How Patricia Elzie-Tuttle uses Buttondown to share resources and foster community

Patricia Elzie-Tuttle is a writer, podcaster, librarian, and information fanatic who appreciates potatoes in every single one of their beautiful iterations. Patricia earned a B.A. in Creative Writing and Musical Theatre from the University of Southern California and an MLIS from San Jose State University. Her weekly newsletter, The Infophile: Enthusiastic Encouragement & Dubious Advice offers self-improvement and mental health advice, essays, and resources that pull from her experience as a queer, Black, & Filipina person existing in the world. She is also doing the same on the Enthusiastic Encouragement & Dubious Advice Podcast. Patricia has been a Book Riot contributor since 2016 and is currently a co-host of Book Riot’s All the Books! podcast and one of the recurring writers of Book Riot’s Read This Book newsletter.

What made you take the plunge? What did those first couple of editions of the newsletter look like?

It was an idea that I had been rolling around in my head. Initially, it was a podcast idea. Although I am a writer at heart, I am also a paid podcaster. The idea came up with my work through Book Riot. I’ve been with them for eight years now and I have a master’s in library science. I am a librarian on paper and I try to write diverse book lists. I was, and still am, an avid reader of self-help but when I started figuring out wanting to recommend self-help I realized that no one that looks like me or my circle was writing these books. A lot of these self-help books and content creators depend on having certain privileges like the money to outsource domestic labor. If you want more time to create, you have to hire someone to clean your house and that’s not the reality for many groups of people, for many different reasons. I was finding a lot of self-help to be not helpful and it’s often part of the plan to sell more things. As Toni Morrison said, “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” So, I write the self-help that I wish existed. I still read self-help and I take what’s best and leave the rest. I take ideas that I have learned and expand upon them by making them more inclusive of queer communities, communities of color, and people who aren’t as affluent. I try to make self-help more accessible. A lot of the self-help out there focuses on self-care and individual things. I believe we will go further together through community care and building community and those are the most important things to me. My newsletter has spun out into a podcast and a Patreon. I start weekly accountability threads where I’m like, “This week I have to make a doctor’s appointment.” And three other people are like, “You know what? I also have to make a doctor’s appointment.” Collectively, we will check in with each other the following week and see if we all did our things. It’s a low lift to be accountability buddies, but this is the kind of community I have fostered through my newsletter. 

It’s a larger-scale version of the accountability group text that I feel like so many people have. It’s a more positive, larger version of that. Terrific. I feel like for many people, sending out the first couple of things after you’ve had this idea in your head for a good amount of time there’s always a level of anxiety and rapid iteration. What was your process of sending those first couple of emails, especially compared to your process today where you’ve gotten in so many reps?

One of my best friends, says, and pardon my language, one of her favorite phrases is “Fuck it, monster truck it.” The way I say that is “do it scared.” Yes, I was nervous. I was anxious. It’s not going to be perfect. But I’m going to do it anyway because no one ever died of being scared. No one ever died of being anxious. It’s even the same with calling the doctor for an appointment. Feel bad about it, cry, whatever, and do it anyway. One of my earliest newsletter issues was talking about one of my other phrases, “Not everything has to be five stars.” I try to embody that mantra. Not every newsletter, especially if I’m sending it out weekly, is going to be five stars. Understanding that it’s enough to do it and it’s enough for me to do it consistently. The “resources” part of my newsletter is every other week and I give myself an easier lift by offering free resources. There are so many free resources out there. People just don’t know these resources exist. That’s when I put on my librarian hat and say, “Hey, here’s something free that might be helpful.” 

Often, I feel there’s one end of the spectrum people don’t know these things exist. The other end of the spectrum goes back to the library science of it all; there is so much information and noise that there’s now a dearth of curation and someone that you just need to be able to see, like, here’s some stuff that’s like, actually good, that is not like SEO, spam, or ChatGPT, or whatever, this is legit

I have a master’s in figuring out what is BS and what is not. Meanwhile, Google is recommending people eat rocks. 

It’s quite clever to build in leeway for yourself with a weekly newsletter schedule. How long did it take for you to land on that cadence? Did you experiment with other formats? Or did you hit gold with that pretty early on and stuck with it?

