IN THIS ISSUE
- From the Editor’s Desk: Two years to a breakthrough
- On The Wordling: LOIs that earn thousands of dollars
- News & Views: Why are younger audiences reading old dating guides?
FROM THE EDITOR’S DESK
Hiya writer friends,
I’ve been in an incredible state of career Zen lately. Freelancing has been good. I have three clients who send me regular assignments (a total of 16-20 each month), a few of which are reported stories, but most of which are ghostwritten content pieces for websites and newsletters that take me 2-3 hours each to finish.
Business is good. Having figured out the content piece for The Wordling over the last year, I’ve turned my attention to monetization, and we’re gearing up for a new product launch in September. It’s going to be the culmination of everything I love about online business, and a letting go of everything that doesn’t suit my personality and lifestyle.
And finally, my author career is good. As I mentioned in last week’s newsletter, I’ll be spending most of my energy on growing this business, then growing my audience, and only then putting out more books. I don’t want to launch anything new until I have a substantial audience, and so, until then, I’m simply focusing on the creation side of things. The goal is to write as many books as I can before I jump into publishing next year so that I have an inventory to play with when I’m ready.
Something strange happened yesterday. I’d been working on a new novel and I was tired, so I decided to have a nap in the middle of the day. When I woke up, my brain was on fire. I rushed to the computer and over the next hour, a detailed outline presented itself for a new book on a subject I’d never thought of before, and well, I guess I’m now also writing a nonfiction book. The creativity gods must have been feeling particularly generous, however, because this morning, I received the idea for a new course.
This wouldn’t have been an exceptional statement at any other point in my career—I’ve launched 22 online courses and published 9 books, after all—but I’ve had a few setbacks over the last few years which all but dried up my creativity. I haven’t been excited about a new book or course idea in a long time. Two years, to be precise.
I guess it shows how Zen I’ve become in that while I felt frustrated that I couldn’t get excited about anything, and I worried about the impact this would have on my creative life, I did trust that the fog would eventually lift. In the meantime, I have dutifully kept my head down and shown up to the page regardless. I have written approximately 185,000 words so far this year, including on new projects that I didn’t feel particularly excited about. I’ve been writing, no matter how I feel about the day, my life, or the project, because that is what I do. I’m a writer. I write. I’ve trained myself, especially in this last year, to show up for the work. It’s always better when I feel aligned, in flow, and incredibly excited about what I’m creating, but I felt it was even more important that I show up when I wasn’t. I knew it was the only way I would get my mojo back.
Yesterday, I did. I felt as though I fell asleep one person, released some block or belief in my dreams, and then woke up massively changed. I still don’t know what shifted exactly, but I felt more creatively certain than I have in years.
Working on a new book and creating a new course feels like just the way to honor that.
Enjoy the issue!
Natasha Khullar Relph
Editor, The Wordling
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ON THE WORDLING
How to Write a Letter of Introduction for Landing Content Marketing Clients
Looking to break into the lucrative world of content marketing writing? A Letter of Introduction is the key.
With the exception of websites that allow you to put up your portfolio and let clients find you, most of the time you’ll need to be proactive about contacting potential clients and finding work. You do this by sending a Letter of Introduction—a brief email introducing yourself, mentioning your clips and credits, and outlining why you’d be a great fit to do content marketing for this business or agency.
A strong Letter of Introduction can be the difference between getting thousands of dollars’ worth of work within a week and never hearing back from anyone.
NEWS & VIEWS:
Why are dating books from the 90s hitting bestseller lists?
What makes BookTok unpredictable and completely fascinating is there’s no saying what it will drag up and send to the top of the pile. One day it could be Hot Girl Summer, another Fantasy Frenzy. There’s been the Historical Hype, the Rom-Com Riot, and Lit Fiction Love.
More recently, it’s been dating advice. From the 90s.
What’s the deal?
Why Men Love Bitches. He’s Just Not That Into You. Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man. Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. Calling in the One.
These are all books from the 90s and early 00s that are currently proving popular with younger audiences, thanks to viral videos on TikTok. “This might come as a surprise, given that these books are now widely considered to contain outdated and pseudoscientific advice,” writes Daily Schofield for i-D. “Typically, they’ll implore women to hold back on communicating their feelings too early on, to not be too clingy, or to stop ‘chasing’, in order to attract the opposite sex. Most will make reductive and often misogynistic claims, all while pretty much ignoring the existence of LGBTQ+ people.”
Why should you care?
Regardless of how you feel about these books in particular, or self-help books in general (and the i-D article is thoroughly dismissive of the entire genre), there are a few key takeaways I think are incredibly important for authors to note:
1. TikTok is still independent: While there are vast efforts being made by both the publishing industry and TikTok itself to profit from its book recommendation engine, BookTok remains resistant to manipulation. It’s not marketing armies that are causing old books to get back onto bestseller lists, it’s viral videos. Often, just one. Which evens the playing field massively for authors with fewer resources.
2. Your backlist can make you money: In Issue #46 of The Wordling, I talked about how TikTok had been a surprise driver for new and older books and authors were seeing backlist books suddenly rise to dominance. This is excellent news and a reason to feel incredibly optimistic, especially if you’re a career author and even more so if you’re prolific. If you have a large backlist, the chance success of one can amp up sales of all your titles pretty much overnight.
3. Old fashions become new trends: What’s really exciting about decades-old titles finding their way on to current bestseller lists is that the book publishing industry as a whole is being forced out of the launch-and-drop model, which involved promoting a mid-list author for the first month of their book’s life and then offering zero support thereafter. If your book didn’t perform particularly well during launch because it was ahead of its time, didn’t find the right audience, or didn’t have enough marketing resources to back it, there is no reason anymore to consider it a loss and move on.
ALSO SEE
The world’s oldest national newspaper, Austria’s Wiener Zeitung, is shutting down its print edition and going exclusively online after 320 years. Over in the US, Mississippi has a new law on the books prohibiting anyone under the age of 18 from accessing digital materials through public and school libraries without explicit parental/guardian permission. And here in the UK, The Times has been publishing inaccurate financial data for several years.
Finally, it turns out that the “very online” Gen Z and millennials are most vulnerable to fake news, at least in the US.
GLOBAL REPORT
AUSTRALIA: “A new book details how a network of interlocking business arrangements allowed a few men to consolidate control of a huge share of Australia’s media—power that extends to today.”
NIGERIA: “Once upon a time, Nigeria paraded the best set of authors and publishers in Africa. At that time, reading was an innate affection for both young and old. This reading culture reflected so much on the quality of leadership and civil discipline that it brought pride to Nigerians anywhere in the world! Now, however, the rich literacy history the country was famous for is gradually being eroded. A new type of reading problem is sweeping our country. It is called Aliteracy.”
COLOMBIA: “Since 2020, Lina Álvarez, founding member and director of ECM, has collaborated with Voces to shed light on the harsh realities in [Nuevo Colombi]. The more established outlet provides training and professional support for the community reporters who, in turn, help ECM with access.”
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
“When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.”
– George Orwell
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