I found myself in a puddle this week.
With the first draft of the novel due this Sunday, I put aside everything else to work on it. The more I worked on it, the more I realized that writing fiction was my love, yet I hardly spent time on it.
Even though I kept on harping about it, I barely wrote new scenes or filled the gaps in the draft I wrote five years ago. I am doing that now, just a week before it is due.
I was not procrastinating, neither was I slacking. What I had been doing was ‘feeding the content monster.” Content monster is taking up all my time and energy for some time now.
It is a conclusion several content writers are reaching almost at the same time.
Tom Kuegler, a well-established Medium writer, warned against creating content on multiple platforms.
It’s not worth it. It’s not worth it to be everywhere. You don’t need to be everywhere. It is the ultimate hamster wheel that’s impossible to get off of.
It’s a special kind of hell that WE throw ourselves into. Put your shades on when the newest shiny object flashes nearby. You don’t need it.
- Tom Kuegler
Quentin Allums, a famous video creator on LinkedIn, recently had this to say:
“One of my biggest mistakes with business was that we built a machine that needed to continuously be fed. New clients, new employees, more attention needed, repeat. It needed my time. My heart. And all of my attention.
Content shouldn’t be like that. At least not for me. It should be play. Not a machine that needs to be fed. I don’t want to have to create more content because I’m afraid I’ll become irrelevant or because I need to please a sponsor or whatever.” - Quentin Allums
I couldn’t agree more.
Like Quentin, I don’t want a huge following or a big company. I want to learn new things, write about my experiences and connect with like-minded people. I want to wake up each morning and feel challenged.
I also want to feel free. I love the feeling of spontaneity. A feeling the creatives get when they follow their whim.
I want to create art and tell stories.
For no particular reason other than to have fun creating them.
The second epiphany came from Shanon Ashley, a top writer on Medium ( 39K followers). She wrote, “I was an idiot to think I needed some special lead magnet.”
Like most writers, she hated building an email list by offering lead magnets. For those who don’t know what a lead magnet is, you offer an incentive in exchange for an email address.
Shanon didn’t want to offer an incentive to sign people up. Yet, she started offering blogging tips to sing people up. She started doing that because successful writers with big email lists recommended her to do that.
But she realized they are very different kinds of writers. They’re more like marketeers who were teaching writing and the business side of writing and needed a following to sell their courses. She was not that kind of writer.
All I really want from an email list is to connect with the readers who really love my work.
- Shanon Ashley
That is what I want too.
I, too, want to connect with readers who want to read my experiences, learnings and insights.
The readers who join through a lead magnet don’t stick around. They get the free gifts and then unsubscribe. I have done the same many times. The free gifts created for list-building purposes usually worth nothing and neither are the emails that follow afterward.
The only people worth following are whose work you really like.
Shanon’s epiphany was, she didn’t need a lead magnet to attract the right readers to her mailing list. She IS the lead magnet.
Readers will subscribe to her newsletter because they love her work, not for the blogging tips.
I want to be able to do the same.
You know you are on the right track when many top writers start predicting the same thing. Here is the third epiphany.
Tim Denning, another top writer on Medium (161K following), proclaimed that the salesy and preachy kind of emails are dead.
He wrote:
“A sales email feels like a one-night stand. That’s why you unsubscribe. The rebellion against sales emails started with the reinvention of the newsletter as a result of Substack. Substack made emails cool again. Substack reminded us that the best emails are blog posts.”
I knew I was on to something when I started my Substack newsletter.
But its format I wasn’t sure of. Nonetheless, I picked something and ran with it. My newsletter had four sections - 1) Authorpreneur Journey Steps, 2)Writing Industry News, 3)What Am I Upto and 4)What Intrigued Me. To these, I added an introduction section. But the truth was, I only enjoyed writing the first and last sections where I got to talk about my insights.
Not all my subscribers want to start their author business. Many of them don’t even want to write. But all of them want to read about life. They all want to hear my perspective and the perspective of those I happen to highlight with my writing.
Tim Denning says the best newsletters are the articles. He suggests sharing your best articles through email each week. But I think Oliver Burkeman has honed his newsletters to perfection. His emails are crisp, insightful and are relevant for all his readers.
So I have decided to get myself out of the puddle.
I am changing the format of the newsletter. It will be less of advice, tips, etc. (some might sneak in, I can’t promise) and more of life, insights, learnings, experiences (the stuff the real writing is made of).
I want to put it this way, I am taking the word “news” out of the “newsletter” and will be writing a “letter” to you each week.
If you are my superfan and really like my work, you won’t be disappointed.
If authorpreneurship tips were the reason you joined the newsletter, you are welcome to unsubscribe. You can read about those on my Medium publication Authorpreneurs.
That’s it from me this week.
Take care.
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PS: I'd love to hear from you. Let me know what you think of this recent change.
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Great letter Neera, thank you! Looking forward to the next one and “in bocca Al Lupo” for your draft! (it’s Italian, don’t try to translate it... 🤞)
Love love this .. Our thoughts are on a similar trend .. Submitted earlier today an article to a publication relating to something similiar .. We all have different reasons why we write . Writing should be fun not stressful