Kill your darlings? Taylor Swift’s “From the Vault” version of All Too Well is 5 minutes longer and has nearly 5x the number of Spotify plays as the original. The “Snydercut” of Justice League, double the runtime of the theatrical release, was HBO’s fourth-most-streamed film in 2021. The Stand: The Complete & Uncut Edition is 400 pages longer than Stephen King’s original manuscript, which isn’t even in print any more. There will always be fans who want it all, even the stuff that didn’t make the final cut. And there’s currently no better delivery mechanism than an email newsletter.
Every artist creates and culls, adds then subtracts, to distill their work into its most potent, sharable form. With a direct line to your most ardent admirers, however, you can sweep the detritus of those efforts into a sort of content compost, a pile of throwaway lines and trimmed fat to fertilize relationships with grassroots fans and those for whom more is always better. Email is the best way to make sure you send the right content to the right people and benefit from some of the easiest, most rewarding self-promotion available to you.
Zero-waste creativity
Anyone who has tried to write a book, publish a comic, compose a song, or attempt some other artistic endeavor knows that less than half of their total output will likely make it into a finished work. Even the most practiced and accomplished creators end up deleting hours worth of digressions and distractions, assuming that it’s just part of the process and if they can’t publish the not-quite-good-enough bits, there’s nowhere for them to go.
“A lot of what I write ends up on the cutting room floor—oftentimes as much as, if not more than, ends up in the final story...I’ve got some genuinely good lines languishing in dump docs and graveyards of struck out sentences,” the author of Captain’s Log told their subscribers. They did include a screenshot of one such page, but like I’ve seen in so many other indie artist newsletters, sharing dead darlings seems to be a stopgap, something to fill a slow news day rather than a regular habit. I’d argue changing that is one of the most impactful things you can do to grow your list.
Coming up with ideas for your newsletter month in and month out is hard. But by wrapping up every creative session with a snippet of what you sketched, or recorded, or wrote, you have a never-ending stash of behind-the-scenes extras to dole out to subscribers. And, as an added bonus, having an outlet for scrapped work makes the act of scrapping itself a lot less depressing!
Mike Schur, the creator of The Good Place team, has his writers put jokes in “The Candy Bag” if they don’t end up in the final cut of an episode. “It's a far less stark term than The Cutting Floor,” Matthew Guay pointed out in his own newsletter, “and perhaps makes writers feel safe cutting ideas knowing they can be pulled back.” Every one of those candies informed the character or the story, though, even if they never made it out of the writer’s room. And you can’t tell me that 10,000 people wouldn’t immediately sign up for a weekly email of unused lines written for April Ludgate, Eleanor Shellstrop, or Gina Linetti.
“A good daily dispatch is like getting all the DVD extras before a movie comes out. You get to watch deleted scenes and listen to director’s commentary while the movie is being made,” Austin Kleon writes in his book Show Your Work. “Become a documentarian of what you do.” You don’t have to share every discarded creation or oddment. And you don’t have to make them the main feature of your newsletter. A small section at the end of every email is plenty, especially if you can send to subscribers who have already told you they want any and all bonus content you have to offer.
Segment to save your darlings
Best-selling author Craig Mod has several newsletters. Roden is a monthly missive of broad general topics. Ridgeline, a weekly email specifically about the walks that inspire his writing. And Nightingalingale, “a members-only daily diary about the writing / editing / production of my next book,” reserved only for the most dedicated followers of his work.
Anywhere you can sign up for one of Mod’s newsletters you’ll see a description of what it is, letting his fans self-select for what they’re most interested in. Compare that to cases like The Stand, where Complete & Uncut is the only option, for everyone. Or All Too Well where Spotify shows From The Vault and Taylor’s Version on the results page with the original recording buried in the back catalog. A newsletter lets you split the groupies and the normies into different segments, sending experimental and extraneous creations to one group and basic announcements to the other.
There are several ways to segment your list based on how interested subscribers are in emails with bonus and behind-the-scenes content. You might add the equivalent of a “Give me everything!” checkbox to your signup form. Or add the list segment parameter to your signup URL. Then there’s the option to simply manually update someone’s status after they reply or share your work on social media. None are perfect. But even someone who’s only interested in basic updates will be forgiving. “Unless I am mistaken, hate-subscribing isn’t actually a thing,” Joanne McNeil likes to remind people.
When you overshare on social media, creating posts that don’t generate “enough” engagement, the algorithm quietly buries you. With a newsletter, feedback is unambiguous and immediate. You can ask people why they’re leaving when they unsubscribe to learn whether you were sharing too much or too little. You can survey current subscribers to find out if you’re stuffing too many dead darlings in their inboxes. You can fine-tune your lists to your heart’s content to avoid all the pitfalls of one-to-many platforms.
Craig Mod invites subscribers of his members-only newsletters to participate in “meta discussions (via zoom, livestreams, et cetera) around my work. Those meta discussions help me work better and more thoughtfully.” That’s what most newsletter subscribers want, really, human connection. And to feel part of the art they love so much. There’s no better way to do that than to show them how the sausage gets made.
The stories you tell about your work
Few, if any, think emails from Taylor Nation are written by Swift herself, with any one individual in mind. But for a local comic book artist or self-published author, the dynamic is flipped. Sending a half-finished sketch or a cut chapter is less like marketing and closer to a message from a friend. Subscribers feel like they’re hearing from someone who knows their name and remembers where they met. Still, that closeness can make sharing rough drafts and imperfect creations terrifying.
“We all love things that other people think are garbage,” Kleon says. “You have to have the courage to keep loving your garbage, because what makes us unique is the diversity and breadth of our influences, the unique ways in which we mix up the parts of culture others have deemed ‘high’ and low.’” If anything, hiding and holding back all the unused work that went into a project just makes it harder to build relationships with fans. They want to see the mess!
People can buy your finished work, with all its sanded edges and safe endings, without handing over their email. They can learn about your book tour or next concert on social media or your website. To fret over sanitizing and polishing your newsletter is to misunderstand what most people want in their inboxes: direct, one-to-one relationships.
So go ahead, cut, delete, scrap, erase, and obliterate parts of your work from the final product. Then send them to the people who will love them, despite their blotches and blemishes. Kill your darlings. Then resurrect them to build bridges with your fans.
| Image | Credit |
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| Header photo by Steve A Johnson | Unsplash |