This week’s episode of Common Shapes is about the fact (yes, it’s a fact) that your art is of service, no matter what you create.
“The world needs art. The world needs art on walls, on the backs of couches, in our living rooms, in our kitchens, in our phone screens, on our computers, in museums, in art galleries, at the farmers market, in libraries. The world needs art. And when we see art or feel art or hear art or use any one of our senses to experience art, we are better. ”
I also share my four containers for connecting with the why behind your work. And I offer many, many ideas for how to market your art in creative, fun, meaningful ways.
Listen in to learn—
🧩 Why all art is of service
🧩 How to figure out who your art is for
🧩 My favorite creative marketing practices
🧩 Practices for visioning our work in the world
🧩 A spell for hitting send
After you listen, go get my free Creative Ideation Portal, and join me in sharing your work with the world!
Links
🧹 Get the Creative Ideation Portal
🧹 Sign up for my weekly newsletter, Monday Monday
🧹 Join Flexible Office, my digital co-working space
🧹 Sam Slupski’s I LOVE TO FAIL
🧹 Find all these links & more at marleegrace.space/commonshapes
Want more support for getting your ideas and projects off the ground? Join me for class on Sunday May 28 Live on Zoom (recorded for those who can’t make it live)
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[0:00] Hello and welcome to Common Shapes, a podcast about practices, systems, and rituals for a creative life.
This is episode three, the art of the newsletter.
I'm your host, Marlee Grace, and if there's one thing you should know about me, it is that I am devoted to email newsletters. I'm devoted to physical newsletters. I'm devoted to emails that tell you about art that exists in the world. I am devoted to marketing as a creative practice. That's what Common Shapes is all about. I'm glad that you are here today.
So if you haven't already, there is the Creative Ideation Portal, which is the three-day guide that I made that you can download for free at marleegrace.space slash common shapes.
[1:02] It's free. It takes you through different exercises and visioning practices to dream up all of the projects that you want to make and then put them into the world.
And so on episode one and two, I talked about the first two parts of the Creative Ideation Portal.
And today in an episode four, we're gonna talk about art as service.
And so the best way that I know to be of service is to have an email newsletter.
It is a list. An email list is something that I own.
Unlike my social media followers. It is a list that I can move between platforms So whatever you pick today or whatever you picked after listening to episode 2 or whatever You've been using for the last decade. You can switch that at any time, So if you're already stressed and you're like more I can't do it. I don't know where my newsletter should live It's okay. You can always change it. A core value of common shapes is pivoting. We can always pivot.
[2:14] So I welcome you to this episode. I hope you bring an open mind to the art of the email newsletter. This is for you if you've never had an email newsletter, if you've had one for many years and you want some inspiration on how it could be better or grow or be different.
And it's also for you if you're like a really famous person and think maybe you don't need a newsletter, right?
Maybe you are a famous comedian with a podcast or you are a Grammy nominated musician and sell out stadiums or you are an actor with a television show.
I'm a believer that you should have a channel from your fingertips to your audience that you are in control of.
Not your agent, not your booking manager, not your editor, not your producer, you.
You own your email list. So I want you to be open to the idea of email marketing.
Idea of email marketing, you go, huh.
[3:26] Did I say marketing? Doop-a-ba! It's true. I said marketing.
I'm even going to get more comfortable saying the word here.
Marketing as a creative practice.
Something I promised you we would do here. So we're going to talk about both the marketing side of a newsletter and the creative side of a newsletter and how they intersect with each other.
Welcome to Common Shapes.
[3:57] My own journey with the newsletter started on December 21st of 2012.
And I'm like, it was a dark day.
No, I'm just kidding.
Well, probably. It was winter in Michigan and I had just opened a shop called Half Company.
I had opened it in a vintage camper and there was a neighborhood shop hop.
And I wanted to tell the people. So I made a free MailChimp account that is a common platform that people use for their email newsletter.
It is free to start an account with MailChimp, although it does cost money as your subscribers grow, as your subscribers grow.
So we'll talk a little bit about who's taking a cut, where's money going, et cetera.
But at the time MailChimp was free to start an email newsletter.
I opened up my Gmail and I sent the link to subscribe to approximately 100 something people.
And I said, subscribe to this newsletter if you want to get emails and updates about Have Company, my new project.
I sent that out and I think 40 people opened it.
