Category: Writing

JUST HITTING PUBLISH

I write about writing in ‘PUBLISH OFTEN AND TALK ABOUT YOUR WORK,’ over at my Social Media Escape Club:

Conversations, in varying “live” settings, sharpened my ideas and my ability to express them.

This is how Cory Doctorow can riff about horrible corporations for over an hour and make it look easy.

We can all do this if we stop spending five hours a day on our phones.

We lose in followers, but we gain by honing our craft, finding our unique ways to express the ideas and concepts that will resonate with the right people.

I coulda spent 10 more hours editing and re-writing, but I feel just getting the post out there help me write a clearer post at some point down the road. Maybe that’s next week, or three months from now.

MEET ME WHERE I AM

From Mario Fraioli of the The Morning Shakeout newsletter:

I’ve spent a lot of time this year thinking about and experimenting with how I want to use social media (Notes, IG, and Bluesky). And where I’ve landed after trying to maintain a consistent presence on these platforms and “meet people where they are” is that I just don’t think I want to use social media at all anymore.

I’ve seen this concept for years – “meet people where they are!”

What I’ve found is that I’m expected to become a regular on multiple platforms and engage with them every day. Every post, every like, every comment leads to more things to keep up with – the shares, the comments, the DMs. This is every day, spread across time zones, morning noon and into the night.

Always another post to reply to or share. Another commenter to reply to. Another DM to answer.

I think a lot of us are getting tired of meeting people where they are and stepping off the engagement rat race, as the benefits of playing the game just aren’t worth it anymore.

A lot of those those people we engage with on social media are content to just be on social media, without subscribing, without meeting us where we are.

There’s a time when the quirky eatery leaves the food court at the mall and sets up shop downtown, and I think that’s a lot of us right now.

LET PEOPLE FIND YOUR WEBSITE

If we can agree that we’re posting into the void on social media, why not just post on our own sites “into the void?”

I recently suggested a client add a blog to their website, and they sent me this:

“Literally within one week (of adding the blog) this led to an invitation to give a talk (you know the old-fashioned way, you introduce yourself to someone cool, they look you up, find your website and boom).”

If someone looks you up, and you’re on a social media platform and they don’t have an account, it’s very hard (or sometimes impossible) for them to see your work.

But every smart phone ships with a web browser. No one needs to have an account to view your website on the wide open internet.

When adding to your own website, you’re not posting into the void, you’re building an online archive.

BEFORE 1000 TRUE FANS

I started my Social Media Escape Club newsletter in 2021 with an imported email list of 19 people.

Maria Popova started Brain Pickings “in 2006 as an email to seven friends.”

These days I have 6,600 email subscribers, the biggest email list I’ve ever had.

Then I have around 100 paying members, which is also the largest paying membership I’ve ever had.

There’s a big distance between zero and Kevin Kelly’s “1000 true fans” dream, but it all starts somewhere, one person at a time.

There’s no one-size-fits-all path, I don’t think, because everyone we serve is human, and as humans we’re messy and unpredictable. So when people ask me about finding their “1000 true fans,” I usually ask if they found their 10, or their 50 yet.

You’re gonna learn so much with the smaller groups of people, lessons you’re going to need to learn before you even think of hitting 1000.

JUST START BLOGGING

Fuck a Square Space, fuck a newsletter, fuck a social media platform and just freaking write, preferabbly on your own domain or least something you pay for so you can export yoru work if it ever goes belly up.

Fuck the full-width photos. Fuck the buttons. Fuck the H2 tags.

We’ve spent hours everyday posting and consuming social media content. Now it’s time to get radical. Reverse thrusters and lock in the auxiliary power. Pull the emergency brake and abort, it’s to get back to blogging.

Every new blog post is a signal to the reader, the curious visitor. There is no confusion, there is no navigation, there is THE FIRST POST.

It’s the menu, it’s the directions, it’s the manual – we start here. Today, this first post. This is where we start today.

Don’t like it? Scroll down, there’s another post. Not for you? Take a hike.

I guess I could say this blog is a failure for not landing me some big giant six figure client or whatever, but I’d say it’s a success because it’s fended off any shit-ass hiring manager from hiring a ding dong like me and that’s fine.

This blog is a signal. This is me. This is what you get. And it’s not ever video!

But the blog serves a purpose. Each post is like an email to the universe, a signal saying “this is what you get.”

Some might be curious and dive in. They might even email you.

Otherwise all those busy, cluttered, slow loading square space sites are just bogged down with static photos, text that was written three years ago, and a bunch of buttons to “sections” where it’s just more of the same.

Fucking write on your blog like your life depends on it because I’m thinking right about now it does.

BLOGGING IS A TRADE

I’m not even sure what part to quote from Alex Danco, but we can start with this:

Winning, for bloggers, means writing the reference take on a good topic. My favourite example of this is how Byrne Hobart broke out with his piece on the 30-year mortgage. It’s kind of surprising that this kind of post had such influence – it’s wonky, it’s not written for a general audience whatsoever. But it turns out that people think and talk about their mortgages a lot, and like to feel competent when they do. Reading that piece equips them with a kind of legitimacy to speak on the topic.

This under the header of Blogging is a trade, which I love seeing in the year 2025.

There is power in blogging, in writing, in text.

Everyone can put text on a screen in 2025, but not everyone can write. And if you can write, you’ve got options. From a blog post, to an email, to a text message – so much of it comes from the years blogging, of publishing on the web.

“This is the great secret of writing in public: the writer and primary audience both put in effort (to pack and unpack the idea); and they jointly reap the rewards, which is the legitimacy earned when the idea gets subsequently retold verbally to the wider secondary audience.”

Sadly, in the year 2025, some stupid ideas have won, but the good ideas spread, so it’s time for a lot of us to spread some more ideas. Not thoughts. Not hot takes. But ideas, ways to get out of messes, to move forward, to build a world we want to live in.

EVERYTHING IS A COPY OF A COPY OF A COPY

From The Slow Death—and Occasional Resurrection—of Original Reporting:

How We Fix It (a non-complete list)

  1. Fund the digging. Subscriptions aren’t charity; they’re R&D for democracy.
  2. Celebrate articles that wreck your priors. Surprise is the price of learning.
  3. Demand receipts. If a story leans entirely on “sources familiar”, ask for the paper trail, The Verge does this well.
  4. Back legal defence funds. Lawsuits stop more stories than lack of curiosity.
  5. Publish your changelog. Post the list: people spoken to, documents read, and known unknowns.

Excellent post.

I WRITE TO REMEMBER

From my People & Blogs interview with Manuel Moreale:

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

Honestly, no. WordPress and the hosting and such works fine for me. I don’t care much about the name, or the theme, or whatever. The blog is 100% for me.

“I write to remember,” as the lyrics go in ‘One Armed Scissor’ by At the Drive In.

Read the rest here.

BUILD DENSE THINGS

From ‘3 Ways to Amplify Your Creator Gravity,” by Alice Lemee:

LinkedIn posts and Substack notes and Skeets (that’s Bluesky for the uninitiated) are not dense. They extend your reach, sure, but they’re more like your planet’s atmosphere—thin, easily dispersed, and quickly forgotten.

Instead, you need density. When I say dense, I mean something that doesn’t have a 24-hour life cycle and can’t be plucked from the top of your head.

WRITING ISN’T ALWAYS ABOUT US

Writing newsletters can be tough because we think it always has to be us us us…. me me me… look at all the things I got going on! But it’s so fun when we show this world we’ve built, talk about the people in our creative orbit. Tell the stories of how we got where we’re at, and the people who made it possibiel.