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.
Category: Writing
HOW TO WRITE ONLINE
Solid advice for writing online, from Sean Goedecke:
- Try and find opinions you have that lots of people disagree with. Those are the interesting opinions others might want to read about
- Ideas should come naturally from doing actual work, not from sitting and reflecting on what a good blog post would be
- It’s OK to write multiple posts about the same thing
- I deliberately don’t include every caveat – good readers will know I’m only writing about my old experience; bad ones won’t care anyway
- I try to be upfront about my experience so readers can judge how seriously to take what I’m saying
- Set up a RSS feed and some kind of analytics
Read more at ‘Writing a tech blog people want to read‘ (via Hacker News).
LOSE THE MAP
As Seth Godin says in his book Linchpin:
“The reason that art (writing, engaging, leading, all of it) is valuable is precisely why I can’t tell you how to do it. If there were a map, there’d be no art, because art is the act of navigating without a map.”
If you want a guarantee, buy a hammer.
Stop looking for tricks. There is no shortcut. There’s no “one size fits all.”
Make a painting, a photograph, a sad song, teach a course, call an old friend, dance like no one’s watching, cuz no one cares more than you do, so you might as well get to it.
START OVER
Photo by Seth Werkheiser
If an unpaid intern could write it, start over.
There are things can could be written by someone else on your behalf – announcing a new product, an upcoming tour, a fancy new something or other.
Lay out the facts. The dates. The logistics. “I’m really excited about this,” you say – gee, really?! Tell me more 😕
There’s enough safe, boring, dry text out there. Throwing chatGPT into the mix makes it even less spicy.
Your creativity is your magic. But please, don’t stop using it when it’s time to talk about the things you’re doing.
I wrote about this in ‘Find social media success by occasionally riding a horse,’ where I say:
“If all you can muster is “I updated my site,” lower your expectations. The algorithms are cruel, but it’s nothing personal. Is this fair or kind? No. But playing this game is a choice, and hardly anybody wins.”
NO GOING BACK
Here’s the terrifying thing about the state of music in 2024 (from The Verge):
“The tech industry’s introduction of MP3 slowly felled major retailers. Behemoth music stores went belly-up in the 2000s: Tower Records, Virgin Megastores, and Sam Goody. FYE bought up the rest. Ads from those retailers vanished, too.”
Like, that happened 20+ years ago and we’re still recovering. All the music knowledge, the time we spent going to those stores, the jobs that were cut and lost… the digitization of music is an atomic bomb that I don’t think we’ve recovered from.
Back when we paid $16 for a CD, yes, music review sites were crucial. And of course, yes, music critics are of course needed, but they’re not valued (as we can see).
There was a time you could write for an online outlet and make a few bucks. There was also a time when you could write for a newspaper and pay the rent.
Ernest Hemingway was paid $1 a word in 1936. That’s more than $21 per word in today’s dollars. The maximum I was ever paid to write for a glossy magazine in print was $2/word, in 2021. No one (and I really mean no one) in media makes $21/word. That compensation just doesn’t exist.
That’s from Defector (above).
When I ran Noisecreep in 2008 we were paying writers $50 a post.
A few years later, I was writing posts for $5 a post.
Now Yahoo for Creators isn’t even paying per post, but they “offer a competitive 50/50 ad revenue share from ad placements in your articles as well as e-commerce benefits like affiliate revenue share.”
CPM display ad placements. On blog posts. It’s 2005 all over again.
“Although I live in a huge house, I keep a hotel room and go there at about 6:30 in the morning. I have a Roget’s Thesaurus, a dictionary, a Bible, a yellow pad, and pens, and I go to work. I encourage housekeeping not to go in, since I leave at about one in the afternoon and never use the bed.”
Maya Angelou
Via ‘Apples, Baths, and Bestsellers: The Rituals of Creative Minds‘
“I have one piece of advice: if you read a book you love, tell other people about it. Tell them face-to-face. In your groupchat. On social media. Even on Goodreads. Every book is a lottery ticket, but the bezzlers are buying their tickets by the case: every time you tell someone about a book you loved (and even better, why you loved it), you buy a writer another ticket.”
Cory Doctorow
“Don’t write online for fame and glory. Oblivion, obscurity and exploitation are all but guaranteed.”
James Shelley
Via Patrick Rhone
BE KIND
In this post Dan Blank describes how we can now take a video and upload it in seconds for the world to see.
I take it for granted how easy it is to do with just WORDS on a screen! We’re all typing, and hitting post, or send, and whoosh it goes out there and people can read it on their computers, or their phones while in line at the drug store, or on the bus!
Then those words can take us on a journey, much like the post I’m talking about today!
They lead us on sharp turns and twists, and then we sit with them, and laugh, or cry, or leave comments, or share them with a friend.
HEAVY METAL EMAIL HITS 500 SUBSCRIBERS
I started my HEAVY METAL EMAIL newsletter in late 2021, writing all about email marketing in the magical music world, in a very niche sort of way. It’s not for everybody, and that’s just fine.
But it’s for 500 people right now, apparently.
This happened mostly without social media. I deleted Twitter, stopped posting on Instagram, and Facebook? My goodness, I never log in, really.
All that time saved creating “assets” for social media platforms, and “engaging,” now I just spend that time on writing. Hell, I moved to a summer schedule, posting just once a week, down from three times per week.
Most of the subscribers come from Substack, and recommendations from other people who also have Substack newsletters. And I picked up two new clients from writing the newsletter.
Maybe this “not being on social media” thing will work out fine.