Hello and Happy Friday, thanks for reading. Uncle Seth here to guide you through four things that may help you move your work forward.

Also, the replay for yesterday’s Escape Pod is available here.

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// FOUR THE WEEKEND

1. SPEND LESS TIME ON SUBSTACK NOTES (AND SOCIAL MEDIA)

I know a handful of you reading this have your own Substack publications, but I’m telling you – spend less time on Substack Notes (and social media in general).

Use your time wisely. If you must use social media, just reply to a few friends, and join some conversations here and there. Spending time and energy trying to craft the perfect post just to get 100 likes? I don’t recommend it.

Instead, try reaching out to a writer friend and workshopping your next email newsletter together, or update your websites. Craft a pitch to a creative director.

I fully believe there is more to be gained collaborating on an hour long Zoom call than spending two hours a day scrolling on social media.

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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.

Saw this question on Substack Notes from Aishwarya Vardhana, and figured I’d make a full post about it because I see it a lot.

Go to the profile of the people you already subscribe to and find out what they’re reading! You’re probably subscribed to some quality folks, and I bet they subscribe to good folks, too.

Relying on the Substack Notes algorithm (or any algorithm, like Spotify) to show you exactly what you’re looking for is a waste of time. As you can see, I Subscribe to a lot of people – maybe you’ll find something from my list!

Do your own homework, and seek out the sort of materials you want to consume via your own network.

And don’t be afraid to ask your friends (and even your subscribers) what they’re reading, too. You just never know who you’ll discover along the way.

I got a great question from Maja Lampa asking about using a stand-alone blogging platform like Pika versus using Substack.

Deciding between Pika (or any stand-alone blogging platform) and Substack depends on what you’re trying to achieve.

Pika gives you more control but no built-in audience, so driving traffic is entirely up to you.

If you want a nice quiet corner on the internet, then Pika is great!

Substack, however, has a built-in network to help readers find your work and makes it super easy to grow an email list, which I think is super important at whatever level you’re at.

Again – it depends on what you’re trying to achieve. I love the built-in network that Substack provides because it makes it super easy for people to subscribe and get my posts in their inbox.

That means if someday I leave Substack, I can export my email list and set up shop somewhere else, and my fans won’t have to find me elsewhere or re-subscribe on another platform.

Spend time setting up a new social media account, and in five years you’ll be right back where you started.

I’ve seen this song and dance before. We’ve learned nothing from the days of Xanga, MySpace, and Facebook. What was the name of the app that’d replace Instagram?

“I’m wondering if another social media network is really the answer we need.”

It’s time to build something that lasts – your own website, a homebase on the internet that becomes the primary source of all the work you put out into the world.

A place where casual fans can turn into bigger fans of your work.

Now, most “build your own website” services make websites that are good enough, but your work deserves so much more.

“We are the creative professionals who base our entire careers on making things look interesting.

Why would we stop with our branding, our collateral material, and – for the love of God – our website?

We are in the world of visual excellence. We should make visual excellence the priority feature of our brand.” Photographer Don Giannatti 

• Roman Muradov made a micro-site for his comic, and Diana Pappas & Tom Bland made a site for their photo & video shoot location titled Meadow, both using Cargo.
• Cody Cook-Parrott uses Notion to explain their upcoming classes.
• My interplanetary commuter music project (Hunterthen) needed a website, so I built one using Carrd. MMM is another website builder, but weirder.
• You could upload HTML files to YAY.BOO, made by A Good Enough Newsletter (they make Pika, too, which is a neat little blogging platform).
• I have a WordPress guy, and they set up my blog sethw.xyz in 2018, and I’ve been manually importing photos and posts dating back to 2004. I can introduce you.

You can do whatever you want!

Relying on a platform to get it right is hard because platforms are made up of people, and it’s hard for people to get it right for everyone all the time.

I was on the phone with my buddy Dino Corvino the other day, bumming about the recent election, and he said, “Someone in your town is hungry; make them a sandwich.”

