I'm Nick Disabato, an independent designer & writer. I've run my newsletter since 2012, writing letters to thousands of people every week. After some years flitting between newsletter platforms that didn't really understand my needs, I landed on Buttondown in 2022. Four years later, I got tasked with designing & editing this book.
I don't think my newsletter is any better or worse to "follow" than any of the thousand others on Buttondown. Certainly others are larger, more widely read, more "successful" by any metric. But I've been doing this for a while and think there may be some things to teach everyone about what I've learned writing every week.
Writing every week
The most important thing I do in my newsletter is to write every week. Really for me, newsletter writing is a question of discipline. I show up to the work, put in the work, and try to give it my best shot. Obviously it's never perfect, but doing this has allowed me to honor the practice of writing to people.
Not everybody needs a lockstep cadence like mine, but I've found this is what works for me. Above all, it keeps people engaged & interested. And it makes me ask myself: what do I have to share today? It's an honor to have people really care about what I'm doing and how I'm doing it. I never take it for granted.
Coming up with ideas
Sometimes I can sit down and hammer out something quickly for my newsletter. It might be timely or just weighing on my mind. Most of the time, though, I need to be prompted with an idea.
I've personally found that my idea-generation brain never engages when I'm actually trying to write. Too much pressure. So I've decoupled the two activities, and I occasionally spend whole afternoons generating dozens of ideas to write about. I never write about all of them; the goal is to get enough that I can pick from a large set of options and go from there.
For years I've used Naomi Dunford's 1-hour content plan to come up with dozens of ideas. It's pretty simple: come up with some broad-stroke topic areas that describe your area of expertise, then find some sub-topics, then find as many things to write about under each sub-topic as you can. I never look back at my original topic lists, so the list of lists can evolve with me.
Growing my audience
Since we don't advertise or use social media, word of mouth is all we have for sharing our work with the world. That means we rely on our readers to tell others, and we need to put out good work in the first place.
My list will not grow if the work isn't good. There are no hacks. There are no substitutes for a quality product.
Instead, we work hard to write well & often, and then we sometimes ask people to share our letter with their audience. In practice, all of our growth comes from three sources: book sales, appearances in the wider world (podcasts, conferences, guest blog posts, etc), and other people recommending us. The latter is by far the biggest cohort, by design.
Building a routine
I've written about 95% of my letters on Monday mornings. My brain is freshest before lunch and early in the week, so that's my peak time for focus & intentional work. I edit the letter on a morning later in the week, and then I send it off to be queued.
Again, you don't have to pick a specific time at all. Just find what works best for you and stick with it.
Talking to people
We know a lot of people care about open rates, click rates, and view rates. We care the most about reply rates. Why? Because if we're doing our job, then we've struck a chord with our writing. Who knows, maybe people will even share it, too.
Again, this may not work for you. But we've found that it works for us. Perhaps the real lesson in this writing is to learn, listen, be unafraid of moving off the beaten path, and make something that's well & truly you.
What I look for on newsletter platforms
I want my newsletter platform to help me write text efficiently and put it in front of people. I want the barriers between me & my audience to be as thin & permeable as possible. I want deliverability to be high, because I know how hard that is to pull off at scale. I want to be able to write, schedule, and receive replies. I want to add as much branding as I can, and no more than that. I want to know I can get help when I need it, which is often, because I don't know how computers work.
I want something that will work simply & easily. I want it to get out of my way. I want something that will last. That's why I've chosen Buttondown for so many years. I'm really grateful it exists.