A clip from a recent chat with a subscriber, talking about leveraging your existing audience to build a sense of community, showing your readers how connected and fun (or intriguing, or smart, or serious) your publication really is.

Some notes after a great call from this morning:

• If you know you’re working a shadow career, you’re on the hook
• Just post / publish / upload the thing – then people will have a link to refer back to, to say “yes, this is the thing.”
• Perfect is the enemy of done – the sooner we start getting it out there, the sooner we find our people

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?

This happens on social media a lot – you post something about a subject matter that isn’t actually your thing, and it takes off. Goes semi-viral. And suddenly that’s your most popular piece, when you have all this other stuff you write about.

The thing is – we don’t get to choose.

So write for your email list first.

If they’re not vibing, or opening, either rework how your doing it, or accept they signed up for something you’re not giving them. And that’s okay. Let them unsubscribe.

But keep writing to your newsletter audience about your real work, regardless of open rate or click data. Maybe there’s “only” 10 people that give a fuck about it.

Don’t let the other 90% determine it’s not worth continuing, because man, there’s also a zillion other people out there that don’t give a fuck about what you’re doing, too. But you don’t have time to worry about them, and it’s the same for the people on your list who don’t either.

I had a boss one time who said this in regards to audience who doesn’t click, or vibe with what you’re doing – “fuck ‘em.”

I hit 5,000 subscribers recently, and 70ish paid subscribers – that’s barely 1.5% of my people. And even still, 14 people were on my call the other day from 2 to 3pm.

The most important 14 people in the world that hour was those people. Full attention. 

Have I worked “this hard” for this many years for 14 people? I guess so! And I’m completely fine with that, because at least I know those 14 people now, and they hang out with me on a workday in the middle of the afternoon. It’s so great.

A lot of people would love your work but they don’t even know about it yet – so keep writing about it so when they find you someday, it’ll feel like they’re home.

1. Skip the self-checkout

This came up in our Escape Pod Zoom call this week, as a way of breaking away from our isolation and the ease of “not talking to others.” If you’re able, stand in line and wait (maybe without looking at your phone), and make small talk with the person helping you. I did this a few hours after our call and it was a delight.

“Buying things in stores is a simple trick I use to spend more time offline and increase my chances of chatting with real humans. Win-win. Nobody said real life would be easy.”

From Mehret Biruk’s ‘How to live without social media.’

Q. Could making small talk help us get better and talking about our own work in bigger settings?

2. About Page collaborative workshop?!

I’m thinking of making a collaborative workshop, instead of me just blabbering on for an hour.

Talk for a bit, we work together, talk for a bit more, share our work… if that sounds like a productive use of your time, click here to add your name to the wait list and I’ll let you know when it’s ready to launch.

P.S. this will be for your about page anywhere, not just on Substack. Your website also needs a nice about page!

3. Trust that the kids are alright

Kamilah Jones of Hard Decora passed along this video after this week’s Escape Pod Zoom call, basically telling me “don’t worry, the youth got it!” I’m a believer.

Q. Are you comfortable saying you’re an artist, and not a content creator?

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Next call is Thursday, January 16, 2025 at 2pm EST– click here for more info.

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4. Make it easy for people to contact you

This advice might not be for you you, and that’s fine – skip this and have a great weekend!

Sending an email to someone whose work you admire feels good, and it can sometimes lead to opportunities.

But I bet if you start doing this you’ll run into a common problem – most people don’t list their email address anywhere.

There may be reasons for this, notably avoiding harassment from creepy men (SIGH), but… if you’re up for it, try to have an email address that can receive inquiries from other artists, companies, art directors, and more.

Yes, DMs on social media can work, but not every artist, company, or art director is hanging out on social media everyday, but they’re all checking their email around the clock, I assure you.

So, be reachable. Have an email address. Make it easy for people to say they like your work, give you money, and/or hire you.

Who could have seen this coming?

It was July of 2023 when Instagram boss Adam Mosseri said this:

“Politics and hard news are inevitably going to show up on Threads – they have on Instagram as well to some extent – but we’re not going to do anything to encourage those verticals.”

But now?

“Our intention is to introduce political recommendations in a responsible and personalized way, which means more for people who want this content and less for those who do not.”

Several friends have said they’re glad Threads wasn’t super political, and a nice change of pace from Twitter.

But when your town hall is run by a bunch of money hungry clowns who are desperate to appease the new regime, this is what you get. The “food court” that you thought was still an okay place to hang out was always destined for this outcome.

A client who has worked with some wonderful people is building an email list from scratch.

Typically this could mean sending a boring email to “all your contacts” saying, “hey, I have a newsletter now, please subscribe.”

Instead, I suggested they think of the amazing people they worked with throughout the years, and think of all those stories you shared, and the memories you’ve made. They’ve got to have dozens of those stories to write, right?

So write that post, with that one person in mind. Once published, send that person a link to the piece.

Maybe they subscribe, or at least reply and you two catch up, and who knows where that leads?

It’s not always about getting 100 new subscribers. Sometimes the right message to the right person at the right time is all you need.

Got this great question from Christy, a fellow writer on Substack; why spend money on something that’s not doing anything for you in the moment?

My thinking is that Substack could go away tomorrow. I’ve seen a lot of people say, “I’ve stopped paying for my website and moved everything to Substack.” But Substack is something you don’t pay for.

For example, I paid $430 a month for Bench to do my bookkeeping and taxes every year, and they just disappeared one Friday. They came back, but it was not a comforting experience. The same could happen with Substack, Medium, or any other platform. What if these sites go away? I’m terrified that my best work on Social Media Escape Club is only on Substack. If Substack shuts down or I leave the platform, where does my body of work go? It’s gone.

I’ve experienced this before. I sent over 1,000 newsletters for Skull Toaster, my metal trivia project, and now they’re all gone. They were in MailChimp or people’s inboxes, but there’s no archive. My music blog, which I started in 2001 and ran through 2008, is all gone too. That’s why I believe in having a website as an archive of your work.

A website can also replace the feeds we use on Substack Notes or social media. Instead of sharing off-the-cuff thoughts on those feeds, post them on your site first. For example, I visit Seth Godin’s blog every day because I know there will always be something there. Imagine people coming to your website to see what you’re up to—because they know that’s where your best work lives.

Ultimately, having a website ensures your work doesn’t vanish when a server shuts down or an account gets deleted. It’s time to rethink how we use websites: put your best work there first, then share it elsewhere. That’s my two cents.