Seven things to do BEFORE you start a newsletter
Whether it's on Substack or another platform, don't even think about launching a newsletter until you do these things.
Hello and Happy Wednesday,
Did you all do the eclipse? In my part of Connecticut, the eclipse was super duper visible until 3:10pm when the eclipse was supposed to peak, at which point we couldn’t see jack sh*t. I very much enjoyed all the radio stations playing eclipse-themed songs on my drive home though— that was a highlight.
I’m beyond excited for our query writing class next week. I’m still looking through the query letters that enrolled students shared to pick a few to workshop during class— thanks for your patience as I look through these great letters! If you want to join us, we’re nearly at capacity, but we have a few spots left! You can register for the query class here, and if you can’t join us live on April 17th, no worries: the video will be shared with all participants after class and video-watchers can follow up with a question about the material presented.
Today, we’ll be discussing the preparatory things people should do before they start a newsletter. A few weeks back, I ran a class on all things platform1, and understandably, a lot of the questions and concerns were on the topic of newsletters. It’s my impression that people—both gatekeepers and other writers—are out there telling writers to “just go start a newsletter” like it’s an application you can download, and just start winning at.
I ran through my own newsletter timeline in the platform class, but preparation and honesty are concepts that I care about, plus, I want you to set yourself up for realistic (and realizable!) success, so I’ll share that timeline again, here.
When I decided I wanted to have a newsletter, I began it on Mailchimp in 2019. Originally, it was called “Maumalog” and I wrote about whatever the heck I felt like. But more and more, especially with the release of my publishing guidebook, Before and After the Book Deal in 2020, I found myself writing about all things publishing. The thing was, I had a lot of friends and family members subscribing to my Mailchimp who weren’t in the writing world, and I didn’t want to bore them with publishing-related posts. So I hired someone (she’s not doing this work anymore, otherwise I’d name her) to help me set up “segments” in my Mailchimp so that people could opt in for Maumalog content (my personal musings) or publishing advice that I called “Get Published, Stay Published,” or, if they wanted to, they could sign up for both.
I ran my Mailchimp for a few years. I got enough followers that it became expensive to maintain— at the end, I was paying over $70 a month to publish my own content. It was actually my agent who told me to go to Substack; she thought it was absurd that I was paying to publish my own advice. (Best nudge you ever gave me, dear Rebecca!)
Because I’m technically inept, and also of an age where I’ve learned that paying experts to do things I’m bad at pays off in the long run, I hired Miller Coffey (they/them) from Bellflower Media to help me migrate to Substack. All praise Miller, because it was Miller who asked me why I wasn’t giving my newsletter the same name as my bestselling guidebook. Wasn’t that creating brand equity confusion? Yes, Miller, it was. Thanks to Miller’s help, I got my first post for “Before and After the Book Deal”—the Substack—live in the spring of 2021.
I brought about 3K subscribers with me from my Mailchimp, which was a great and solid number to start with. I also came to Substack about a year before a tsunami of content creators in the publishing and craft spaces arrived, which certainly helped me carve out and maintain a space for my content.
But me writing about writing started a full decade before I launched a newsletter. The first piece I published about the writing life was “A Field Guide to AWP” which came out via Tin House in 2012. I kept writing about writing, and I kept working on my own writing, and the next publishing-related piece that got a lot of eyeballs was a 2015 Buzzfeed essay called “Why being being a debut author isn’t exactly a dream come true.” (The clickbait title was their doing, not mine ;) At the time the piece went live, I had a novel out with a major publisher and another one en route. I continued writing about publishing in between publishing fiction, nonfiction and short stories of my own. Finally, in 2020, I went big with all my writing thoughts and published the guidebook to the industry that this newsletter is named for in January of 2020.
My point here is the math. I started having real success on Substack in 2022. That’s an entire DECADE after I started writing about my passion topic: what it’s really like to be a published author. For ten entire years, I was pitching and writing and publishing some of my pitches, while working on book-length manuscripts and doing storytelling series and reading series and volunteering to read slush piles at literary magazines and going to conferences and trying to make friends and hustling like my very life depended on it.
My success on Substack didn’t happen overnight. Success doesn’t work like that, and it really doesn’t work like that in the world of writing.
While it might be hard to hear, it takes a long time to make a newsletter take off, and more than anything else, it takes publishing about your chosen topic outside of your newsletter to build buzz around whatever newsletter you will eventually launch.
A caveat: the following seven tips are for newsletters that focus on a certain topic and come out fairly regularly, not author newsletters which exist to keep you in touch with readers and fans on a sporadic basis or when you have something to promote.
With that said, here are the seven truest things I know about starting a newsletter:
