Ellen Wu has sent 300 issues without a schedule

Ellen Wu writes Margin Notes, a letter about editing and the people who do it, to about fourteen thousand subscribers. She has sent three hundred and four issues since 2017. The gaps between them range from four days to seven weeks.

Every piece of advice in this field says that should not work.

Let’s have the argument straight away. Why no schedule?

Because I tried one and it made the letter worse. I committed to Tuesdays for eleven months. About a third of those issues existed because it was Tuesday. You can tell which ones. I can tell, and so could the readers — the Tuesday-filler issues got half the replies.

But surely people need to know when to expect it.

They need to know what to expect. That is a different promise and I think we have confused the two. My readers know that when Margin Notes arrives, it is finished. That is the consistency. The interval is not the product.

What does that do to your numbers?

My open rate is 52 percent, which is higher than anyone tells me it should be. I think that is causal, not despite. People open it because it is not routine. There is no habituation.

On what replaces the deadline

If not a schedule, what stops you drifting for a year?

Two things. I have a rule that I never go more than eight weeks, and if I am approaching six I send a short one — genuinely short, three hundred words, one observation. That keeps the address warm and it keeps me honest.

And I write constantly. There are always four or five half-issues open. The gap between sends is not a gap in working, it is a gap in finishing.

Does that not just become a schedule with extra steps?

A ceiling is not a schedule. A schedule tells you when to send. A ceiling tells you when you have stopped.

A deadline makes you produce. A ceiling stops you disappearing. They are not the same tool and most people only use the first one.

On the readers

Do people complain about the irregularity?

Once every couple of months someone asks when the next one is. I reply and say I do not know, and that is usually a nice exchange. Nobody has ever unsubscribed over it in a way they told me about.

And deliverability? Irregular sending is supposed to be a problem.

It is a problem if your volume swings. Mine does not — the list grows slowly and I send to all of it every time. Gmail does not have a diary. It has a reputation score, and mine is fine because people open and reply.

Three hundred issues. What has changed most?

I stopped writing for the person who might subscribe and started writing for the person who already did. That happened around issue sixty and it is the only decision I would call important.

What would you tell someone on issue nine?

Send the one you are embarrassed by. Not the bad one — the one that feels too personal or too specific or too small. Those are the issues people write back about, every single time.

Margin Notes arrives when it is finished. Ellen has never used the word “weekly” in any of the three hundred and four.