I searched “Thanksgiving volunteer (your town)” in Google and found a local non-profit organizing meals for the upcoming holidays. I told a friend, and we went out and bought three meals for people needing a Thanksgiving dinner.

Today, for me, that’s my answer to all this.

From Embedded:

“It’s time to stop ceding our humanity to these platforms. It’s time to invest back into IRL community. It’s time to stop 24/7 scrolling social media—you will not find the answers there.”

I’ll find more of the answer when I drop off these three boxes of meals later this week because the answer is people, not platforms.

We need more people working on bringing joy into the world instead of uploading vertical videos for no one to see.

As Alice Katter says,

“The systems we live and work in today are human-made; they were created by people. So, why not create something different? That’s the beauty of creativity — it has the power to overcome established rules and even the language we use daily.”

Get to know the people who work at your local record shop, music store, gas station, library, or grocery store.

Say hi to your neighbors. Tell other creative people you like their work. Start Zoom hangs or phone calls with your friends.

Start a blog, an email list, a neighborhood group, a community meeting of artists, or gardeners, or joggers.

Conversely, don’t hang out with people who drain your energy. Set boundaries. Cut people from your life if you need to. Yes, even family. Life is short.

Spare me the “echo chamber” talk. We can have different opinions about economic policies and football teams, but if you think people I love don’t deserve basic human rights, well, go fuck yourself.

Yes, we should continue throwing stones at Spotify and Apple and Facebook and Amazon, but we can also do the work of engaging our communities for the benefit of humanity at the same time.

We can create new systems, new ways of working, new ways to show our work. I know it’d be super cool if I just laid out all the answers for your super-niche category, but I promise that you already have the ideas inside of you.

Do the thing you want to do. Most people won’t see what you’re doing anyway, so you might as well do it how you want.

Email someone way up the food chain. Go to the event. Ask for an introduction. Make your own luck. Your next big break could be one email, one interaction, one person away.

Hitting the viral jackpot on social media won’t save you, but building genuine connections with people around you just might.

We’re not meant to stare at our phones for several hours every day. As Tuğba Avci says:

“It isn’t easy, but we need to start treating our mental and emotional health with the same importance as our physical health. You wouldn’t run a marathon every day, would you? So why do we subject ourselves to this communication madness for 12 hours straight?”

We make ourselves more available to anyone at any time, as we might be on several different social media platforms and their DM inboxes and replies, Slack channels and Discords, and managing multiple email inboxes.

As Seth Godin recently wrote:

“You might not have thought you’d be spending seven hours a day reading the internet, or most of your free time posting and responding, but that’s what the social media companies have pushed us to do.

We’re so scared of leaving social media because we’ve been led to believe we’ll be alone without it.

So, how can we possibly live without social media?

We read books. Magazines. Visit our library and local bookstores. Join a knitting club or take a photography course. Learn a new skill or a language (or two).

We can play shows in weird venues. We do book clubs in diners (or Zoom). We make comic books and zines, podcasts on cassettes, and screen print our own posters.

We build websites, and we update them. We send newsletters that aren’t just digital product catalogs. We buy photo prints and postcards and vinyl from our friends, and if we’re broke we at least tell our friends about the cool things our friends are making.

We stop talking about the 900 things we read yesterday and instead tell stories of shit we’ve done, places we’ve been. Trust me, you’ve got stories.

We host dinners without cell phones. We make breakfast for friends. We talk up our friends who do good work with people who can hire them.

We start radio shows at the local college, make ambient music, make short films with our iPhones, and bring together friends to premiere our work over pizza and seltzers.

None of this is a guarantee. None of this goes viral, or brings in 100 new subscribers, or pays your rent.

None of this is easy.

People working at social media platforms made sure that posting a video is as easy as possible. That makes everything else feel like hard work.

But we need to do hard work because when done often enough, with good people, we create a scene and build culture. That’s how we find our people and start feeling less alone in all of this, because we can’t hang out at the food court at the mall on Friday nights forever.

Let’s start hosting our own Zoom calls, and meeting in basements, studios, and backrooms to create the creative world we want to inhabit.

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).