[5:09] I wanna start by saying there is an importance in the consent of adding emails, right?
We need people's consent to add their emails to our email list.
So if you are totally starting from scratch, ethically, I would suggest that you send an email with the link to subscribe to your newsletter.
We want people to opt in on their own accord. So feel free to open up your Gmail and email everybody that you know and are connected to and say, hey, I'm really excited.
I'm launching this newsletter. I'd love it if you subscribed, right?
And we can talk more later about really fleshing out how we tell people about what we're working on.
So over the first couple of years that I was using MailChimp and had a newsletter, it was mostly for marketing.
It was mostly to say, hey, these are new tinctures that are in the shop.
We just got this cool tarot deck in the shop were having a quilting workshop in the shop.
This is the resident that's here. And I would always send out the new podcast episodes, right?
So when I would interview a resident at Hough Company, I would upload that podcast episode and send it out with the newsletter.
So the newsletter was my way to reach people.
Now, at the time, I was also using Instagram, which is a social networking service that I still use today. and.
[6:37] I was finding even already then that I wasn't getting people to interact with.
[6:44] What I was saying as much. And I was like, oh, I really want people to like take in this podcast interview. Right. And so I will also share that even if you have a big social media following or you're finding that you can find your people there, there may be dips in the algorithm or how people are interacting with your work that it might feel really good to have this more direct channel that's not designed or controlled by an algorithm, right?
You send an email, it goes into people's inboxes.
In 2017, I started to add an essay to my newsletter.
[7:23] So instead of just sending marketing information about what was going on, I started to use it in a more creative way, right?
So this is sort of when I think I started experimenting with marketing as a creative practice. I wasn't just sending emails, selling things to people, and announcing things. I wanted to practice my own skill of writing and thinking about the world through writing and sharing it with people who had opted in to read it.
And so I've been sending out an email newsletter that is also a channel for marketing weekly since 2017. I have absolutely skipped a couple of weeks, but it has mostly come out every Monday for the last six years or so and it was on MailChimp up until 2021 and.
[8:18] What happened was I had started a Patreon, the Planetarium portal, which I'm sure some of you listening were a part of, thank you for being there.
And I had the Patreon and my free newsletter. And so this is where I want you to start thinking about your business ecosystem, because what I'm about to say about my own move to Substack very well might not be correct for you.
And we're gonna talk about the different ways that the newsletters can exist. So I had a Patreon where I was interviewing artists and writing every other Monday and I was also writing my newsletter every Monday and then adding other things in the Patreon and it just felt to me like I was, I had a few too many pots on the stove of my business this ecosystem, right?
So I usually like to think about, I have digital coworking, I have online classes, right?
I have online classes about creative practice, I have online classes about quilting, I have my newsletter, I have writing books, right?
I have sort of these different pieces of the puzzle.
[9:31] And Patreon and my newsletter were just a little too similar for me to differentiate.
And so I had seen, actually my friend Faria was the first writer I had seen using Substack.
How to Cure a Ghost is her Substack. You should absolutely subscribe and become a reader.
And I thought, wow, that is such a beautiful place to read writing and look for writers.
I wonder if I could move over there. And so, what I did was I...
[10:07] Exported all of my subscribers from MailChimp and all of my members on Patreon and imported them all onto Substack and then sent them a welcome email from there.
So again, with your email list, you can move it at any time.
So in episode two, I said, start an email list, pick something, right?
Flodesk, MailChimp, MailerLite, Tiny Letter, Substack, whatever it is.
There's also Beehive and Ghost.
Those are two other email service providers that you can send monetized newsletters with.
[10:45] There's also something called Moonclerk. Moonclerk is a checkout that you can embed into your website if you want to monetize your MailChimp newsletter, right?
So there's a lot of different options in the sort of tech world, but what matters is that you own your email list.
So you can move platforms whenever you want, right? Unlike social media, you don't own those people's contact information.
And this is why, again, we want good consent when people are opting in for our list, right?
We're not just adding people's emails that we have, we're really giving them the subscribe form and letting them come to us, right?
Or we are giving them something, whether it's like a PDF or a guide, right?
The Creative Ideation Portal is technically part of my creative marketing system.
When you download that guide, I receive your email, which is automatically added to my email list.
We will talk about that in another episode.
