State of the Newsletter #9

And a heads up for December's holiday schedule

Hello, my duckies,

November has whooshed by to the accompaniment of snowflakes. The streetlights have come on earlier, and I’ve confided in the power of lo-fi hip-hop music and homemade beetroot-lentil soup to keep me typing.

Photo by Adrian Curiel on Unsplash

Substack updates

Over 95% of y’all read ‘What’s Curation?’ in your inbox and don’t use the Substack app. Adding another app is asking the reader to invest in another ecosystem. People check email; they don’t necessarily want to open another app to read newsletter content.

Substack has a new “Chat” feature wherein only people with the app can chat with me and other readers—akin to a live social media thread. But I feel this is selective and undemocratic. Also, I don’t want to be “on” all the time, and I’m sure you’re not excitedly thinking about What’s Curation? at 10.47 PM on a Thursday night wherever you are. So, that feature is turned off. If you want to reach out, just reply to any email you get from me.

Substack also introduced a feature to periodically send emails to highly engaged readers with discounts on annual subscriptions. I’ve disabled this as well.

The reason? Because you’re all adults and you know where that paid subscription button is.

With the global financial situation the way it is, the last thing anyone wants is an unsolicited email from the platform offering an X% discount when you’re worried about keeping the lights on. The end of the year is especially rough. But keep an eye out for discounts I’ll be publicly posting and take advantage of them if you can.

Monthly roundups

In November 2022, we had an interview with Arunabh and guest posts from Luigi and Amie. Arunabh regaled us with his story of coming to Toronto. Luigi introduced us to music from his homeland of New Zealand, and Amie unpacked memories of her father to jazz music. You can read all our interviews and guest posts at any time! A good bit of early 2023 will be spent trying to get invited to other peeps’ newsletters!

We also started introducing sponsorship links on select emails. Clicking those through to signup or purchase will indirectly support ‘What’s Curation?’ for that calendar month.

And as always, you should share this lovely newsletter with your friends and arch-nemeses and recommend it on Substack to your readers because that’s one way to grow our base and take over the newsletter world.

Personal updates

At Publicis Toronto.

I attended a mixer at Publicis Groupe in downtown Toronto hosted by Ad Club Toronto. I met several advertising students and shared my tips (and received theirs!) for breaking into the ad biz as a copywriter.

This newsletter was a great icebreaker and unique brand showcase: continued, disciplined writing, growing an audience, and engaging with them.

I also caught up with one of my readers, Yuval, an ethical email marketer in Berlin. Rather, she opened up her calendar to her newsletter readers and I just had to say hi!

Having a lovely chat with Yuval about email marketing!

December’s schedule

Oh, Christmas is just around the corner!

I am mindful that readers will want to take time off and enjoy it with their family and friends. Gives me an excuse to sneak off for two weeks and recharge my writing batteries, haha! I’ll still be reading; just not writing 😉

So, the last post on ‘What’s Curation?’ for 2022 will be on Monday 19 December. That post will be an open mic discussion thread and I invite all of you—yes, even the shy ones— to share your experiences of reading this newsletter, what you want to read in 2023, and so forth. We’ll resume transmission on 3 Jan 2023!

Thanks to all the usual culprits for being here, and I encourage new culprits to say hello!

And that’s month 9.

Nikhil. 💖

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