A Creative Work Question

[radiantfracture]

One of the central suggestions of the Creative Work course is to write an email newsletter (update, report, e-mag, mail art project -- some sort of thing people get from you in email form at least once a month).

Do you read, or write, email newsletters? What are your thoughts about them as a genre?

The course doesn't advocate for hard-sell spammy emails -- it's newsletter as audience-building, not direct marketing. The examples we looked at were worth reading and viewing as publications in themselves, or else usefully informative about things the reader would be interested in (art classes from an artist they liked, say).

I can see how it's a good idea in many respects. You build connections, community, audience. You can showcase work and directly remind people of events, updates, etc.

I just don't see how what I do -- or rather what I want to do -- would fit into a newsletter model. The direction I want to go with poetry and images is a more difficult, challenging direction. Not very newsletterable.

So if I did an email-based -- thingy -- it would have to be -- something else. Some other sort of project. Potentially fun/creative in theory, but -- what would that be?

If I had a form I wanted to write or draw in regularly -- like reviews or essays -- then I could see the fit, but as things stand I'd have to make something up, and that really feels like a non-starter.

I have a vague idea about creating a sort of theatre lab where some friends and I try out performance games / exercises I want to develop -- I had thought of that as an in-person thing, but it could also have a long-distance component -- sort of like projects that Miranda July has done -- but the idea is so unformed that I wouldn't know how to actualize it at this point.

I won't be offering classes or workshops or events for a long time, so there's nothing to inform people about there.

Also -- while I have signed up to *receive* several newsletters -- I have a hard time focusing long enough to read them through. (I don't usually have that problem with blogs, so maybe it's something I could re-learn.)

This post, of course, shares features with a newsletter -- or anyway it's a public piece of writing -- but it's untargeted and unannounced, without the formal and content demands that a newsletter has. This fits in much better with my pathologically aggressive diffidence.

If you were going to do an email thing, or read one, what would it be?

{rf}

Comments

[siderea]

The idea of doing a newsletter offends against one of my core creative principles, which is, "Never say anything more predictive than, 'Watch this!'".

That said, I did have a thingy once, a kind of predecessor if you will of what it is I do here, which involved my emailing essays at friends I thought would be amused by them, on a wholly unpredictable schedule. It quickly fizzled out because of lack of synergy: without a comment forum, without the feedback from the audience, my creative energies dissipated.

Is there some reason you can't do a blog? Or have a newsletter that says, "New thing at my blog"?

There was a band I liked (well, duo) that had very funny newletters, with lots of spoof news stories and similar that connected with their style/genre of music. Looked like a lot of work, though.

[radiantfracture]

Is there some reason you can't do a blog? Or have a newsletter that says, "New thing at my blog"?

I definitely could do a blog with a newsletter that points at it. I think I'm partly just being difficult. (Partly? Largely?)

Formalizing my blog is another challenge I have not yet risen to.

It sounds like you had a great newsletter that didn't have the digital infrastructure around it to support it.

[sonia]

I do a combination blog/newsletter article once a month as my main form of marketing for my practice. Audience-building, like you said. Someone told me I had to do a newsletter eleven (!) years ago, and this is what I came up with. It took a long time to build up enough to bear fruit, but these days a lot of people find me (or remember that I'm there) via the articles & website.

The monthly discipline of it is a drag sometimes, but I always manage to find a topic, put something together, and send it out. I like that I find out what I have to say, and the commitment to myself to send *something* gets me past the inner censor that says it's not worth saying. I realized recently that yes, the writing is still hard each month - creating something new *is* hard.

I had to ignore what I thought a newsletter looks like to come up with what worked for me. You could create your own format. Sounds like you want something short, with a poem or an image (or both). I bet you could come up with something once a month that you want to send out. You could think of it as an offering, a gift to the people on your list.

Best wishes with negotiating with your pathologically aggressive diffidence (lovely phrase!) and I look forward to seeing what you come up with. I do get less anxious about pressing Send on the newsletters than I did the first year or two, and I've only ever gotten two pieces of hate mail in response, which is pretty darn good for today's Internet.

[radiantfracture]

Thanks -- this is very helpful!

I do a combination blog/newsletter article once a month as my main form of marketing for my practice.

Great to know! I've seen your site, but not the newsletter. (V. cool post on the digestive system.)

I can totally see the advantage of the monthly writing accountability, if I could just think of something I actually felt inspired to write serially.

