store”
”Deals ending soon”
”New workshop announced”

Sure, these can work. They’re serviceable. “Don’t ask, don’t get.” I get it!

But consider this email from Lauren Denitzio, of the band Worriers, with this subject line: ”Tips for tour and life.”

Everyday we get emails asking for something; buy now, book soon, pre-orders available.

But how many emails are we getting that are giving us something, too?

How many creative beings send out emails of stories, unraveling the wonders of life by way of their unique viewpoint?

• Like Lauren above, sharing tips for life while also promoting their hand written lyric sheets.
• Like Cody Cook-Parrott sharing how they got XC skiing equipment for free during their spending ban while also promoting a limited edition version of their new book.
• Like Tom Bland and Diana Pappas who decided to live blog the making of their latest photographic art drop.

You’ve already done the hard part; you’re a photographer, a painter, a professional mountain biker, a comic book maker.

We just need to use that same creative vision to talk about the work we do in our own unique way.

If our newsletters stopped acting like product catalogs, maybe our newsletter becomes something that people won’t want to miss.

I posted this over the weekend on Substack Notes, but you probably didn’t see it.

Five people called me, and we had some nice chats.

Most of my email subscribers don’t spend time on Substack Notes, and probably don’t even know it exists.

I’m certain of this, as over 80% of you read my newsletter in your email inbox.

It might be the same for your newsletter, too.

Hard truth: Substack Notes is social media, where algorithms control what you see and where most of your audience doesn’t see what you post anyway.

The best remedy to all this is delivering a message to their inbox.

This is why when you post a new song on Spotify, you should send an email to your fans to let them know. You can’t trust that Spotify will surface this new song to all your subscribers on their platform.

If you post a new video on YouTube, you should still send an email to your subscribers and let them know. You can’t trust YouTube to distribute your new video to everyone who subscribed to your channel.

Leaving the distribution of your work to algorithmic platforms is a dead-end street. Posting isn’t enough; you have to reach out to your audience directly if you want to survive.

Now, maybe you’ve got some objections…

🚫 Sending too many emails is spammy

✅ If people don’t want to hear from you, let ‘em leave. An unsubscribe is just making room for someone else to come and enjoy your work.

✅ Funny how we don’t want to send too many emails, yet most of us posted multiple times per hour on social media, right?

🚫 Sending a newsletter is too much work

✅ You don’t have to make vertical videos, and you don’t need to make new static images. If you’ve already posted about your new thing on Instagram, just copy and paste the caption you wrote – 95% of your audience didn’t see it anyway, so re-use it!

🚫 I don’t have enough email subscribers

✅ If you have 1,000 social media followers, you might reach 10% of them (that’s 100 people).

✅ If you have 100 email subscribers, 99.9% of them will get your next newsletter (so make sure you write a good subject line).

I got a few questions from CansaFis Foote via Substack Notes, and figured I’d share my answers with everyone. Enjoy.

Q. What made you choose this platform above all others?

Honestly, I started all of this using Circle, under the name HEAVY METAL EMAIL.

I wanted an online space for musicians to come together and talk about reaching their fans with an old-fashioned email newsletter. This was back in mid-2021 or so. I Tweeted about this little project and got about 19 people to click and sign up.

But things felt off.

I wasn’t using a newsletter to talk about newsletters, so I started looking for at Ghost, Beehiv, and of course Substack.

I picked Substack because I didn’t want to mess with designs and themes and settings, I just wanted to import my subscriber list of 19 people and send them an email.

Oh, and it was free.

With any new platform, the “Is this tool for me?” phase can get cloudy with just a 30-day trial to determine whether it’s a proper fit.

But then Substack rolled out Recommendations, which led to 2,000 new subscribers (remember, I started with 19).

Substack rolled out Notes, which feels like the early Twitter days. That’s led to making friends, paid clients, and plenty of fun interactions. It feels like I’m not just shoveling my “content” into a social media platform and hoping for a click.

Substack has let you upload video for the last few years, embed audio, and set up paid subscriptions, all for just a 10% cut.

For me, Substack is the place to be right now, and it’s built around the concept of having an email list. Call it social media if you want, but my email list will serve me for the next several years, even if this place goes out of business.

Q. Are there any other web spaces you recommend for creators?

This question always leads me to its deeper meaning, which sounds something like, “Where are some good places I can set up where MORE PEOPLE can see my stuff?”

Being “a regular” at 10 different coffee shops in town takes a lot of time and energy, so I’m always wary of going on that journey.

I recommend focusing on one or two places at most, intentionally driving the interest and clicks back to a place (Substack or your website) where people who want to become bigger fans of your work can subscribe to an email list.

When you spend all your time on social media platforms, you’re building an audience you can’t reach.

The long game is building an email list to reach people who want to hear from you.

Q. Would you recommend Substack over a personal webpage or is this better?

Substack is a platform like any other, and it can disappear tomorrow (that’s a reminder to export your email list).

Right now (9/24/2024), I recommend setting up Substack to give people an easy way to subscribe to your email list and to read your work online.

That said, I will always recommend you set up a website/blog to have a running archive of your work, a space on the internet that is wholly yours, where you control the branding, the vibes, the images, the typeface – everything.

I have a blog I’ve been updating since 2018 (sethw.xyz), and I’ve been adding and archiving my work from all over the internet, which dates back to 2004.

Austin is also on Tumblr, too (thanks Sarah Shotts for the heads up). I haven’t seen a post that links back to his work, but as you can see, right below his name, he links back to his site with three links, and his Substack.

Final thoughts:

Don’t leave your fans and readers to bounce around between different platforms like a pinball machine.

Have a website, provide a way for people to sign up for a newsletter, and then send them a damn good newsletter on occasion, telling them about the cool things you’re doing.

Then we get back to work.