I'm gonna keep going though. So I made the decision to move to Substack, and sort of combine the art of the email marketing system that I had created in MailChimp and the art of the paid subscription model over on Patreon.
[12:07] So when you subscribe to my sub stack, you can either just be a free reader and read every Monday.
It was important to me, like it was one of my values to keep the Monday email free.
That's what I had done for so long. My email newsletter had been free for almost a decade at that point.
And it was just really important to me to keep it that way, and so.
My newsletter is free every Monday. And then the first thing I offered was the yes, yes advice column podcast.
And so Substack does let you host your podcast there.
You can embed audio, photos and video. So there's a lot of different ways that you can be creative with your newsletter in Substack.
Now, Substack does take 10% of all the money that comes in.
If you only want to use it with free subscribers, it is actually free to use.
So if you're bringing in $0, you will give them $0, right?
[13:12] Flodesk, which if you're listening and you're like, I don't want to do sub stack, I don't want to have a newsletter that isn't offering that makes money, that's great.
You absolutely don't have to.
I suggest Flodesk. That is what I use when I want to do a sequence of emails to introduce someone to one of my offerings.
So for instance, when you download the Creative Ideation Portal, you get an email that says, here's day one of the Creative Ideation Portal.
And then it might also say, hey, I'm teaching this class in a couple of weeks, you should also come to that, right?
So I'm inviting people in to my ecosystem and I then have their email to continue communicating with them.
Are we following?
Yes, so that is something that is much easier to do on Flodesk.
So if you're feeling like, I wanna keep my business as is, I wanna teach classes, play concerts, have art shows, whatever it is, be a service provider, a therapist, a chiropractor, whatever your job or work is, or your creative passion or hobby that you just wanna share about, and you're like, I absolutely don't want that to have anything to do with getting paid.
[14:32] I would suggest using Flodesk to send unlimited emails with unlimited subscribers on Flodesk.
It is thirty five dollars a month. And if you want 50 percent off, you can find the link for that in the show notes or at Marlee Grace dot space slash common shapes. Now, I will say again, I mentioned there's there are free options. Mailer Lite is a free option. I don't have have experience using that, but it is a free option, as well as using MailChimp at the beginning.
So if you're like, I have zero subscribers, I don't wanna spend any money on this right now, there are absolutely ways to do this.
For me, Flodesk makes sense because I have over 6,000 subscribers on just that marketing email list, which includes people who have downloaded the Creative Ideation Portal, my past students, members of Flexible Office.
So that price makes sense to me because MailChimp would have already been more expensive.
But again, this is sort of up to you in knowing where are you at in your email newsletter journey.
[15:43] Also, Flodesk just sends really beautiful emails. It's really intuitive and really easy to use.
I found that MailChimp was really unintuitive to me and really hard to use, and tech, it doesn't always make sense to me. It's also part of why I love using Substack and didn't love using Patreon.
The back end of Patreon just didn't make me feel like I was creating beautiful aesthetic things.
Whereas with Substack, I feel like the blank canvas really lets me speak the way I want to speak with my writing and my images and the other media that I want to include.
So those are some of the ways that I've made choices around which email newsletter platforms I am using personally.
So let's talk a little about what the hell you even put in a newsletter.
And then let's talk a little bit about paid versus not paid. So what you put in a newsletter.
[16:48] I'm laughing, what you put in a newsletter is literally anything you want. So I want to give a couple examples. So of newsletters and the amazing things people do with them. So I think about my friend Liz Migliarelli, whose business is called Sister Spinster. She's an amazing herbalist and teacher. And Liz's newsletter is truly so beautiful to me. So let's say Liz is teaching like a nettle magic class, right? Liz loves nettle. I love nettle. I actually just found some nettle in my yard yesterday. So let's say Liz wants to teach about nettle. So in her newsletter, she might include a poem about nettle, a folk tale about nettle tea, right? It's like she's she's gonna weave in all these different things.
So Liz teaches a lot about apple magic.
And so, you know, sort of leading up to the class or in promotion with the class, she might share her favorite things about apples, as well as her own stories about growing up amongst apple orchards, tending to apple orchards, things like that.
So I share that as an example of someone who isn't monetizing their newsletter and isn't necessarily using the newsletter itself.
[18:07] As only a place of creative writing, but is really combining those two practices together of like sharing the parts of her creative practice.
[18:19] That integrate perfectly with teaching herbalism, practicing herbalism.
