It honestly sucks that in 2024 there’s not a good way to support creators with small donations. The “one a month” model is great from a human perspective but financially it’s quite awful: a 1 USD donation, after fees and taxes, becomes more like a 0.60 USD donation but it is what it is. I’m still grateful to the 86 people who are currently supporting what I'm doing here.

Nowadays people do much of their reading on phones.Four years ago, I threw mine away. It made me crazy. All day talking nonsense.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTWe must learn to speak with the person inside us. It was him who saved my life. Since I was alone for many years, that has stayed with me.When I’m in the field working with the tractor, sometimes I stop to see how a little bird constructs its nest. He was born with the program. He’s already an architect. Nobody taught him. Do you know the hornero bird? They are perfect bricklayers.I admire nature. I almost have a sort of pantheism. You have to have the eyes to see it.

In 1950, master photographer Irving Penn set up a simple studio in Paris and started to photograph people of all kinds of professions, each wearing their work clothes and carrying the tools of their trade.

What allows you to stay active and engaged in your work? The simplest way I could answer that would be that I’ve never thought of making art as a career. It’s certainly a job in a sense, but it’s just not a career. It’s a choice you make somewhere down the line about how you’re going to live your life. It doesn’t mean that you don’t have to deal with the same bullshit everybody else has to deal with as far as making a living and all of that, but it’s a shift in your mind where everything you do becomes a part of the same thing. That’s the way I’ve felt about it. Once that decision got made, and I don’t really know when it was, it was probably sometime when I was in school, that’s how I wanted to live my life. That’s pretty much been the throughline from the beginning.

You could just about eat her voice for dinner: it’s the gravy spilling out of a chicken pie, the flinty click of a fork on the plate, the crackle of the woodstove. But it’s also the sound of grass. A gravestone. Dead wood.

If I’ve learned any lesson from this, it’s that I don’t want to let the readers lead me too much. If they don’t like something but I like doing it, I’m going to keep doing it, even if it doesn’t necessarily mean more subscription growth or even if some people unsubscribe. This is my playground, and I’m going to have fun with it. Hopefully, people will come along with me.

Professor Byung-Chul Han is a 64-year-old man who lives life backwards. He’s awake when people are sleeping, and goes to bed when others are starting to work. A proudly lazy thinker, he writes just three sentences a day. He spends most of his hours caring for his plants and playing pieces by Bach and Schumann on his Steinway & Sons grand piano. For him, these are the things that truly matter in life.

’ll leave you with one final lesson, in fact, it’s the lesson we chose to close The Daily Stoic with. Marcus was clearly a big reader, he clearly took copious notes and studied philosophy deeply. Yet he took the unusual step of reminding himself to put all that aside. “Stop wandering about!” he wrote. “You aren’t likely to read your own notebooks, or ancient histories, or the anthologies you’ve collected to enjoy in your old age. Get busy with life’s purpose, toss aside empty hopes, get active in your own rescue—if you care for yourself at all—and do it while you can.” At some point, we must stop our reading, put all the advice from Marcus and the other stoics aside and take action. So that, as Seneca put it, the “words become works.”

But what really made a difference was the auto-responder I set up. For more than five years, new subscribers were simply added to this list but received nothing from me until the next monthly email went out. That meant that sometimes readers might go 45 days before they heard from me, meaning that some forgot that they’d even signed up (and then promptly unsubscribed). So I added a short, clear email that you now automatically get when you sign up. It hits you with 5 book recommendations to start you off and provides links to some popular articles I have written about reading and writing.

It’s critical that you pick an angle for your mailing list. I see so many authors and brands just put up a form that says: “Sign up for my newsletter.” What newsletter? Why would I want a random newsletter from a random person? I decided on book recommendations because no one else was doing it and it was something I was good at. What are you good at? What can only you offer via email?

In another example, I was listening to an interview the other day from someone who used to have a platform on one of the largest media outlets in the world — with millions in the audience. But more recently, he left and has focused solely on developing his platform on his Substack newsletter, which has 174,000 subscribers. He described the problems that came up for him when he had a massive audience who didn’t fully understand his viewpoints or methodology. So he put everything behind his paywall, saying, “I want that self-selected audience that understands how I think.”

