Welcome
a brief guide to enjoying this newsletter
Hey readers old and new, welcome to my newsletter. If you read along on the web, then you can simply log in to Substack and follow along at your own pace. If you would like to follow the blog on RSS (and if so you’re my kind of person), any modern RSS reader will be able to subscribe simply by using the home URL, freddiedeboer.substack.com.
If you are an email subscriber, I want to take a moment and let you know about the sections system so that you can manage your email effectively. If you’re unaware, Substack allows for different sections of a newsletter, so that people can tailor their reading preferences. You can see up top on the homepage that there’s the main newsletter and three additional sections:
The Weekly Digests are where I wrap up the week. Every(ish) Saturday afternoon(ish) I post a digest that summarizes what happened in the newsletter that week, and I provide song, book, and newsletter recommendations, along with some random thoughts and ephemera. The Red, the Brown, the Green is a novel that I am serializing here. The Book Club section is where we read and discuss books together according to a shared schedule. Each week I’ll have a post up where I offer some thoughts and pose some discussion questions. People following along can engage in (spoiler-free) discussions of that week’s reading in the comments. The digests and serialized novel are and will always be free for anyone, while the book clubs will always be subscriber-only. All of these sections are opt-in; you will only receive emails if you choose to. Otherwise, you can follow along simply by checking in on the website.
Here’s how to manage your subscriptions. If you log in to Substack, you should see your account and profile icon in the upper right-hand corner. Click that and you’ll see “Account Settings” in the dropdown. Click there and you’ll see this part of your settings, which lists your subscribed newsletters. (This image is from a dummy account I use to make sure everything is looking the way that it should.)
If you click “Edit” next to my newsletter name, you’ll see this menu:
Here you can decide which emails you’d like to receive.
I write and publish a lot, which many people like but which overwhelms some with emails. The weekly digests are an effort to make things a little easier for those who would prefer fewer emails. Because each weekly digest contains a list of every post with a brief synopsis, some readers choose to disable the main newsletter emails and only receive the digests; they can then browse what I’ve written in the prior week from the summaries and decide which posts they’re interested in. Alternatively, some readers want to receive the regular emails but aren’t interested in the digests and disable those.
I have not failed to have a free post for everyone on Monday morning since starting in March, and usually have one on Tuesdays as well. I try to have book club posts up on Wednesday mornings, but bear in mind that the book clubs are seasonal and I take breaks in between books. Every Friday I have a subscriber-only post, as well as two additional subscriber-only posts each month. On Saturday afternoons I post the digests.
Just a quick note about subscriber-only posts. I know that it’s common for many established writers to have newsletters where almost all of the posts subscriber-only. I certainly don’t begrudge them that choice. However, this newsletter will always be mostly free, with something like three free main posts for every subscriber-only post. This is primarily due to a simple commitment to being accessible, but it is also a market calculation, I guess you would say. It has never been proven to my satisfaction that the increase in subscriptions from people who are already interested and need to get through the paywall outweighs the marketing value of having most work available to whoever wants to read it. I could be wrong about that. But a lot of my readers are upfront about the fact that they primarily subscribe to support the project, rather than to access subscriber-only content as such. There are some who have unsubscribed and told me that it’s because they feel that not enough of the content is paywalled. I understand their perspective but will continue to mostly post stuff for free. I do think it’s worth saying that just my subscriber-only content outpaces that of many other newsletters in word count. In addition to more subscriber-only posts and the book clubs, there are a few other inducements to subscribe. Commenting privileges are always restricted to subscribers, which also makes the comments a much nicer space that I barely have to moderate. I also run a monthly post where I share subscriber writing, which has proven to be a hit.
Anyway - I hope you enjoy. Feel free to share what you like or don’t about how this newsletter works by commenting, if you’re a subscriber, or by replying to this email.
Just want to say that I think you're doing a good job at turning this into a service that's more than just 'paying to see some dude's blog posts' and I think if you keep fostering a community w/ stuff like the book club it will be good for keeping subscriptions locked in and/or moving this project somewhere else if substack collapses or whatever.
I gathered after a few months that this would be a Substack without a lot of pay content but stuck around as a subscriber anyway to "support the project." Did not realize comments were subscriber only, and that is almost worth it alone. This is a very high quality comments section. Almost a throwback to the earlier days of the internet.
I don't fully understand the "I get too many emails from Freddie" thing but I also forget that I rules and filters setup in my email boxes. So, as a PSA, if you're annoyed Freddie (or anyone) is clogging up your inbox, simply:
In Gmail, create a filter that any email from (whatever account these come from) Skips Inbox and goes to folder named "Freddie deBoer" or "Substacks." You can do the same in Outlook merely by clicking "Rules" on the navigation ribbon while you have the email open. Then your Substack emails will not end up in your inbox but will sit in a folder for you to access at your leisure.
If you really want to get weird and wild, in Gmail do the same thing but for any email that has the word "unsubscribe" in the body. You've essentially created something between your Inbox and your Spam folder. It will occasionally grab something that's not automated, but for the most part will save your inbox down to only things you want to see.