Three quick notes: 1) Support the GEO strikers. 2) My friend Christine is a highly interesting writer if you like nerd stuff, Kate Bush, the intersections of being a Catholic and being a leftist, and various other things — now she’s writing “An American’s Guide to Czech Cinema.” The gal has range. Check out her Patreon and if you like her work, she could use your support. 3) If you’ve been on the fence about buying either of my books, or basically anything published by Belt, you can get either or both for crazy cheap this week with the sales code SPRINGSALE23 if you buy them directly from Belt. Belt is kept alive by direct online sales through its own website, so you’re doing a small publisher a solid while saving a ton of money on books you definitely want to have.
So, picking up from some earlier thoughts: it seems like Substack is going to be one of the inheritors of the collapse of Twitter. So it’s not a bad time to think about what makes for a good paid newsletter?
The smartass who lives in my head says to that “How would you know, Christman?”, simply because it’s a good setup. And in fact I’m not sure I do. People have talked of an Age of Newsletters that will replicate some of the features of the Age of Blogging, but the two forms aren’t anywhere near identical. Individual installments of a newsletter are hard to Google and they show up in people’s inboxes unbidden, and this changes the whole dynamic. With both blogs and newsletters you’re allowed to be sloppier in certain ways than you would be if writing for traditional publication, but in a blog you’re also trying to catch and reward the attention of random strangers who Googled your topic, so you are trying to be funny, clever, or even eloquent. In every medium, there’s a style that gradually emerges that passes for cleverness or eloquence on the days that you can’t quite achieve those — nobody can do it all the time. …