Do the paid-tier arithmetic first
Two percent of your list will pay. Multiply that out before you spend three months building something to sell them.
The craft of sending a newsletter.
Twice a month, one issue about writing, designing, and sending a newsletter people finish.
The send button is a design problem
An irreversible action with no undo, pressed while tired, on the thing you care most about. No wonder everyone has a story.
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The forty people who opened nothing
Every list has a dormant third. Most advice says to win them back. The arithmetic says to let them go, and to do it on purpose.
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One column is not a limitation
Email design has one real constraint and about forty imaginary ones. Working inside the real one is where the good work is.
Ellen Wu has sent 300 issues without a schedule
No cadence, no calendar, no apology. She argues that consistency is a promise about quality, not about Tuesdays.
Plain text still beats your template
I ran the beautiful HTML version against a near-plain one for four months. The plain one won on every number I cared about.
Six tools I stopped paying for
An audit of a newsletter stack that had quietly grown to 214 euros a month, and what survived it.
The welcome email is doing all the work
It gets opened four times more than anything else you send, and most people write it once, in a hurry, and never look at it again.
How to end an issue
Openings get all the advice. The last hundred words are what decides whether anyone replies, forwards, or opens the next one.
Deliverability, without the folklore
No, the word 'free' does not send you to spam. Here is what actually decides whether your issue lands, in the order it matters.
Read by topic
Craft3
Writing the thing: openings, endings, voice, and what to cut before you send.
Design3
How an issue looks in an inbox and on the web, and why the two rarely match.
Growth2
Finding readers and keeping them, without buying a list or begging for shares.
Money1
Paid tiers, sponsorship, and what the whole thing costs to keep running.
Tools2
Sending software, deliverability, analytics, and what is worth paying for.
Interviews2
Conversations with people who have been publishing long enough to have opinions.