Sloth and Manatee

Okay before we start, I have to thank Radiator Comics for agreeing to distribute all three Sloth and Manatee books, please share this fact far and wide so that they get lots of sales and support, they carry SO MUCH GREAT STUFF. I am very grateful!

When we write an email to someone, one of the things that is top-of-mind is that we want them to read it.

It used to be, we could assume that mail would be seen and read, because it arrived in a little box, amongst probably not-too-many other things, perhaps a catalog and some bills, and that physical object of a letter would be distinct from the other stuff, maybe with familiar handwriting on it, and so we just didn’t worry about whether the recipient would blow it off.

Now, “mail” is the abstraction of email, and it does not come to a box in front of your domicile. There is no handwritten envelope, of the size of a greeting card that might contain a few bucks from Grandma, or the Airmail stripes on there that tell you it’s from overseas, or a ridiculous postcard with a big fish on it, or anything like that. Now “mail” is lines of text on a screen.

So now, everyone is shouting. This would be like if you opened your mailbox outside and all the envelopes were covered in glitter and spinning around but they were also all the same and you had to figure out which ones were “real” mail. Emails are full of "BREAKING NEWS” and “SALE TODAY ONLY” and emojis and it’s all very noisy and very flat at the same time.

And so the sender and the subject line have become kind of it, and amongst those, the subject line is the one that you can control, and so the subject line is now an art form to get “opens” and “reads.”

So I write little subject lines for each of these emails, that are sort of about what the email contains, sort of, but I notice that the “opens” vary. Sometimes a lot. And there’s no discern-able pattern. Maybe there are magic things, like if I mention animals it goes up and if I am funny it goes up and if I am vague it goes down, but honestly if you looked at the list together you wouldn’t have any idea either.

(By the way, writing good email is in fact a doable thing, and there are good people who have written a whole really good book about how to do it well.)

Don’t get me wrong, I skip over stuff too. Sometimes I’ll go “not today” or “that’s just not interesting” even though I KNOW that the email’s gonna be interesting. If you get an email from Sacha Judd or Mike Monteiro or Lisa Maria Marquis, or The Nature Conservancy, it will always be worthwhile.

But I also wonder, if I just put “here is the Sloth and Manatee email this week” if anything would change (maybe I will try it!). It’s just so weird, it’s an organic weird thing amongst these cold pixels and so it’s not really just bad, it’s living, like a weed popping up in a sidewalk crack.

Sloth and Manatee Page

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Okay! That's enough nonsense for now.

May you get a letter in the mail, may it have stickers and glitter on it, won't you be my neighbor? - Betsy