I’m not offering dark secrets, just light secrets - to illuminate.
And not even secrets, really, to many people here.
But if you have never operated your own newsletter or email list, you may not know how they differ from plain old emails of the kind you send at work or to friends and family.
You’ll soon find out!
That is, if you try sending the same message, within a certain limited time period, to lots of people all at once.
I did that, years ago, and my personal email account was blocked - suspected of spamming.
Bit awkward, because I was on deadline for The Sunday Times. I had to set up a new Gmail account. Not the end of the world, but who wants to do that?
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So anyway, I made a video about this.
It’s really for subscribers to my other newsletter, outside Substack. I’m NOT posting it here so that you subscribe to that other one. I’m posting it because it’s about journalism, of a sort.
I think it has value to people, even here on Substack, who may not understand the implications of links in emails, opening rates, and unsubscribe links.
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Over the years, I’ve given a number of talks about how newspapers work(ed). It always surprised me what people did and didn’t know.
This is my attempt to start doing something similar for email publishing.
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Enough typing!
Time to watch the vid:
For reasons that must be obvious, if you have actually bothered to watch the video, I’d be glad to have a comment, or a like, or whatever.
Just to know I’m not publishing into the void, that kind of thing.
You could even use this:
Have a nice day.
Watched the vid, JPF. I didn't know that not-interacting has such a specific impact on the success of a newsletter. Also cool to find out you'd written a novel. It's on my list after reading (part of) the brilliant first chapter.