I’ve been considering examples of this. For instance, I belong to a small private Facebook group of vintage toy enthusiast, run by one guy. He is an avid toy collector, and the gaps he has to fill in his collection are very specific hard-to-find items. Does he spend his days on eBay, Facebook Marketplace and other online venues to track down these rare toys in the worldwide marketplace? Nope. As a rule, he only buys items “in the wild” — at antique malls, toy stores, toy shows, or from other collectors. He has to happen upon it in a natural way in the real world, just as one would have done in the 1990s or prior.

. The tip jar revenue stream is usually based on how good our content is. We see a huge influx of tips when we publish something that is clearly well done. I can almost predict now when those bumps are going to happen because I can see the newsletter and feel like, “Oh, we nailed this today.”

Early on, I’d have ten emails, so I’d spend an hour a day or two hours a day writing 1,000-word emails to readers who were writing about my political views. We’d have these rich, robust exchanges. Now I’m writing back one-sentence responses, or I’m not replying at all, because there are a lot of new readers coming in to whom I want to give those responses. It’s just a time management thing, and I think that’s been hard — more for those people who had that relationship that’s gotten narrowed, but it also sucks for me because I wish I had more hours in the day to give people that kind of attention.

When people write back to say, “Hey, I don’t have much money right now. I lost my job, I need to cancel,” then I can gift them a subscription and do something to build that brand loyalty.

This renewal email is a great example. This was born out of the fact that I was doing my taxes, and I saw, like, eight subscriptions for news that I didn’t read anymore that were going to my spam folder and that I got no notice about the fact that were re-upping my subscription.

Tangle’s team has also grown. Isaac has since hired Magdalena Bokowa, head of ad operations and social media; Ari Weitzman, Tangle’s managing editor; Will Kaback, their editor and communications lead; and Jon Lall, executive producer for YouTube and podcasts.

The other decision I made is to only check my personal email on Sunday mornings. I’ve found that there is rarely an email message so urgent that it can’t wait a few days to be read and responded to. To that end, I’ve added an auto-responder to my personal email. It just lets folks know that I received their email, but that I only check and respond to email on Sundays, so there may be a delay in response.

I try and remember the old Buddhist saying... Let go, or be dragged. Once you've let go of the creative work and you've released it into the world, you must develop a new relationship with the creative work. You must go from parent to friend. It's perfectly okay to care deeply about the creative work and to even hope the creative work will be well received. But, you must form a healthy detachment from the creative work. If you treat the creative work as if it is a part of yourself, every criticism will feel like the butt of a rifle to the nose ((notice I am using the words the creative work and not your creative work). You can see it when writers, artists and entrepreneurs are too attached to the creative work upon its release. They're like nervous, helicopter parents. They're trainwrecks. This all-consuming, all-or-nothing way of creating might feel thrilling and exciting but it takes its toll on the artist over time. It's not sustainable. I have spent so much of the past three years overthinking every single mother fucking thing I do. After stepping away for several months and focusing on myself, my friends and my family, I've realized that my overthinking was a side-effect of my own ego

Two years after I began emailing essays into the void, I was contacted by the founder of a startup. He wanted me to write for them. He offered me $100k per year, which is about 5 times more than what I earn at the art gallery where I work part-time to pay the bills. I said thank you, but I wasn’t interested. He took that as a negotiating tactic. I played along. After five minutes, he offered me $200k per year.“Well, that is interesting,” I said, getting carried away. “I’ll have to discuss it with my wife.”We could fix the roof! I would never have to worry about money again! We could get a car!I walked out to Johanna. She was in the vegetable garden, picking aphids of the artichokes. The children were playing with the soil between the planting beds. Halfway through telling her how much money I could make, Johanna broke me off, saying, “But why on earth would you accept that?” She was genuinely confused. She brushed some grass from her shirt, and said, “You wouldn’t have time to write.”And by God—who cares that we can’t afford a car when I get to live with a person who says things like that? Of course, I don’t want $200k to write things I doubt the value of. What is the opportunity cost? If I do this, if I go on this vacation, if I get this car, what am I turning down? By asking yourself this, and then consistently aiming to pick the thing that optimizes for what you most deeply value—it adds up. It makes life rich.You don’t have to do things others do, or have things they have, at the expense of the deeper things you want. You really don’t. Almost everything is an option. You have full permission to ask yourself what really matters to you—whatever that is—and then optimize for that in all hard tradeoffs of life. You’re going to have to make some sacrifices anyway. Might as well not sacrifice the wrong thing.

