What's your newsletter's North Star?

Six words are all it took to run Southwest Airlines, according to CEO Herb Kelleher. “We are THE low-fare airline. Once you understand that fact, you can make any decision about this company’s future as well as I can,” he said. 

“Imagine Tracy from Marketing comes into your office. She says her surveys indicate that passengers might enjoy a light entree on the Houston to Las Vegas flight…she thinks a chicken Caesar salad would be popular. What do you say?” Kelleher would wait for an answer before continuing “You say, “Tracy, will adding that salad make us THE low-fare airline? No. We’re not serving any damn chicken salad.” An MBA in a single sentence. 

Herb’s North Star for Southwest wasn’t the sexiest, or cleverest, or even the most original. Just like Polaris isn’t the brightest star in the night sky. No, the real function of a North Star is that its position remains mostly stable amidst a constantly shifting canvas of (sometimes brighter) stars. Consistency is gold.

Practicing forced prioritization

For newsletter creators, having a fixed point on the horizon is a filtering function. If there’s a straight line from a topic you want to write about to your North Star, draft it. If it’s a detour, a meandering stroll, avoid it like a chicken salad on a cheap flight to Vegas. That’s easier said than done.

Writers are so close to the source material, steeped and stewed in the details, that it’s hard for them to take a step back and see the forest for the trees. They get distracted, diving into rabbit holes and pulling on threads that lead themselves and their readers away from the anchor point. As passages become less meaningful, the writer loses motivation to keep going and readers lose interest.

In Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, brothers Dan and Cheap Heath highlight the story of The Dunn Daily Record, a city newspaper that slowly became more and more focused on state and national news. That was, as the reporters of the time thought, where the most interesting topics were. But the paper’s owner disagreed.

“All of us know that the main reason anyone reads a local newspaper is for local names and pictures. That’s the one thing we can do better than anybody else. And that’s the thing our readers can’t get anywhere else,” Hoover Adams wrote to his staff. 

On another occasion, he doubled down, “If an atomic bomb fell on Raleigh, it wouldn’t be news in our town unless some of the debris and ashes fell here.” There was zero ambiguity about what he wanted from his staff. Everyone knew how to make the “right” decision, and that was reflected in the paper’s circulation numbers.

Focused writing as a search query

The number of subscribers to Adams’s local paper was 112% that of the local population. As the Heath brothers point out, that means that people outside of his small town were buying the small-town paper and/or households were purchasing multiple issues. Either way, the paper’s singular focus and format attracted and retained subscribers.

The internet magnified the potential upside of forced prioritization tenfold. Writing about the growth of his email newsletter, Henrik Karlsson explained “The more precise and niche the words I input, the better the internet would match me with people I could forge meaningful relationships with. Writing for the general public, you need to be broad and a bit bland. I didn’t want a general public. I wanted a specific set of people, the people who could help me along as a human being obsessed with certain intellectual problems. I didn’t know who these people were. Hence my writing was a search query. It needed to be phrased in such a way that it found these people and, if necessary, filtered others.”

In this way, identifying your North Star and locking yourself into its path becomes a virtuous cycle. It keeps you on topic, which catches the attention of people interested in that topic, which validates work on said topic, and reinforces focus on it. It worked for Southwest, The Dunn Daily Record, and countless niche newsletters like Karlsson’s Escaping Flatland. 

How a North Star is born

For a singular focus to be sustainable and marketable, it must be declared and circumscribed. It should take almost zero cognitive power to decide what falls inside or outside of the quest. The chicken salad would have raised Southwest’s costs. Reporting on a story from the next town over would have meant fewer local names in The Daily Dunn. Bland writing would bore Karlsson’s subscribers. 

It’s rare to get it right on the first try. You might write a handful of newsletters that you hold off on publishing, waiting until you can distill what unifies them into a succinct, precise statement. In Made to Stick, the authors recommend starting with a “Hollywood Pitch” formula, anchoring a new idea to pre-existing ones. Speed was “Die Hard on a bus.” Alien was “Jaws in space.” “My email newsletter is like X but [for/about] Y.”

Then, put it on the Newsletter page of your website, your social media profiles, the introduction of your book, anywhere that will set people’s expectations and get them excited. Or filter them out early. Buttondown user Jessi Eoin writes on their website that their work “focuses on uplifting fat, disabled, queer, and trans people.” That’s a North Star! Through that lens, there’s no way to be confused about which topics work and which don’t, what subscribers will like and what they won’t. All you have to do is keep marching in that direction.

Be an immovable point on the horizon

The single most important thing for any email newsletter to succeed is a North Star. With one short sentence, it answers tricky questions about what to work on or prioritize today and far into the future. It tells subscribers who you are and what you’re about. It filters out bad ideas and busywork, detractors and distractions, so all that’s left is work that matters to you and those you want to collaborate with. 

Yours could be as simple as promoting your work. Not everything needs to be thought-provoking and novel. But it must be focused, purposeful, and human. There is no (worthwhile) North Star that demands that you send an email just to maintain an exact cadence. Leave rote, robotic writing to AI. You’re searching for a different kind of reader.  

As Karlsson wrote, “It turns out that if you’ve written something that you find interesting, it is not unlikely that people you like will find it interesting too, and pass it on if you give them the chance.” 

And for people like you to find you, it’s best to stick to a fixed path.