If I am being honest Doug, I do not actually read your ‘newsletter‘ as such, but I do follow everything you post via RSS. While Laura, I really enjoy your newsletter, but find I keep on getting unsubscribed. I fear that my email address has been flagged somewhere possibly, maybe.
Tag: Newsletters
The newsletter is the ultimate form for a moment in which writers feel pressure to produce a steady stream of advertisements for themselves. “The dominant literary style in America is careerism,” the critic Christian Lorentzen wrote this spring. (“This is neither a judgment nor a slur,” he added, not quite credibly.)
I agree with Jonas, the open rate is a good way to see who is still interested in your newsletter. You can use that data to keep your lists clean. That tool is now being taken away from the maker and it remains to be seen what effect this will have on issues such as spam and list hygiene. It’s good that Apple is taking these steps, the email industry is now on the move.
Hi Frank, I read your newsletter, although I am not sure how that counts in regards to analytics. I read your ‘newsletter’ via your blog. Not sure how this count comes through. I liked this piece from Mailpoet in regards to analytics and open rates. It will be interesting to see how this space unfolds. Personally speaking, I am lucky that I do not care too much about my click count – haven’t looked at my analytics for years – but if I did, I guess I would be concerned. I do appreciate the random comment 🙂
Put work you care about less—work for hire, short-form editorial, dumb jokes, random experiments—on platforms you don’t control, where the risk of failure is a distinct possibility. Leverage the resources of what else is out there. But when you’re working on the stuff that does really matter to you, put it in a place you have ownership of. Put it on your website. Send the newsletter using tools you run or manage—and be willing to pay for that right.
Ernie Smith goes beyond Substack and Mailchimp to discuss a number of options associated with managing newsletters. Whether it be using Mailgun, Amazon SES or EmailOctopus to send and Craft CMS, Ghost, Sendy or WordPress to host. Personally, I host my newsletter on my own WordPress site and send out a link via Buttondown.Email. However, Smith has me reassessing this, especially in regards to how I email.
This newsletter has been moved a few times this year. I started at Revue, where I automatically posted the editions on my blog. I then used a few editions of Mailpoet as a WordPress plugin, to eventually land at Newsletter Glue. First as a betatester and now as a cheerleader. Newsletter Glue lets you write and send newsletters from your WordPress blog. In addition to a newsletter, it becomes a blog post and the edition is searchable on the web. It works really nicely and the developers are open to improvements.
I had not heard of Newsletter Glue. I currently use Buttondown.Email, however I have been looking at other options.
Popular email clients, particularly Gmail, have a tendency to cut emails off after a 102-kilobyte limit. Why the heck is that?
Ernie Smith dives into some of the technical problems/limitations to email newsletters, in particular why one email gets cut off at 1,500 words and another doesn’t:
- You Write Too Much
- Your Email Has Too Many Design Elements
- Your Links Are Too Long
- Your Readers’ Email Addresses May Be Too Long
- You Waste Too Much Space
It is interesting to think about this in regards to Angela Lashbrook’s discussion of spam filtering. It is also another reminder of why email is broken.
I spent some time looking at Substack, but ultimately decided against it for a variety of reasons. I am interested in this new writing space and model. But, it also does remind of the hype around Medium when it first started.
Ian, I am really intrigues about the rise of Substrack. I liked Sean Monahan concern about the magic of micropayments:
A new micropayments platform for newsletters won’t magically liberate public intellectuals from commercial pressures; it won’t solve the tensions between free speech and safety; and I highly doubt it will make having a career as a writer any easier. But it will create space for writing not tailored to the trending on Twitter section, encourage writers to develop a deeper relationship with their audience, and promote the sort of writing (both longform and short) that doesn’t fit neatly into the categories of legacy media.
I really liked your association between Substack and Medium. What Monahan labels a ‘social media interregnum’. I really liked Chris Aldrich’s point about ‘yet-another-platform’.
I have been using Buttondown, but have reservations and am considering moving to Mailpoet, especially as all my posts are already on my site.
In recent years, the email newsletters has seen a huge revival thanks to tools like Substack. From culture to tech to politics, here are 80 of the best.
Just when I thought I had enough newsletters coming into my inbox.
It seems like everyone and their dog has an email newsletter these days. If you go back and check the last 10 sites you visited, I bet at least half of them have a newsletter.
Is that a bad thing? No way! While all the optin forms and pop-ups you come across online can be overwhelming, there are se…
In the search for different suggestions in regards to music, I have started following all things NPR Music:
Although I have followed bits and pieces over the years, I have decided to actually add the feeds to my list.
I have particular been enjoying All Songs Considered’s dive into the 2010s.
In 2015, Meredith Haggerty produced an episode on TinyLetter and women’s writing for her WNYC internet-culture show, TLDR. In it, Haggerty quoted the essay “The Laugh of the Medusa,” published by the French feminist scholar Hélène Cixous in 1976. “Women must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies,” Cixous argues, going on to explain that the only way women can make up for their absence from recorded history is to write themselves in now, super fast, with lots of detail and energy.
This, Haggerty argued, is what women were doing with TinyLetter, and what many of the best newsletters are doing now. In her newsletter Like This, the writer Meaghan O’Connell documented in gory and personal detail the experience of giving birth. Starting in 2014, the writer Charlotte Shane published a serialized memoir about her experiences as a sex worker in a TinyLetter called Prostitute Laundry. It was later adapted into a book, but as she was publishing the newsletter, she kept no public archive: You had to subscribe, and whatever you’d already missed was lost to the wind.
Kaitlyn Tiffany explores the ever evolving world of newsletters. Although not a traditional ‘blog’ this is another interesting post in regards to development over time. Intriguingly, this captures both changes to people and purpose, but also in regards to the various platforms. One question I was left wondering is whether there is an incentive from some of the freemium platforms for spam accounts to get users up to the magic ‘1000’ subscribers?