I did think of a poem/drawing plus some notes about its creation process. It doesn't feel quite exciting enough as-is.

I do have some vaguely ongoing projects -- maybe some sort of rotating content.

[sonia]

Glad you liked the article!

Just about every month, I have to tell myself, "Maybe this month it will just be a paragraph," to be able to get started. And then it turns out to be the usual 2-3 pages. If you decide to do a newsletter, I recommend giving yourself permission to start very small. Your idea for a poem/drawing + notes about the creation process sounds great!

No need to be consistent month to month either - my topics vary quite a bit. And sometimes the throwaway "no time this month, just put something simple out there" articles get the most appreciative comments. Trying to predict how people will react is a losing game.

[sabotabby]

I'm subscribed to two author newsletters: Warren Ellis and Daniel Ortberg. Both were newsletters I subscribed to because I'm fans of said writers and because the few that I read were really good, and I miss Ortberg's regular columns.

When I get them now, I hit delete without reading because I have no time and too much email. Most of the time, I'm checking email on my phone and I don't have the energy to read a long thing on a small screen.

[radiantfracture]

Yeah, I mostly deleted the ones I used to get. Now I've signed up for a bunch more.

I do sometimes read the articles that Longform recommends. Sometimes artists have done visual projects I enjoyed seeing the updates for. If Daniel Ortberg has a newsletter, I do kind of want that.

[shewhomust]

For what it's worth: I subscribe to several newsletters, some of which I always read, some of which I usually read eventually, some of which I really ought to unsubscribe from. Also (at leasr) one which seems to have fizzled out, and I was mildly irritated to see the author tweeting about how much he had enjoyed a gig which I would have gone to if he had sent out a newdletter containing that date.

Then again, calibrate for me as a person who treats my DW f-list as a sort of morning newsletter (so I was glad you made that link in your post), and Twitter as an instrument of the devil, into which I dip occasionally with a very long spoon.

And now, with my 'website manager' hat on: the marketing people will urge you to be ever-present on all the social media, but a more realistic aim is to find one that's a good fit for you, and stick with it. Maybe a newsletter that tells people when you've posted to a blog is the way to go, and then you have a platform where you can add in more infrequent events when / if they happen? But I do believe that readers can tell when something is forced, so if it doesn't feel natural, don't do it.

[radiantfracture]

I might read more if I liked my screen better. I used to sit down with a coffee and a smoothie in front of my LJ reading list and have a perfect happy morning.

I do like reading my blog list, and I only check Twitter to see if anyone s me, so we're pretty parallel there.

Of the big ones, I think Instagram is my platform, with backup posts to Facebook. This blog is in a sort of liminal space between privateish and publicesque.

[contrarywise]

It's been a long time since I wrote or edited and formatted a newsletter, but there are a few I read regularly. A simple format that accommodates limited reading time, a relevant or interesting image or two, and items with links pointing elsewhere for a deeper dive into the topic at hand are common features of the few that have stuck around in my In Box. You can always start small and build up content as needed. One possibility is an annotated rec list of interesting things that reflect your tastes, interests or worldview. One newsletter I look forward to, called Three Weeks, takes this format to a bit of an extreme, but it's always interesting and includes many things I don't generally encounter in my online reading. It apparently started from a small nucleus (three things to read, watch and listen to), and grew from there.

[twistedchick]

I used to do a newsletter (on paper, pre-computer era) and subscribe to a couple. They were tightly focused in terms of content, for a specific readership. I'm not sure that's what you want to do here, unless you only want to write about a small group of topics and never vary.

Or you could do as contrarywise suggests, and grow it.

I'm uncertain how different a newsletter in that sense would be from a blog. Or, actually, from this journal.

[radiantfracture]

I used to do a newsletter (on paper, pre-computer era) and subscribe to a couple.

Cool -- what were the newsletters about?

I maybe think of my blog more in the genre of letters. I try to make it worth reading, but I place no requirements on it in terms of subject or structure. That's just expediency. It would be really nice to have more focus, but the wherewithal hasn't, so far, manifested.

Sending a newsletter feels like announcing something more purposeful. It feels like it ought to have some sort of focus -- maybe not a rigid one, but something more predictable.

What I like about podcasts, for example, is knowing that I'll get a specific kind of experience at regular intervals. I would love to do a podcast, but that is a hell of a lot more work. See under wherewithal.