Notes From the Brain Jar: A Zine (001)
For the past few years I’ve been running a more-or-less weekly newsletter that goes out to a couple of hundred loyal readers. What started out as an exercise in promoting new books and updating folks about projects gradually evolved into a weekly missive where I stashed write-ups about publishing, writing, technology, creative processes, culture, and other interesting things I came across while working. Basically, all the things I used to blog about back in the days when folks read blogs. And it turns out I wrote long newsletters. They average about two thousand words a pop, plus a handful of graphics. A lot of the time, my clumsy attempts to sell books either got lost amid more interesting elements or felt like an awkward intrusion. I haven’t been happy with that balance for a while, so I did something about it. A few weeks ago, I decided to pull back on the overt marketing in my weekly emails and embrace