February Call for Subscriber Writing, Reader Q&A, and the Book Review Contest Winners
I beg of you to follow the submission instructions
Hello folks, as I announced yesterday, the 2023 book review contest winners have been chosen and contacted. Congratulations to winner Alicia Kenworthy and runners up Hal Johnson and Ethan Spiegelman! Look for Alicia’s review to run in this newsletter in the next several weeks.
People have been asking me to do a print Q&A thing here for forever, so here you go: I’m soliciting questions for a Q&A here on whatever topic might interest you. I will answer the questions I feel like answering, as many as I can without the post getting excessively long. If you want to ask a question, please do so by replying directly to this email. There is no requirement that you be a paying subscriber for this. I’ll try to get the post out before the end of February.
Also, it’s time for our (now practically-speaking bi-) monthly call for subscriber writing. Let me take a moment to let new people know what this is all about, reiterate what it isn’t, and make a much-needed reminder of the format. Every(ish) month, I present an opportunity for subscribers to share some of their writing with my mailing list of ~50,000 readers. This is a subscriber perk, and it’s also something I really love to do because I’m very passionate about writing and writers and want to help people who are trying to build an audience. I emphasize that this is for sharing subscriber writing, not your podcast, your Twitch stream, or your Instagram. One thing that I have to reiterate here is that this is the opportunity to link to writing that’s already hosted elsewhere; it’s not, as some people assume, an opportunity to actually post your work here. If you’re looking for someplace to host your writing, why not start a free Wordpress or Substack, or use another blogging or newsletter service? Then you can link your work here. I’ve had more than a dozen readers tell me that they meaningfully expanded their audience through this service before.
Here’s what I am now just begging for you to do, if you take advantage of this opportunity: please, please, please, use the following format to submit your work. Please. Every time only about half of submissions are in the proper format. It looks like this:
Bolded Name or Pseudonym, Title of Your Work with Link
Synopsis of your work of one or two (at most!) sentences
So in practice that looks like
Freddie deBoer, How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement
A book about the elite capture that has neutered our progressive social movements
I understand that some people think they’re helping when they do things like this:
Name: Questo the Wizard
Title: “Spells That Make You Horny”
Link: http://questothebesto.org/horny
Synopsis: A grimoire of useful cantrips to get your motor running
But that isn’t helping; it’s taking a 30-second process of copying and pasting the exact format above and turning it into a five minute process of putting down each individual element in the right place and inserting the link and bolding the thing that should be bolded and taking italics off of the things that shouldn’t be italicized…. I implore you, guys, make this easier for me. It’s more backend work than you think. Please see here for more details about these posts and make sure to email me at fredrik.deboer@gmail.com. I search for these submissions using that alternate email address, so you’re significantly increasing the chance I’ll miss yours if you don’t use it! Deadline for this month is Friday, February 9th!
If I messed up previously and promised to include your entry in a later edition, please email to remind me! If you submitted something before the submission period began, submit it again! And if you don’t use the fredrik.deboer@gmail.com address, I have no sympathy if I fail to include you. I look forward to seeing what you come up with. Yes, I do check your email against the emails on the subscriber list, so if you’re emailing from a different one, point me to your subscribed email. Non-subscribers, if you want to take advantage of this forum to share your work, you know what to do.