Should Writers Have a Newsletter?

To be a writer, all you really have to do is write. But if you want to grow your audience, connect with readers, and sell more books, the best tool available right now is a newsletter.

(Should Writers Use Social Media?)

When I started writing my newsletter, in March 2021, I had a pretty straightforward idea: I’d share a poetry prompt each day for April, and anyone who wanted to join us could write along. For years I’d celebrated National Poetry Month by trading prompts with friends and writing a poem a day (or trying my hardest to), and I thought I could share that celebration with a wider group of people by creating some sort of mailing list. I claimed an address over at Substack, where several writers I liked had recently moved their newsletters. I popped in a name inspired by advice a mentor of mine had shared in grad school: Write More, Be Less Careful. 

Three years later, that newsletter, which I’d started almost on a whim, has changed my writing life in all kinds of ways I couldn’t have imagined. A regular cadence of writing and sharing short pieces has helped me develop momentum in my writing practice and made it easier to finish other writing projects. I’ve developed a really lovely, loyal readership and made connections with writers whose work I admire. My newsletter even helped me find my agent and land a book deal for my first book of narrative nonfiction, The Good Mother Myth.

But even more than that, working on my newsletter has taught me to write for readers in a way that has transformed my writing practice. My MFA trained me to value gorgeous metaphors and sharply broken lines, and my PhD honed my ability to do exhaustive research and write tightly constructed arguments, but the years I spent in workshops and seminars had only ever glancingly mentioned the reader who might be on the other end of that polished writing.

Writing a newsletter forces you to think about what you’re offering your readers. Because your readers can comment and email you right back, you can hear pretty quickly about how well it’s working. And since a newsletter is necessarily occasional and brief, you can respond to reader feedback quickly and experiment with new ideas. If you feel like your writing practice and your platform as a writer could use a boost, writing a regular newsletter is about the best way to accomplish that.

Here are a few ways that writing a newsletter can impact your writing practice and improve your writing career.

Establish a regular rhythm of finishing and sharing short pieces

If you’re feeling stuck in your writing, or you’re working on a long project where the finish line is way off in the distance, regularly finishing a small thing, like a newsletter post, can be an incredible boost. And the immediate feedback you can get from a newsletter, where people can comment or email you back right away, is a great reminder that there are readers out there for your longer projects, too.

Connect more directly with readers

I know I’m probably harping on this, but writing can be such a lonely business, and it’s easy to lose track of the fact that there are specific people out there in the world that you’re hoping to reach with your words. A newsletter provides you with a way to write right to that audience and build a relationship with them long before you’ve got a pub date for your next book.

You don’t need a huge subscriber list for your newsletter to have a big impact on your writing life. I’d argue that, if you’re going to spend time working to grow your audience, you’re better off investing that time in a newsletter than in a social media platform. 

On social media, the algorithm plays an important role in determining who will see your content, and if the platform changes direction when it’s taken over by an unpredictable billionaire, all those followers you’ve worked to accumulate go with it. With a newsletter, you send your work right into the inboxes of people who’ve signed up to hear from you—and that email list is yours to take with you on whatever platform you like.

And the folks you’re engaging through your newsletter will probably be the first to click buy when your book goes up for pre-order, which brings me to the most practical reason to start a newsletter…

With a growing catalog of instructional writing videos available instantly, we have writing instruction on everything from improving your craft to getting published and finding an audience. New videos are added every month!

Sell more books

It can feel gauche to talk about selling our work as a goal, but if you’re working hard on your book, you want people to read it, right? And I think the direct, ongoing relationship between newsletter writer and reader is one of the best ways to promote new books, highlight titles from your backlist, and drive pre-orders for forthcoming books. 

Several of the nonfiction books that have cracked the New York Times bestseller list in recent months have been published by writers with strong newsletter subscription bases, like Virginia Sole-Smith’s Fat Talk and her newsletter Burnt Toast and Lyz Lenz’s This American Ex-Wife and her newsletter Men Yell at Me.

And look: If a newsletter feels like just one more thing that you can’t possibly add to a too-long to-do list, and you really just want to keep your head down and work on your writing, that’s totally fine. But if having a space where you control how you share and connect directly with your readers sounds appealing, I think a newsletter is really your best bet.