So it didn’t take me long to email Pistelli to see if he might be interested in having Belt reissue the novel. Meanwhile, I spent the weekend finishing Major Arcana, which is breathtaking in its breadth, its willingness to be maximalist and to express Big Ideas through characters, a feature of the best of the best novels, in my opinion, plus its cleverness in updating Kavalier & Clay (one of the best novels of the past 50 years imo), and its refusal to be whittled down and smoothed out as is so much current fictional fare. Then I spent more time reading Pistelli’s extraordinary Goodreads reviews of canonical works, his online, free college courses, and his criticism. This man is brilliant, prodigious, and generous. To my delight, John responded to my email saying he was open, and we had a blast talking about the book, and about how traditional publishing works, and —oh look!—today, the screenshot went live.

For the past month or so, as an experiment, I’ve been opening my calendar each week for video calls with whoever books a time. It’s been amazing. Wednesday is now my favourite day.

How it works: when you ask a tree for local news, the program checks to find streets nearby. It then uses a news API to check WRAL, WTVD, and WNCN for mentions of those streets in the last 90 days. Finally, it bundles that information into a ChatGPT prompt and generates a summary (while links to the news articles used for the summary appear beneath.)

But, luckily, AdWeek managed to get hold of the pitch deck OpenAI is using, and it reveals some really important things.As AdWeek reported (my highlights):The Preferred Publisher Program has five primary components, according to the deck.First, it is available only to "select, high-quality editorial partners," and its purpose is to help ChatGPT users more easily discover and engage with publishers' brands and content.Additionally, members of the program receive priority placement and "richer brand expression" in chat conversations, and their content benefits from more prominent link treatments.There are more details about this in the AdWeek article, but these two things, "select group of publishers" and "prominent placement" completely undermine the industry as a whole.Not only do we see the tech companies acting more and more like gatekeepers, and using that power to force interactions via their focus areas, but now we also see that they are going to provide preferential treatment and exposure to some of the largest publishers, leaving everyone else (and especially smaller, independent, and local publishers) with a much less effective market.This symbolizes everything that is wrong about this. The internet is supposed to be a place where everyone has the same equal opportunities. Where anyone can become a publisher, and through the quality of that work, they can rise to the top and build on their success.This is the opposite of that. It's a world defined by gatekeepers, who are giving preferential treatment and better market conditions to those who are already rich.As a media analyst, this is my greatest concern. The trends we see right now are undermining the diversity of our industry. Again, I don't have the data to make any conclusion yet. But this is what I'm keeping a very close eye on.

How sending fewer emails and content previews improved The New Yorker’s newsletter engagement

Making a bad photograph is not the risk: the lack of experimentation and play is the real danger.

Newsrooms - say it with me - need to establish direct, first-party connections with their audiences. Anything else gives a third party too much supplier power over their businesses and presents an existential risk. Apple News is useful right now, but at its heart the dynamics that drive it are no different to Facebook or Twitter. There's nothing to say it's here for good, and there's nothing smart about letting Apple own your relationship with your readers

would like to take a moment to thank Robert Kane for the generous $25 donation that he made to Vagabond Journey the other day. These donations are really what’s keeping us going and they’re very much appreciated. If you’re able, please consider making a donation or subscribing for just $5 per month.

Run Your Own Mail Server: A Book for Independence & PrivacyA book for the hard-core Unix sysadmin, by a fellow hard-core sysadmin with decades of experience running small mail servers.

Despite this potential traffic loss, I'm committed to keeping this blog going. Thankfully, we have a strong community of RSS readers and email subscribers who consistently engage with my content.

Now, to be clear, growth-hacking content, in this context, is content that is intentionally built for purely commercial reasons, but more importantly, is about the act of making money.

But instead, here it is, promoting some dude’s rant on how blogging is worthless unless it has inherent search-engine value, or it makes you money.

But they always have a play, and that play allows for exploitation of your attention, whether directly or indirectly. It’s not about the quality of the information being shared, or what they’re saying, or how they’re saying it. It’s 100% about optimization in its ugliest, most base forms.

