Redefining the Newsletter

It's more than just an email or exclusivity. It's a community.

During the internet boom, when email notifications came from a familiar voice stating “you’ve got mail” and spam wasn’t a thing yet, the idea of communicating through a sequence of emails to customers was only just catching on. Fast forward to today and whenever anyone talks about starting up a business the first thing anyone will say, even before “get a website” is “start a newsletter.” Get those subscribers. Your list will be worth its weight in gold. Platforms can disappear tomorrow. The means with which you use to communicate to your community. But as long as you have that list you can easily import them anywhere a similar service is provided.

But is the basic concept of the newsletter from yesteryear the same as it is today? The idea of exclusivity and connection with the person whose newsletter you just subscribed to. Do I really care if that email I got from my favorite author can also be read by anyone on their personal website? And if that’s the case, would I quickly unsubscribe and spare myself the annoyance of having something sent to my inbox?

I think that is where this great divide lives. We all have email and we all know how annoying all the spam in our inbox can be. So when someone takes the time to subscribe they are basically saying they don’t mind if I email them because they won’t be annoyed. They want me to send them something to their inbox. But again, if they knew that email I just sent can (and hopefully is) being read by dozens of others who didn’t go through the extra step of subscribing, would they unsubscribe? Is that a risk we should take in order to limit how thin we spread ourselves already?

The idea of having a Substack where I post one thing to a set of subscribers, then Mailchimp where I send exclusive emails to another set of subscribers, then I have my website blog where my published posts also get emailed to yet another set of subscribers is crazy! There has to be a better way to build a community, have that exclusivity, and not light the candle at both ends while I’m doing it. Especially, as having to manage it all will easily take me away from the reason for the community building in the first place; my fiction writing!

The only way I can see to solve one problem (at least) is getting someone to subscribe and stay that way is to offer something that everyone can’t get. See if you can follow my thinking:

Step 1 | I have a substack that will soon be divided into three different newsletters: Blog posts, Friday Fiction 2.0, Serial Novel Series

Step 2 | These three areas would typically be separated between my website, Patreon, and Mailchimp newsletter. But with Substack, someone can subscribe one time in one place and get all of these things.

Step 3 | Of the three different kinds of newsletters a subscriber will receive from me TWO of them are exclusive to Substack. Meaning, you won’t find them on Patreon or my website. (I’ll be shutting down Mailchimp at the end of the year). Those things are my Friday Fiction 2.0 and my Serial novel series.

Step 4 | I will continue to publish my posts on both my website and now on Substack because I do get a lot of traffic to my website, but if anyone wants to get my posts direct to their inbox (the most convenient thing about subscribing to anything) then they can just subscribe to my Substack.

Step 5 | And this is where I’ll be taking my biggest gamble. In the Summer of 2022, I intend on doing two things: First, activating paid subscriptions. Second, releasing chapters of my serial novel series on a weekly basis. My hope is that I will have increased my subscriber base in that time through my Friday Fiction 2.0 that will have gone through 2 OPEN SEASONS of short-short fiction stories that people will enjoy so much that they will be glad to pay for a long continuing story that will last several weeks to get through.

Rethinking what a newsletter is really intended to do, which is provide useful, helpful, informative, and maybe even entertaining content regardless of exclusivity is the key to being able to move forward and not get bogged down by the way things were in the past.

There are so many ways to be exclusive with your subscribers and know that is what they want. One thing I love to do is put clickable links at the very end of the emails I send to see who is reading everything I send them. This can be used even in Substack by adding a link to your Facebook Group and see how many people click it and join? That is an exclusive place that can give your subscribers access to you. It doesn’t have to come from an email that only your list can read.

The only drawback I can see from abandoning the usual newsletter platform like Mailchimp is the analytics that comes with it. Using a service like Substack means I won’t know things like demographics, gender, location. I will know the open and click rate which, at the end of the day, is probably more important to know than anything else. And what makes Substack so great is that it doesn’t cost you anything extra if you should get more than 2k subscribers or send emails more than a dozen times a day to those subscribers the way it would with a service like Mailchimp.

Will I come to regret abandoning Mailchimp for Substack? Well, we’ll just have to wait and see. Look for my update in December 2022. I’ve already set a reminder for myself to write the follow-up to this post and I hope to bring good news.