On Being a Good Newsletterer (2020) | Hacker News Reader

On Being a Good Newsletterer (2020)

craigmod.com

30 pointsTomte6 comments

"People are busy, exhausted, overwhelmed. Help them. They may have subscribed in a three-second impulse, they may be subscribed to 20 different publishing-related newsletters."

I cannot relate. If I subscribe to a newsletter I know that for months to years whenever a mail pops up in my inbox.

Same for me. I’m pretty deliberate what newsletters I subscribe to, and I also regularly prune my subscriptions when I lose interest.

I also cannot relate to:

> Have killer voice.

In regards to tone, my preference is authenticity. If someone has genuine “killer voice”, fair enough, if someone doesn’t, great as well. Overall, the quality of content is far more important to me than the style of presentation. (Which doesn’t mean it wouldn’t matter, it’s just not my top priority.)

Things are changing now because Substack makes newsletter discovery pretty effortless. After you sign up for one, and then open a different Substack link, your email will already be filled in on the other page's "subscribe" box. So subscribing to that one only takes a click.

Plus, with so many newsletters out there on the same topic, I usually need to subscribe to a few before deciding which ones to cut.

A far cry from the old days when the only way to discover a newsletter would be on HN's periodical "favourite newsletter" threads.

>Who are you? Answer this question in every newsletter, preferably in the first paragraph. Unless you send a daily newsletter, readers will forget. New readers will have joined since you sent your last edition (even if it was just a week ago). People are busy, exhausted, overwhelmed. Help them. They may have subscribed in a three-second impulse, they may be subscribed to 20 different publishing-related newsletters.

I've seen this intro in the newsletters I subscribe to, but didn't think of adding to the one I send out. Used to just say what's the issue number. To be fair, the links to the newsletter and unsubscribe were automatically added at the end of the email, will now add these details at the top as well.

Regarding the third point of images-as-text, I use it for one section (programming tip, with syntax highlighting) but also provide link to the text version with explanations.

> Using images-as-text also often means you’re forcing readers to load images, and in doing so, often forcing them to opt-into tracking

He has a point, but much in the same way as "don't slow down your website with a bunch of unnecessary JS" also has a point.

It's just people don't seem to care enough for this to make a difference. Every Substack newsletter I'm subscribed to embeds tweets into the email or web page, which is worse than just a static image being served from cdn.email.substack.com or whatever.

Good tips.

Besides these, a welcome sequence where I send some of the most liked editions worked great for my newsletter.

It allows a new subscriber to get familiar with the content and unsubscribe early on if it's not for them. I saw a 10-15% increase in open rates thanks to this.

Obviously, this is for newsletters with timeless content rather than news.

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