When I first started writing, I was pretty bad. Unimaginative prose, boring sentence and paragraph structure, and more. I spent years on that other writing project, literally writing and rewriting over a million words. And I mean rewriting. I read, rewrote, and edited every post at least four times, sometimes over a dozen times. Within a couple of years, my writing had improved exponentially. And it improved because of that rewriting.3

Find Your Lane/Pick a NicheA lot of people have opinions on popular topics (like, say, movies or politics) then try to start a newsletter to discuss those things, often just sharing their personal opinion and that’s it. Best of luck, because other people do that sort of thing better.You need to pick/find a lane. A unique lane.

Don’t start a newsletter if you don’t have a passion for writing (or podcasting or making video) and a passion for the subject matter that you’re covering. If you’re just trying to do it to make money (or more oddly, become famous/influential) then you shouldn’t bother.

Let’s say you’re buying a book. Books aren’t perfect commodities, but they’re still commodities. As a shopper, you’re trying to get as much value for your book as you can for your money. If I can get the book cheaper and faster from retailer A(mazon) than retailer B(arnes & Noble), most of the time, that’s what I’m going to do. If I’m skeptical of A, and prefer to support B or C(ity bookstore of my choice), I’m not strictly speaking in a purchasing relationship anymore, but something closer to a patronage one. I don’t just want my money to buy an object; I want it to support institutions and individuals I like, and I want it to support the common good. This is one of the weird things about patronage. As a consumer, your first thought is to your own benefit. As a patron, it’s to the good of your beneficiary. Likewise, as an artisan supported by patronage, you tend to think more about what’s best for your patrons and audience than you do yourself.

I’m less inclined to click on a Substack newsletter link. All the essays look identical. The site branding is bland (not necessarily a bad thing), but the per-newsletter branding is beholden to the site (sub-optimal). My mind is starting to re-categorize Substack from “Whoa, maybe a neat new voice to be found??” to “Ugh, another 3,000 unedited words sent too frequently?”

With most creative work, the trick is to focus on habit formation. Somewhat counterintuitively, don’t aspire to be someone who writes a book — don’t be a sucker waiting for “inspiration” — instead aspire to be someone who writes on schedule. Books naturally flow from rigorous writing habits.

The human. I often return to the Jeff Bezos dictum about how to think of the future: Think of what won’t change. The shift to favor individuals will accelerate as we are surrounded by synthetic content and synthetic friends. Real world experiences will thrive. We will remain social animals, even if our social circles will be joined by assorted droids with “personalities.” It’s hard to imagine it, but I would assume a new generation will become as comfortable going from talking to humans to talking to droids. Weird stuff ahead.

Winners of the AI era

The smallest. At The New Growth Agenda last week, I asked my table if they really believed people would be hitting a back button on webpages in five years. I don’t know what the future holds, but this seems a far-fetched proposition after watching a droid do real time translation to Italian and trigonometry homework. Times of disruption favor those with optionality. The newer, leaner models are far better positioned than big publishers built for different eras that are mired in sunk costs, union battles and the unappealing prospect of managing decline.

As digital media companies reckon with the changes artificial intelligence brings, deciding on how to adapt or adopt, it’s becoming clear that high-quality journalism retains immense value in the AI era. It offers authenticity, context, and deep analysis that AI-generated content lacks. It provides meaningful insights, informs people and counters misinformation.

However, as it becomes clear that major platforms will be sending less traffic to publishers of all stripes, content teams are now facing the reality that they’ll likely need to pay up for distribution if they expect their content to reach audiences.

Chattanooga has a small but vibrant and growing restaurant scene and a food culture we were not reflecting or doing justice to in the newsletter. No other news outlet in Chattanooga was adequately covering food, either.  We knew Chattanoogans wanted quality information about the innovative, buzzy food scene. Most importantly, we knew people wanted news that would be useful to local food lovers.  We created a newsletter called What to Eat Next. We hoped this new product would attract people who were not currently reading our newspaper. The goal is to get them to subscribe to the newsletter or, even better, subscribe to the paper. We figured food could be a good introductory topic.

