I’m thinking about newsletters again. I do this periodically.
I love email newsletters; I love the intimacy, the immediacy and the unexpectedness of them. They just appear in your inbox without warning, letters from friends you don’t actually know that always feel like surprise gifts (although I do happen to know the authors of a number of newsletters I receive, now that I come to think of it).
I work on one personally — the surprisingly successful Heat Vision newsletter for THR, which perpetually outperforms expectations in terms of opens, which is how readership for such things is measured, I’m told — and I have often thought of starting others: A comics news round-up with commentary, for example, or a summary of things posted here, with links to the full versions.
What always stops me is time. I’m too busy to do everything I want to already, how can I add more to that plate? (Other abandoned projects: A series of essays about the post-Jack Kirby New Gods comics for Wait, What? and writing new essays about the HBO Watchmen show and DC’s Doomsday Clock to put with my Wait, What? essays about the original comic and after-the-fact prequels in a digital book collection. One day, perhaps.)
And so, I read what other people are doing with newsletters and have ideas and thoughts and questions. I think about the potential of the form and its parallels to blogging, which is apparently making a comeback in 2020, I read. (I’m ahead of the curve, for once!) I wonder about newsletters as secret transmissions to curated audiences and what that means and can mean, and I ask myself how much fun it could be to send different versions of the same letter to people without anyone noticing. I’m a stinker.
There are things to be done with newsletters that I want to do. I’ll get to do them eventually, I hope.