Advice for newsletter-ers

There are so many email newslet­ters suddenly!

It used to feel cozy; a little neighborhood. But now, thanks almost entirely to the efforts of the com­pany called Substack, newsletter-ing has become the enticing next step for a whole host of writers.

I was just reading Patrick Tanguay’s thoughts about adding chunkier projects to his long-running Sen­tiers newsletter—which is excellent—and, in his post, he men­tioned an approach that I want to empha­size and sharpen.

Here’s my piece of advice for newsletter-ers, new and aspiring:

A per­sonal email newsletter ought to be divided into sea­sons, just like a TV show.

By “per­sonal” I don’t mean “diaristic” but rather “pro­duced almost entirely by one writer, in order to pursue some interest and/or estab­lish a small business.”

Here’s what you get from the nomenclature, the metaphor, of the “season”:

• a sense of progress: of going and getting somewhere.
• an opportunity for breaks: to pause and reflect, reconfigure.
• an opportunity, furthermore, to make big changes: in terms of subject, structure, style.

When do you break between sea­sons? Anytime! When life gets weird. When you’re feeling burnt out.