A year ago I put up my digital shingle and started writing Mystical Silicon. This is post #54.
As I mentioned in my last newsletter, as I reach the anniversary milestone I am going to take a step back before “Season 2.” My latest plan is to continue deepening my posts with either seasonal, pop-up posts (if I have something that would benefit from that format), or slightly less frequent, more in-depth posts. I have a number of ideas I want to develop and I’d like to do more research, add in some interviews and spend more time on the writing itself. While I love the self-imposed weekly deadlines, it will be nice to have time to follow ideas where they lead.
I wanted to end this Season with some thoughts on writing newsletters. While I’ve had a few shorter travel newsletters in the past, I’ve never done something quite like this. I think newsletters are under-rated so let me explain why:
6 REASONS WHY I LIKE NEWSLETTERS
NEWSLETTERS INTRODUCE YOU TO NEW PEOPLE AND HELP YOU KEEP IN TOUCH WITH OLD FRIENDS
When I first started writing, my audience was just a few friends and relatives. At some point in the past year that changed… Now most of the readers of this newsletter are people that I’ve never met in person (and I’m so glad you’re here!). There’s something amazing about writing about mindfulness, degrees of life of inanimate objects, Tyler Cowen, and whatever others idiosyncratic stuff I’m into each week, and finding others that care. This is the internet at its best!
I’ve also never been great at phone, facebook or texting (although I probably should improve?) but this newsletter has been a nice way of getting back in touch with some great old friends.
NEWSLETTERS LET YOU GO DEEP ON TOPICS YOU CARE ABOUT
If you have an area you want to explore, writing on the internet can be a great way of doing so. As a reader, this is what I love about newsletters. I follow a number of people that are all idiosyncratic and newsletters are the only place I can find in-depth, niche content. It’s content I can’t find anywhere else…
Books are good but they’re long and a big investment. Twitter kills any depth of thinking. Reddit has no continuity. Instagram and TikTok are mostly for quick scrolling and inspire FOMO. YouTube takes too long to watch and to produce. Newsletters fill a niche - they add deeper, valuable, non-adjacent ideas to my life from people whose opinions I find interesting. They’re a gift to read and also are much easier to produce.
NEWSLETTERS ARE FRIENDLIER THAN TWITTER
There’s a selection bias that happens with long form posts: maybe it’s the audience, maybe it’s the medium, maybe it’s both… but the people that take the time to read newsletters are pretty friendly compared to Twitter. There is very rarely “context collapse”.
Twitter was my go-to place to share ideas before this newsletter and what I found is that the format/platform was not open to any real depth – any time I tried to talk about something in detail, it felt unwelcome. The format wants to be fast, catchy and edgy - any earnestness on Twitter feels out of place.
Twitter is also not a great for newsletter discovery since the people reading tweets don’t usually like long-form content (it’s a different cohort). The best source of newsletter readers, I have found, are other newsletter readers!
NEWSLETTERS HELP YOU THINK
One of the beautiful things about writing is it helps you think. Writing takes vague ideas and helps you shape them into a cogent perspective. There’s something about having to “publish” and send out the newsletter that is also a great forcing function for actually writing instead of daydreaming in the abstract.
Related to friendliness, newsletters also provide a sanctuary from excessive commentary; Newsletters give you more room to think in public:
NEWSLETTERS CAN BE AS SIMPLE AS YOU WANT THEM TO BE
Newsletters come in many shapes and sizes: they can be very long or they can be short and sweet. Some newsletters I read are just a handful of paragraphs with bullet points from people’s lives: what they are watching, reading, listening to, where they’ve traveled, etc. This form of newsletter-lite is much easier to produce too (e.g., Tyler Cowen just tweets links in his “blog”!).
Newsletters are also great as a reader because they’re easy to skim and skip - you can browse the subject-lines, flip through the contents and then spend as much time as you want on the content. People check email at different times, it’s easy to forward and it’s easy to respond to. (Email is under-rated!)
NEWSLETTERS HAVE A LONGER SHELF-LIFE
Day-old newspapers were so worthless that people would wrap fish in them. Twitter is its modern equivalent - when you tweet you see the impact right away: if you don’t see anyone engage in half an hour, the tweet will never gain traction. After a day, the tweet is basically dead…
Newsletters are different. When you hit “publish” you don’t see the actual impact for days or weeks. They have a much slower burn… This can be unsettling at first since as a writer you don’t have good signal about whether the post was interesting to anyone (it’s way less dopamine than Twitter for example). However, the newsletters keep their value for much longer; there are newsletters I still revisit and keep building on for months.
Craig Mod writes about this tweet » newsletter » book value transition:
A book is a creative distillation more dense than a hundred newsletters, which themselves are a creative distillation more dense than a thousand tweets. As distillation increases, so too does difficulty. But that difficulty flows from the very opportunity to iterate and refine. You learn to see that difficulty as a positive signal, that you’re probably on the right track.
As a writer, once you’ve experienced and understand the power of iterating on the scale of books, it seems kinda obvious to align your work and life around the act of making of them. I’ve come to see newsletters — and the pop-up newsletter in particular — as a key part in this book making process.
(It makes me wonder about writing books!)
And so I wrap up my first year.
In my first post, I wrote about how I was scared about writing in public: “I’ve been reluctant to [start a newsletter] until now because I felt there wasn’t much to gain from talking about [my experiences] - most of what I’ve gained is from going offline and being more present. Isn’t a newsletter the opposite? Also, what if it sounds crazy? What if it just opens me up to criticism? What if it’s not good enough? All the many voices in my head… So let’s see how this goes :)”
Turns out it went great! I’m so happy to have started this project… While the fears haven’t gone away, I realized they aren’t fully rational: I still feel the trepidation every time I send a new newsletter (What if this is obvious? What if this is dumb? What if it’s boring?), however, I’ve learned that different topics resonate with different people and it’s impossible to predict this fully in advance. Often I think a post isn’t great and then to my surprise, someone replies that it’s their favorite! People are diverse and complex! When I write now, I focus on sharing what is interesting to me and hope others find it of value based on where they are in their lives…
In case it’s not obvious, I’ve become a fan of newsletters. I think they are a welcome relief in our current internet/media landscape. If you are at all inclined towards starting one, I’d encourage you to give it a try. It’s free to start, and if you hate it, it’s easy enough to stop. Everyone has stories to tell and writing is a great way to force yourself to create and reflect on what you believe. Even a few bullets can be a great place to start.
So as I hit send on Post #54, I want to thank you all for reading. It has been a complete delight to share with you.
I will be back soon for Season 2.
PS - if you end up starting a newsletter, please do let me know!
PPS - in case you’re curious, here are my most popular posts from the past year.