That was my plan at the beginning. Because my resource issues are free, I would feel like a bad person if I offered free resources and put them behind a paywall. That doesn’t feel right to me. I think a lot of information should be free. Those longer essay issues that take me longer to write are behind the paywall. I wanted something to come out weekly so in my planning stages, I had to think about what was going to make this sustainable for me.

Probably the single biggest question when I chat with folks just starting out. What is the right cadence? The most common is generally weekly. The real answer is whatever frequency that you can actually do for a year. Life happens. You don’t want to overcommit and burn out trying to make up for missed posts.

Outside the newsletter, you have a Patreon as well. You have paid subscriptions and you have podcasting. Can you talk a little bit about your philosophy in adding more and expanding the surface area of your creative work?

The newsletter idea initially started as a podcast idea. When I started with Book Riot, it was as a writer and then they swept me onto one of their podcasts. I learned that a podcast of my own is going to take more bandwidth when it comes to editing and costs. So, what is my next logical step? What can I do by myself with what I have now? That’s why I went into the newsletter. Our podcast didn’t start until after the newsletter.  Part of the reason I wanted to expand to podcasts is honestly not only to reach a different audience but to make things more accessible. Another benefit is that I can easily reuse newsletter content going back to 2020 to put into a podcast. I’m constantly writing more content for the newsletter which will eventually be published as podcast content down the line. So, I’m taking my newsletter content and having it do double work. Work smarter, not harder.

That makes sense. What is your process for reusing content? Do you have a system or is it just like “I have this really great exchange or snippet in the archive, let’s bring it back in?” type of thing?

It’s a combination of things. My wife is my podcast co-host and the podcast is only every other week because we still have full-time day jobs. Deciding what the show is about is often just reading the room. By “the room” I mean, thinking about what my audience is thinking about what’s happening in the world and what would be helpful for us to hear right now. We’re not so unique that there’s not another person that might find it helpful. It’s a lot of leaning into intuition. 

You mentioned that you and your wife both have full-time jobs. This work is in addition to that. From a blocking and tackling perspective, where do you find the time of the day? How do you schedule everything?

We do try to stick to a strict schedule. Wednesday night has been newsletter night for years. That is the night the newsletter gets written and scheduled for Friday morning so it does leave me Thursday for wiggle room if I need to do any extra editing or research anything like that. We also pay an external editor for the podcast and send her our files by Monday night. These times are locked out on our calendars. We’ve been doing this for years now. It’s almost second nature.

You mentioned starting the newsletter largely because you didn’t see the advice column and writing that you would want to read. I’m curious, what are some of the big things that you learned in terms of starting the newsletter and the podcast? What do you wish you knew in the beginning stages back then?

I wanted to believe that if you build it, they will come. This is simply not true and I’m still learning the level of marketing that needs to be done. I still feel like I’ve not reached the full audience that I want to reach. I learned to think about the audience, but not too much, while writing what I want to write because it’s really obvious if you are trying to cater to people versus enjoying what you’re doing. I never went into this thinking I was going to do it full-time or anything like that. You kind of have to have a love for the game and be clear about your “why.” My “why” was, “I am frustrated with what is out there.” I was just like, there’s nothing for me and my group of friends and loved ones. So, think about what you have to offer that’s not out there, and recognize that even if it is done by someone else, no one’s going to do it the way that you’re going to do it. People don’t need another, whoever.  No one’s going to do it the way you do it. Trusting that. Trust your voice.

That’s true of not just newsletter writing, but writing at large, right? If you were to look at the field of creative writing and think, “Well, pretty much everything has been written,” yet, people will still write and still like pour themselves into their passions. Are there any general words of advice you’d like to share?

It’s going to be awkward at first. It’s going to be bumpy. Nothing is going to burst forth fully, no matter how much you think about it beforehand. Some of the best advice I got was to think about the newsletters, the content, the podcast, or the online content creators that you love and follow. Scroll back and look at their early content. Look at their first reels. Look at their first newsletter issues. Listen to their first podcast episode. I promise you’ll get a boost. There’s still so much to do, but also you have come such a far away. That’s a big accomplishment, already.