One topic, for a limited time: The pop-up email newsletter

As Hurricane Irma spiraled towards Florida’s Atlantic coastline in 2017, the USA Today decided the storm merited a newsletter.

Watching Hurricane Irma, they called it, and sent it to the 300,000-strong subset of their existing subscribers located around the storm’s path. The goal: One email with everything about the storm. The hurricane’s 125-mph winds were heading into Cuba, one email wrote, while Key West was already experiencing heavy winds—each factoid linked to relevant local reporting.

Most newsletters are bounded by topic, unbounded by time. All the news that’s fit to read, today and every future day henceforth and forever. Watching Hurricane Irma was the opposite, “a kind of pop-up newsletter,” as Digiday called it. It was exactly the updates you’d want when a storm was headed your way, for exactly the duration you’d want those updates. Then, back to your normal programming as the pop-up newsletter shuttered.

Three years later, months into the pandemic, self-titled “writer, photographer, and walker” Craig Mod emailed his followers. “I’d like for us to take a walk together,” he wrote, inaugurating a one-month newsletter with daily dispatches on a 500km walk from Tokyo to Kyoto.

Then he broke the mold for newsletters, built as they typically are on dreams of ever-growing subscriber lists. “Your email address will only be used for this newsletter, Mod promised. “On December 1, I’ll delete the list.”

Mod had existing newsletters, with dedicated followers and even paid supporters. But for this walk, he built what became the template for a pop-up newsletter: A new list, for a specific purpose, time-bounded, with a promise to never email subscribers again after the list’s purpose was complete.

For such a time as this

What remains of the first pop-up newsletter.

The earliest pop-up newsletter may have been Fipra’s Ukraine Pop-up Newsletter, launched on March 6, 2014 during the Russian invasion of Crimea as “a daily news bulletin.” “The Pop-up Newsletter will in any event stop appearing as soon as the crisis is truly over,” wrote Fipra Chairman Peter-Carlo Lehrell on its landing page. A year later, the Baltimore Sun launched a “one email a day” newsletter of updates about the Freddie Gray case, something Poynter later called a “pop-up newsletter.”

These, like the hurricane tracker, were emails about a specific thing for its duration. Here’s what’s happening, in the moment, around something that will wrap up at some uncertain date in the near future.

Others had more firm timeframes. The New York Times’ first pop-up newsletter about Game of Thrones ran the duration of Season 7. Melinda Yeoh built a timeframe, with a 15-day newsletter to learn watercolor painting in public. It’s “a seasonal newsletter with a start and end date,” volunteered Melinda Yeoh. “Like those pop-up stores.”

Sometimes the time frame itself is the story. Craig Mod, in his pop-up emails that popularized the format, chronicles walks across an ancient Japanese road with daily emails. “This SMS publishing experiment has strict start and end dates,” said Mod of his first SMS-powered pop-up newsletter, before they were branded as such. “And when it ends, it ends.” Subscribers only know vaguely what they’ll get—the content depends on what Mod stumbles upon. Yet that’s half the allure, like flipping through rare volumes at a pop-up bookstore.

Each author finds different ways to use the limitations of a pop-up newsletter to empower bounded creativity. Elliot Jay Stocks ran Notes from a different (type)setting around his typography-related travel. Signal Chain used time creatively, with a pop-up newsletter by generative musician Duncan Geere and photographer Oliver Holms broken into seasons like a podcast or TV show. Nate Bennett, inspired by Mod, started Walking in Oakland as a pop-up diary of life while his car was getting repaired. Nat Bennett made even shorter newsletters, such as his four-day, four-email photo project Point Lobos, & Maybe Monterey.

The trick is finding limitations that give shape to the project. A topic to cover in-depth, then wrap up, or a time-period to cover anything within that set space. Pop-ups aren’t your newsletter to write anything, forever. They're here for a purpose, and when that purpose is done, they’re done.

