It’s as if these social media platforms (including Substack Notes) are designed to instill feelings of “not doing enough” that pulls us closer to engaging with their bullshit games for bullshit prizes.

Your work isn’t meant for the carnival circuit – “step right up, spin the wheel!”

Your work is the quiet corner of a library or the small group Zoom calls. Your essays and poems bloom in time, right where they are.

I’ve said recently “your newsletter isn’t your permanent address, it’s a delivery truck.”

It’s tempting to build on a platform, but as we know platforms come and go. They can lock you out. Lose your data. Shut down in the middle of the night.

I recently hosted a “let’s work on our websites together” virtual co-working session (next one is Tuesday, May 20 – it’s free, but RSVP here). We’re updating our bios, moving stuff around, setting up Now pages.

We’re re-using the videos we posted on Instagram (that 95% of our audience never saw), and putting them on our sales pages. We’re making videos that inform and build trust, and putting them next to our BUY NOW buttons.

Videos on our website recreate that vibe of the friendly shop owner who says hello when you walk in. Embedding voice notes to our About page lets the internet traveler know a bit more about who you are.

With our own website, our own zine, our own videos, our own voice – we get to fully show up as who we are, instead of twisting and contorting ourselves onto social media platforms, trying to fit in and appease algorithms.

It’ll take a minute to get people at large to return to websites. Lots of people are happy to just scroll on social media all day, and that’s fine. Maybe they’re not your people.

But if you’ve got a dozen people on your email list, you can send them a newsletter and tell them about the great new exciting work you’ve got on your website.

Because writing on your own site a few times a week isn’t all that different than posting seven times a day on multiple social media platforms. You’re just focusing your energy on your platform instead of someone else’s.

And when you’re constantly putting work on your website, when you sit down to write a newsletter once a week you’ll have no problem thinking about what to send, because you already wrote it.

You’ve already made the meal, now you just need to serve it to people who gave you their email address and said, “yes, let me know what you’re working on from time to time.”

Great post here: ‘If nothing is curated, how do we find things?’

“Before, you could reach for a magazine once a month or a watch a show once a week, but now you have to browse Vulture every day and read all 20+ articles they publish, even on the weekends. Who has time to read all that? Who has the time for any of this? Technology is making our lives harder, not easier.”

Everything is a mess right now. There’s never been a better time to be a curator, to own a niche, to be the source for certain sorts of music or media.

(link via Brad Barrish)

Thank you Mary Thoma, GeorgeAnn, Richard Schulz, Michael Maupin, Ken Seals, and many others for tuning into my “live office hour video” on Substack Live.

I don’t know what to call these. Do they need a name? I just know I like going “live” and helping people out. Shooting the breeze, talking about our lived experiences. It’s a joy, really.

Eventually Mary Thoma dropped a great question in the chat: she’s got a Substack newsletter, and has 4,000 followers on Facebook, and she’s worried about losing that audience she’s built over there on Meta.

I riffed on how only a small fraction (maybe 100–300) are actually seeing her posts, and so you need to do what you can to move your biggest fans off it.

“The vault is still open,” I said, meaning she can still reach those folks (I wrote about this here).

So today you can ask (reply to, DM) your biggest fans to join her email list, which is something she can actually own for years and years. You can build a sustainable career with an email list!

I talked about how I had around 2,300 Twitter followers but only 20 or send ended up subscribing to Social Media Escape Club.

Some people just wanna be on social media!

Mary mentioned that her Facebook audience, “wants to know what I’m doing but doesn’t want to read,” and I said, “Later. Bye.”

I’m not trying to be harsh, but maybe I am! If you’re writing a memoir, then people that wanna scroll on FB for three hours a day might be your target audience!

That’s when Mary mentioned she has 600 newsletter subscribers.

Oh, well then.

So then I mentioned that maybe her energy is better spent “watering the garden” of her 600 current subscribers than chasing strangers. And I think that’s true for a lot of us.

Write the best newsletter you can for the people who signed up for it, and then some of them will the marketing for you.

You don’t need everyone. You need the right people, and you’ll find them (and they’ll find you) by committing to the work you’re meant to be doing.

Full replay below:

I’m part of Alex Dobrenko’s BAT CAVE. He writes Both Are True on Substack… BAT, get it?

Anyways, I started following Alex a year or two or three ago, and always looked forward to his newsletter showing up in my inbox.

Quick note: I don’t know that it shows up on a regular schedule (I have other things to worry about), like so many email marketing gurus say you have to do. When Alex’s email shows up, I read it. That’s it.

Okay, back to what I was saying; Alex now does group Zoom calls with his paid subscribers, which he totally stole from me. Just kidding, but no really… group Zoom calls with your paid subscribers is so good. Not everything needs to be a paywalled posts, or extra “content.” Hang out for an hour with the people who love you work once a week and see what happens.

Back to Alex: he starts off these group calls like a damn performer. Oh, that’s right, that’s because he is. It’s hilarious, and funny, and wonderfully over the top. There are SLIDES.

Lots of jokes and silliness throughout, because that’s the world that Alex creates. But then… shit gets real. People get deep.

Not in a, “okay, let’s be adults now and talk about REAL stuff.”

No, it just sort of eases into the room, because space was made for it to come into. The room was filling with fears and doubts and fart jokes, so then there’s room for all sorts of emotions and feelings.

So that’s just a thought on creating a Zoom room hangout with your members, through the lens of how Alex is doing it, and I think it’s great. Find out more about the BAT CAVE here.

Given Ryan J. Downey’s experience in doing interviews with everyone, I had to ask what an artist could learn from his interactions with so many big names in the entertainment world.

It’s absolutely essential for an artist—and by “artist,” I mean that broad umbrella of musicians, filmmakers, painters, authors, comic creators—they’re all storytellers. They’re communicating something through whichever medium they’ve chosen. And it’s so important to have something to say.

Sure, you can make something that doesn’t really say much. Maybe it catches fire for a little while. But that kind of work doesn’t last.

When I say “something to say,” I don’t necessarily mean a political stance or a religious message. It doesn’t have to be Rage Against the Machine or Skillet. I mean having an idea, an emotion, or a feeling that needs to come out.

CJ Chilvers in response to Matt McGarry’s ‘Why “newsletter ad-only” businesses are dead and how to adapt.’

“I feel like newsletter creators need to be reminded pretty regularly that ordinary businesses have been publishing email newsletters for decades — sometimes for tens of millions of customers — without any ads or expectations of short-term ROI.

It’s more likely those companies have the dominant newsletter model.

Call it Newsletter 0.0, or the “hey, just keepin’ in touch” model. It sounds boring, but boring is usually where the money is.”

If it takes talking about these “traditional ads-in-newsletters” to get to that last point, that’s fine.

As I’ve written recently, your newsletter isn’t your permanent address. For most of us we’re releasing music, making photos and videos, creating art.

The newsletter is the delivery truck to your actual work.