I’m a big fan of blogging, but I read a fair number of email newsletters. Here’s why I like email, as a reader:
- It’s easy to read text in email.
- It gets delivered to me.
- It feels more private than the very public spaces of social media (and blogging, sort of).
Here’s why I find the idea of email attractive, as a writer:
- I don’t have to pay attention to some sharing or popularity metric.
- It’s easy for people to respond and have a conversation, if they’d like to.
- People either sign up for emails or don’t. I don’t have to use Twitter to share it.*
Like a lot of people, I feel ambivalent about twitter and the demise of blogs. I like spending time on twitter, but I want to carve out some non-twitter space for myself. Really, I’m looking for balance. I can imagine a version of my online life that would look something like
- Spend a couple hours on Twitter a week
- Updating my websites with more permanent essays, projects, resources
- Sending out emails to people who think that hearing from me every few weeks sounds like a blast.
Basically, I’m looking to fight back and capture a bit more quiet in my life. Thinking hasn’t felt easy lately. The news, yeah, but also my parenting and teaching, both of which are just SO LOUD. It saps up my energy, sometimes.
Anyway, let’s call this as an experiment. If at least ten people say they’d like to get emails from me (I’m not calling it a newsletter) then I’ll give it a shot. You can sign up here or give me your email address some other way.
Michael,
I use Mailchimp’s “email from RSS” feature to write a blog post and then send it to people via email. It also gives one some nice tools to help manage an email list. It’s also free to use if you have fewer than 1000 people signed up to your list.
David