I wrote a book: The Newsletter Book.

What goes into a newsletter? What makes them stick?

The newspaper process—or at least the glamorized, twentieth-century version of it, with words scribbled in notebooks, punched out on keyboards, presses stopped and headlines swapped—has been immortalized on the silver screen enough that most can recognize its broad structures, its clichés. Same for the book publishing process, with agents, publishers, and advances, book tours and paperbacks, translations if you're lucky and options if you're exceptionally so.

Newsletters, not so much.

And so, my Pith & Pip partner Ryan Farley and I set out to tell the story of newsletters, for Buttondown. What gets people started writing them, and keeps them going? Why newsletters, of all things one could create? Where do they find inspiration, and what insights did they have after writing millions of words over dozens of years?

After hours of interview calls, of refining quotes and pulling together a narrative, we wrote a book that I’m pretty proud of. It’s a short book, just four chapters long, but packed with details about newsletters from so many great writers including Clive Thompson, Cassidy Williams, Jane Friedman, Allen Pike, Chatwan Mongkol, Mark Hurst, and Dave Pell.

Because we found out, there's no secret to newsletters other than starting. Start. Keep sending. Everything else will fall into place along the way.

Here’s The Newsletter Book, free to read online or download in PDF and ePub formats. Happy reading!

Continue reading at https://buttondown.com/book

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