Writer's Grove

O come, all ye subscribers

What’s old is new again. But it’s not fashion! It’s not Star Wars! Well, maybe it’s Star Wars. But I’m talking about newsletters.

ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED?

I’ll give you a minute to calm down from the sheer adrenaline high that the word “newsletter” inspires. And I will give you a serene picture of BB-8 and a goldfish from the Telegraph.

Gonna talk a while about the why below, but here’s the quick version: I’m starting up a newsletter that’ll go out mid-month starting soon, on Nov. 16. If you sign up here I’d be turbo grateful, and you’ll get to enjoy Oberon’s “Meat of the Month” column that I’ll be including each, uh…issue, I guess you’d call it? No: Volume. That sounds bulky and nutritious, like maybe it even has fiber.

So why a newsletter? Because publishers are pushing the idea to authors again. And that’s because social media has become rather poor at doing what it’s supposed to do for authors, which is just let people know we’ve written some new stuff and that we still exist. There’s so much noise out there and it’s tough to cut through it. Long, long ago, when the Internet was wee and before all the social media thingies arose, publishers told authors to have a newsletter.  Then the shiny things happened, and the advice to authors changed: Thou Shalt Write a Blog and then use social media to link to it. Be on all the things all the time and somehow it will all work out. And oh, don’t miss your deadline, heh. I got published during that time.

For a while that was working: If you had 10K followers on Facebook and posted something then all 10K followers would see it. Yay! But then, a couple years ago, Facebook decided to apply algorithms to determine what people saw in their feeds. Now if you post a link to your blog, they squash it and only let maybe 1K of your 10K followers see it. Post text only but put a link in the comments, then maybe 3 or 4K people would see the post, but they probably wouldn’t click on the link or even realize it was in the comments. Post a picture of a cat licking itself that will absolutely not help you pay your mortgage, though, and Facebook will send that to everybody. Basically, if they smell that someone is going to make money because of your post, they want their cut first. BOOST POST, they say. Pay us to reach all the people who clicked “Like” on your page and thereby said they want to see what you’re doing, and then actually thought they would see it. “Nnnnnope,” Facebook says. “Maybe we’ll let them see your stuff if you pay us.” Well, nnnnope. Not gonna do it.

So an author can spend his/her time building up a bunch of followers and Facebook will basically take them away until you pay them for each post. And if you check out Twitter analytics, any single tweet of yours that doesn’t go viral is seen by maybe 20-30% of your followers, often less. (Hint: the kind of thing that goes viral is not your announcement of your next book’s release date. Mostly it’s cats again, especially in Vines.)

https://vine.co/v/eWz90B1MX7A

So the two largest social media platforms are ineffective at driving traffic to your blog now, and the lesser platforms? Well, they’re lesser. Which kind of makes having a blog a Sisyphean task. This post will most likely not be read by even half of my  followers on social media because I won’t be able to notify them that it’s here.

Folks can subscribe to your blog, sure. There are some seriously awesome blogs out there and talented people writing them, and they deservedly get buttloads of traffic. They’re rare birds, though. So we’re back to the old wisdom that’s new again: Newsletters are great! If (and yep, it’s a big if) people subscribe to yours, and if you have neato stuff in it worth reading, then hey, it goes directly into peeps’ inboxes, circumventing the social networks. It would work a bit like the way Facebook used to: If you post something, it will at least reach the people who said they wanted to see it.

And for me, anyway, writing something fun once a month is much more manageable than trying to come up with “fresh content” multiple times a week for the blog anyway. So I’m fine with this old idea, which is a new thing for me. By all means: Let us do this. I’ll let Oberon off the leash every month and hopefully both you and I will be amused by his silliness. And I’ll also include what I’m reading each month in case you’re lookin’ for something new, and then let you know what I’m up to bookwise. If there’s something else you’d like to see in the newsletter, let me know. I’m easy to reach.  And here’s that signup link again.

Peace & tacos & cat Vines,
Kevin