Sometimes a set time is less important than just knowing that this, too, will eventually end. The Washington Post was early to the idea, running one of the first pop-up newsletters in 2016. The World According to Facebook ran as a daily, “limited-run newsletter that will publish from Aug. 31 to whenever we/its readers get sick of it,” tracking Facebook’s trending stories of the day with a looser time bound. Pop-up newsletters are perfect for deep-dives on niche topics. The New York Times has run them on what to do in New York’s summer, how to prep for natural disasters, and a deep-dive into AI. Vice ran one about the US Postal Service, The Mail, over four months. Constrained more by what’s worth saying about that topic than by time.

Serialized books fall into this category as well. Microsoft’s Windows division president Steven Sinofsky’s Hardcore Software newsletter spanned three and a half years and 221 updates, but was bounded by being a newsletter-as-a-book, written and published in real-time. Artist Adam Westbrook published his graphic novel zine as a pop-up newsletter, sketching the zine’s 20 pages and emailing them daily to beta readers from an opt-in newsletter that “will self-destruct” upon completion. Once these projects moved on to publication, the newsletters’ jobs were complete. 

Kickstarter projects are similar; you expect to receive emails for the duration, and while there’s no promise to never email you  again, you would likely unsubscribe if the project continued sending weekly messages years after shipping.

Bounded creativity

The final edition of Craig Mod’s most recent pop-up newsletter

Time-bounded. A single topic. Self-destructing.

Those three ingredients make pop-up newsletters so appealing. Subscribers know exactly what they’re getting into, and that they’re in for the short-haul, that their inbox won’t be cluttered with this newsletter forever. Authors know they don’t have to keep writing about this one topic forever, and that they can experiment more and email more frequently without losing their core readers.

Limitations make readers more likely to subscribe. It’s the tiniest of risks, at worst a bit of extra inbox clutter for a few weeks, at best unique, personal insights from an author you love. Those same limitations make it easier for authors to keep going, without going forever.

Author John-Paul Flintoff said his literary agent told him to “Keep talking about the book, as if it just came out today.” A pop-up newsletter, started alongside a couple of friends, was his forcing function. “Giving myself a daily publication schedule provided just enough structure for me to do that,” he surmised. Same, too, for the energy to keep writing. “Everybody experienced a dip, roughly half-way through, and wondered about packing it in,” he recalled. The knowledge that there was an end in sight, and that other friends were feeling the same drain on their energy, kept them motivated to keep writing.

The real benefit came from the urgency, the timeliness, of the emails. “A pop-up newsletter is a lot more current, more NOW, than a series of blog posts that people may not see till long after they've written,” he says, and that gave him both new ways to think about his topics and more frequent interactions with his readers.

Which adds a fourth factor to the formula: Commitment. Emailing for the duration of a topic or an event isn’t enough, without saying how often you’ll email. Daily is most common; weekly could work for larger topics. It’s that public commitment to emailing on a set schedule that focuses the mind. Without that schedule, as Craig Mod put it “it’s much easier to skip the work and say: Aw, heck, I’ll just do this tomorrow.”

“Deadlines are probably the most powerful tool for subverting our inner procrastination dingdongs,” he writes of his pop-up newsletters. “Seasonality means the recurring deadlines themselves will end. It’s a great combo.”

To everything there is a season

Starting a new pop-up newsletter in Buttondown takes three clicks.

Maybe you need a pop-up newsletter as a forcing function to help you write more consistently. Maybe you need one because you write too much, too often, and you’d like another outlet without overloading your existing readers.

Set a timeframe. Pick a topic. Commit to a specific cadence. Then spin up a new newsletter, let your followers know to sign up for this limited-edition set of emails, and you’ve got a pop-up newsletter.

Buttondown’s built with pop-up newsletter support in mind. Every paid account includes support for multiple newsletters—and you’re billed only for unique subscribers, so if someone’s signed up to your normal newsletter and your pop-up, they still count as a single subscriber when you pay your bill.

All that’s left to do is to start. You don’t have to commit forever. You just have to put yourself out there and talk about something you love or catalog something that’s happening, every day until the time’s up.

Then shut it down. Recommend your blog, social networks, and long-term newsletter if they’d like to stay connected; if not, let them go off gently back to their inboxes. And when inspiration strikes again and you spin up another pop-up newsletter, odds are they’ll come back, eager to hear what you’ve got to say this time, for a brief moment in time.