Peter M. Ball

While the traditional side of the publishing industry is bracing itself for disruptions in the supply chain, the conversation over on the indie publishing side is all about how to prepare for the coming email marketing apocalypse.

For those who don’t pay attention to such things, the low-down goes something like this: Apple has been doubling down on email privacy with updates for a while now, and their most recent update to iO15 adds a feature dubbed “Mail Privacy Protection.” Once activated, this feature disrupts a bunch of tools that email marketing relies on: the ability to track open rates and clicks, to see who’s engaging; details about what country the reader is in; triggers that would send you a follow-up email if you showed an interest in a particular thing.

There’s a pretty good round-up over here if you want to get into the technical stuff, but all you really need to know is this: a foundational marketing tool for many indie publishers is about to change in a big way, and a bunch of common tactics are going to get trickier to implement.

The email marketing industry has also encouraged to focus on different metrics of success from this point, because open rates are going to mean nothing. There’s lots of “focus on ‘read more’ links instead of including all your content in the email” type discussions, which means I’m dreading what the next few months of newsletters could end up becoming.

Some people are going to do that well, but I suspect lots of writers (who frequently pick up tactics and apply them divorced from context) are going to make some horrible newsletters as a result. 

A brief lesson from the days of RSS and blogging: Setting your feed to show a quick blurb and Read More can be the kiss of death, because your readers have already decided where they’d like to engage with you and communicated that preference. If I put your blog on my RSS reader, it’s because I want it to appear there when I review the new posts. If I sign up for your newsletter, I want the convenience of your content showing up in my inbox, where I can easily archive it (if useful) or discard it (if not).

Read more works best as a signpost for bonus information, not the core content people signed up for, and I’ve not followed countless writers whose blogs were set-up with an eye towards getting readers onto their sites to boost site metrics instead of getting people to read their work.  

Getting people to read your stuff is always the core strategy for content marketing, and disrupting that strategic goal simply so you can cleave to a familiar tactic is very much a case of missing the forest for the trees.

I’ve got a long history of advising writers to clarify their goals and vision around writing, and a recurring question is often how? It’s too big a question to tackle in blog posts, but something that occasionally gets some clarity during the longer, face-to-face (or email-to-email) conversations that take place with friends.

One insight is this: envisioning a career is a two-step process.

The first step is envisioning the kind of career you’d like to have—how much you want to write, what kind of work you want to do, what kind of readership you’d like to develop. Looking to benchmarks—writers whose career (not necessarily work) like to emulate in terms of approach and schedule—then doing research to figure out whether their current approach to work represents the way they built their profile up in the early days.

No writer comes out of nowhere, and overnight successes are often the product of decades-long effort and build.

The second step is figuring out where you’re willing to compromise and the circumstances in which you’ll do so. If your principal goal is “doing good work,” how far are you willing to compromise that to make working at writing full time happen? If your heart is set on working in a particular genre, are you willing to switch genres—or go to non-fiction—in order to achieve other parts of your goal. If you’ve set yourself the goal of writing one book a year, in order to really give it your focus, are you willing to do two or three if publishers really want you to push the pace? Are you content to write to a small audience, or do you crave recognition and large crowds?

Are the things you were unwilling to sacrifice as a single author the same when you have a working partner, or a family who needs your support? What happens to your vision of what productive means as a writer if you get sick, or develop a chronic illness? Do you want to build your career fast, or would you prefer to take your time?

We all make bad comprises over the course of our careers and only learn we’ve crossed a line in retrospect. Moments when we look up from the long, hard slog of a project and wonder, “what the hell was I thinking? This is making me miserable!”

Bad compromise is inevitable. (And doing work that makes them miserable is a boundary plenty of writers will compromise on if the trade-off gains them something else they desire; I use it because it’s frequently the area I don’t want to compromise on). 

But thinking about your boundaries in advance—the permeable goals that will shift and mutate because of circumstances—helps you cut back on the mistakes, and gives you a clearer vision of what each opportunity represents and what it costs you to say yes.