The result is a collection of recipes from 60 local restaurants and bars, each listed with its address, phone number, website and a one-paragraph summary of what makes it special. “Sacramento Eats” debuted on Nov. 17, retailed for $39.95 and sold all 3,000 printed copies by Dec. 6. At least 1,700 more copies will be printed in January 2024.

Plagiarism is an ugly word for what, in rock and roll, is a natural and necessary — even admirable — tendency, and that is to steal. Theft is the engine of progress, and should be encouraged, even celebrated, provided the stolen idea has been advanced in some way. To advance an idea is to steal something from someone and make it so cool and covetable that someone then steals it from you. In this way, modern music progresses, collecting ideas, and mutating and transforming as it goes. But a word of caution, if you steal an idea and demean or diminish it, you are committing a dire crime for which you will pay a terrible price — whatever talents you may have will, in time, abandon you. If you steal, you must honour the action, further the idea, or be damned.

Each person who visits our site is a prospective long-term reader. We need to take advantage of the traffic we will still get—no one believes it’ll go to zero—and ensure we turn that traffic into our audience. We can complain all we want about the platforms, but building a lasting relationship with our customers—our readers—is essential.

But if we’re going to get less traffic from platforms, we need to start treating each user who comes to our site with a bit more care. Our tactics need to evolve. We must prioritize acquiring information about those people to ensure we give them the right content. I’ll use my favorite phrase, but it’s all about the first-party data.

Me: Any ‘pearls of wisdom’ for interested creatives? Elle: Be comfortable with being shit at first. So many budding artists stop short through fear of not being good enough, but only things worth while are on the other side of fear and hard work. Everyone has been bad at something at some point, it’s the people who are brave enough to push through who progress. Don’t let insecurity block your creative journey. And always leave time for play and experimenting, you will have times that you will fall out of love with your process, whether it be from the pressure of honing and perfecting the technique or just boredom, so it’s important to revert back to that infantile sense of play, to refuel your passion and drive

Aggregate Facebook traffic to a group of 792 news and media sites that have been tracked by the Chartbeat since 2018 shows that referrals to the sites have plunged by 58% in the last six years from 1.3 billion in March 2018 to 561 million last month. Traffic from Facebook fell by 50% in the last 12 months alone as the decline shows little sign of slowing.

AI generated summary: I've managed to curb my addiction to time-consuming websites by blocking them using NextDNS, notably a forum I used to visit frequently. This change has freed up mental space, allowing me to focus on enjoyable projects like refining GoBlog. It feels like reclaiming a part of myself lost to endless online distractions.

What does this data snapshot show? It’s early 2024 send volume, ranked by destination domain volume. The top twenty domain destinations for newsletter signup requests and newsletters are mostly as I would expect. Gmail is at the big end, as they remain the big dog.

When a project looks like it’s turning into something and going to happen, I break it out of my main Moleskine notebook and into its own Field Notes notebook(s). As of Tuesday, I’ve had to break so many things out into their own development notebooks that I’ve had to repurpose an old Maxpedition Fatty organiser as a notebook holder

How do I get new readers? How do you find new communities who will be interested?How did you bring new people outside of your community into your newsletters?Tell everyone you have a newsletter. Make a clipboard for your stand at the farmer’s market. Tell your followers social media. Make a lead magnet. Do good writing. Keep it weird. Email everyone you know with the link to subscribe and ask them to share it. Keep writing. Tell everyone you have a newsletter. Borrow audiences. Be on other people’s podcasts and tell them you have a newsletter. Tell your parent’s friends. Tell your postal worker. Find another friend with a newsletter and trade links in your newsletters. Tell everyone you have a newsletter. Guest teach in a friend’s online course. Tell the students you have a newsletter. This is also where relationship marketing comes in. Building relationships is important because it keeps us alive, but it also builds your creative and professional ecosystem where we cheer each other on in public. This brings in readers from other communities. Don’t force it! Let it be a natural unfolding.

I read once that you should write your obsessions. Not only for yourself but also to find your kind. Being an introvert, this sentiment really resonated with me. Connecting through personal blogs can sometimes feel deeper than in-person interactions. Since writing on my blog, I’ve met the most wonderful internet denizens who have morphed into veritable email comrades—and I love it.

