Happy Friday,
Want to know something crazy? The read rate on my last email was double the number of subscribers I have.
Which is… wow.
I have no idea if some people read it twice or if there’s a whack of people reading on Substack, without subscribing. (Please subscribe!) Either way, thank you.
But here’s the thing. A lot of your readers will kind of suck.
And that’s okay. That’s how it should be.
You can’t hit it out of the park every time…
Email marketing is part of my day job, so I’m intimately familiar with response rates that sometimes knock it out of the park and other times, honestly—kind of suck.
Incidentally, my own emails have better response rates than any I send commercially for clients, which I credit partly to carte blanche—and also to you. Thank you. You rock.
You can’t hit it out of the park every time. Not on your blog, on Medium, or email.
And you don’t need to, because that’s not what it’s about.
When you’re writing, whether it’s a post or an email, what you’re doing is looking for the needles in the haystack.
Your people, if you will.
1000 true fans
There’s an old saying that you only need 1000 true fans to make a living doing what ever you want. If 1000 people are happy to spend $100 a year on stuff you make or do, the math is simple—100K income.
Doesn’t much matter if that’s real dollars, or minutes spent reading on Medium.
But that’s an arbitrary number. If they spend $200, you need half as many. If they spend $50, you’ll need to double the number.
The tricky part, of course, is finding those true fans.
It’s not any different than meeting people in real life. Some friendships are instant. You meet someone and just click. Other times, the connection grows slowly.
It’s not just about you. (or me)
Sometimes, people find you and they’re a die hard fan instantly. Other times, it takes a while for that connection to grow. Especially if they’re cynical. And a lot of people are cynical because there’s a lot of dicey people in the world.
Once burned, twice shy.
On top of that, we humans have our own issues. Sometimes we’re not ready to connect. Maybe there’s too much noise in our life. Or stress, or fear. Sometimes, things happen. We lose loved ones, lose jobs, get sick, have family emergencies.
A month after my Mom died, I got an email from someone saying I haven’t read the last 4 emails and click this button or he’ll remove me. I let him remove me.
You know? I was grieving. 4 emails is too short a window to write someone off. Statistics are wonderful things to have, but we need to be careful not to let them turn us into self serving jerks.
A small number of true fans can make a big difference…
When Paul Harding won the Pulitzer Prize, his book hadn’t even sold 7,000 copies. It hadn’t even sold enough to make any bestseller lists.
When he was trying to find an agent or publisher, he got so many rejections and so much bad feedback that he threw it in a drawer for almost 3 years. Then he pulled it out and went to a small indie publisher.
And then sales kind of sucked. Royalties on 7,000 copies don’t amount to much.
But the small number of people who loved it yelled their kudos so long and loud that word of his book reached the Pulitzer team. Only after he won did his book start selling like hotcakes.
He’s third from right in the photo below, and his advice for writers inspired this post.
I think you might like it, whether you’re writing a book or writing on Medium.
If your response rates aren’t great, don’t be discouraged. Keep doing you. That’s the only way you can ever find the people who will become your true fans.
Writing advice from 10 Pulitzer Prize winners
xo
Linda
From the archive…
Because archive and graveyard shouldn’t mean the same…