The hosts refer to Acquired as “the Hermès of podcasts,” which is a valuable brand to have. They now charge between $400,000 and $600,000 for four-episode sponsorships. (The current presenting sponsor is a unit of JPMorgan Chase.) It costs $40,000 a month just to advertise on the podcast’s archives,

I have no artificial deadlines for when my blog has to be done for the day; it's done when it's done. I have no set length of how long my blog needs to be. I write till I can't think of anything else to say, and then I close it or extend it till the next day.  99% of the time, I have no idea what I'm going to write about until I sit down at the computer and start writing something, which is why I usually start with the weather because once I get something written down, that usually opens up an idea for what to write about

Like everyone else, I have limited time and energy. So I pick my battles when it comes to helping. I weed out topics based on a number of filters: does the question make sense? do I have expertise or experience in the subject? does the OP seem “helpable”? if not, could a discussion be useful or interesting to onlookers?

. If it's true originality you're after, you should never compete. You should seek to create work that's so wildly abnormal, it exists beyond comparison and stands alone from the competition.

I like writers who aren't afraid of thinking out loud on the page and sharing bits of themselves that might present as awkward or uncooked.

Every product is carefully selected by our editors. If you buy from a link, we may earn a commission. Learn more

But if we take a step back, what problem are we trying to solve when we push subscriptions? It’s two things: Getting more money from our readers Diversifying away from pure advertising Well, there are plenty of ways to do that. You can sell event tickets, as FT says. But you can also sell merch or commerce more holistically. Travel publication Skift also sells reports, for example. The goal shouldn’t be to purely drive people to a subscription model but instead to figure out a way to get them to take out their credit cards and pay for something.

From noon on Saturday to noon on Monday, — the day before to the day after the presidential election — Panama is in the throes of prohibition. Stores can’t sell alcohol, bars can’t serve it, and people can’t drink in the street.

Recomendo Unclassified Ads work! Here’s how to reach over 79,000 subscribers for just $150.UNCLASSIFIEDS

Once you have your own fresh eggs, you’ll never want store eggs again.

We’ve been buying baby chicks by U.S. mail from Murray McMurray Hatchery for 30-plus years. We’ll get a call from the postmaster, sometimes a bit flustered, because there’s a box there with peeping chicks awaiting pick-up. We’ll go get them and set them up with a light and feed and water, and lo and behold in three months we’ll have laying hens. Minimum order is 25, so the chicks can warm each other in transit.

Blog comments were also a great way to build rapport and network, but I almost think the case can be made that they spelt the end of the personal website. Now that readers of a website/blog could respond to a post in the same place, many people no longer needed their own website to do so.

But does that make it ok? To therefore monetise personal websites?

“Would you like to subscribe to this publication by email?” read the annoying message. Well, I might, but I’m in no position to decide, as I’ve not been able to read a single word of what’s written here, so have no idea if subscribing is worth my while.

It’s great The Verge has shown us what a post-platform internet could look like. Not so good, perhaps, is the news that “media executives” are seemingly salivating in delight at the prospect. Out goes one money-making model: the platforms, back comes another: the homepage. But we’ve been there before. And depending how many websites you continue using, still are.

The latest revelation is that Plato is believed to have been buried in a secret garden near the sacred shrine to Muses inside the Platonic Academy of Athens that had been reserved for him, according to Graziano Ranocchia, professor of Papyrology at the Department of Philology, Literature and Linguistic at the University of Pisa.

Love is not about losing freedom; it’s about sharing freedom with a partner who’s as talented a liberationist as you~ Rob Brezsny’s Free Will Astrology

All that can’t be healthy for the artform. Comics have always loved to bitch about "the industry" (i.e. the stew of agents/managers/bookers/gatekeepers who can help you “make it”). But at least it was made up of human beings. Now the industry is an algorithm. And the algorithm is gonna get ya.

Too many times, the journalism world has made the mistake of relying on a single stream of revenue for success. We shouldn’t make that mistake again with newsletters. There is so much potential for newsletters, but all of us need to be thinking about how we can continue to diversify our revenue as we build our audiences. This won’t be easy to do — but I do think it’s something that can be done! As always, I’m optimistic about the future of email, even if I do think the backlash (“Email is dead!”, “Paid newsletters are over!”, etc.) is coming soon.