So I'll link Liz's newsletter in the show notes so that you can take a look.
But to me, that's just a really good example of someone who uses a newsletter to promote their classes and their offerings, as well as uses the container as a creative space to share about what they love and what they're excited about.
[18:46] Another beautiful example of you can literally make a newsletter about anything is my friend and New York Times best-selling author, Samantha Irby, writes the newsletter, Bitches Gotta Eat, with an exclamation point, and every post is called, Who's on Judge Mathis today? And then it's numbered. So we're at number 265, and the subtitle is, An Idiotic Recap of the Greatest Syndicated Courtroom Show of All Time.
So Sam writes these amazingly funny and hilarious books that are essays, and then this newsletter has only one theme to it for the most part, which is recapping these episodes of Judge Mathis, and they are fucking hilarious.
And then when you click on it and open it, which I'm literally doing right now, and you scroll to the bottom, she'll have like a couple hyperlinks of, this is my next event of my book tour and here's my book.
You can pre-order it, right? She has a new book coming out right now.
So the newsletter itself is this sort of wild art practice of summarizing this show.
[20:01] And then at the bottom, she still takes the opportunity to promote her books and reach out to her readers, right?
And so it's fitting in because of how comedic and funny and amazing her books are, But it's not like every newsletter is a different topic or a different vision she's having.
It's like, it's literally yet another recap of Judge Mathis, right?
So I share sort of those two to just show you like this is just another place for you to literally let your freak flag fly.
[20:38] My friend Kevin Warby, who's a musician, he used Substack in a really beautiful way. When he put his last album out, paid subscribers of his Substack got to hear the demos of the album.
So that's, to me, another great example of, you know, it's not a huge part of his income necessarily to have the Substack, right? He's playing shows and selling albums and, you know, has a has a huge career outside of his newsletter. But by doing that newsletter, he gets to reach his listeners in a different way and give them something really special that not everyone else would have access to. Right. So just a few different sort of moving examples of what.
[21:21] To put in a newsletter and who to send it out to. So if you've ever read my newsletter, it's called Monday Monday, it comes out every Monday on Substack. And I use the pretty much the same format every Monday, right? So it starts with a photo, usually one that someone has taken of me or one that I have taken of the world that I see. And then there's an essay that is a creative writing reflection of my week. And then I have a section called paying attention to, which is 10 links of things that I'm consuming, paying attention to literally, and excited about and want to share with my readers.
[22:03] And so that's something that I've been doing for many years before Substack was having this sort of section that's like, look, I really want you to look at these things.
And especially as a queer person and as a white person, both the ways that my identities intersect as the oppressor and the oppressed is I really want to use both my power and marginalized identity to draw people's attention to what my values are, which are dismantling systems of oppression, redistributing wealth and resources, and celebrating all things art that people that I love make. So people that write other newsletters are making podcasts, articles that I read, books that I'm reading.
[22:52] Mutual aid funds to redistribute to, right?
[22:55] And that's the other thing, with my Substack, a portion of all paid subscriptions every month get redistributed to a different organization.
And that's something I started doing when I moved over to Substack, and to me, is just a way to sort of redirect some of my privilege, as well as draw, you know, thousands of readers' attention each month to places that I believe are important and making great change in the world.
So those are just other things that you can think about to start to plug in what do I put in my newsletter.
[23:32] And when we're thinking about going paid or not going paid, I think this is just something that you can sit with.
I think if you want to monetize your writing, going on Substack makes a little more sense.
I don't mean to be the biggest off-the-grid podcast fanboy that ever existed, but Amelia just recorded a new episode that came out that's literally called To Substack or Not to Substack.
And I really think it was a really helpful listen to me to just always be questioning what am I monetizing, why am I monetizing it, and does it make sense, right? So definitely, I think, just sit with, is this an offering that I want to be my job.
[24:17] Right? Even if it's your job only a little bit, it might feel like your job a lot, and you might not be bringing in enough cash for that to feel like a reciprocal relationship. So having a free email newsletter that you don't make any money on is awesome. I did it for many years. Sometimes I still miss that, right? I am committed to clocking in every Monday. I don't necessarily have some of that flexibility around it. Of course, I'm allowed to pivot. I'm allowed to pivot to this comes out every other Monday or I need to take a break for two weeks, right? Whatever it is.
But I do think that an email marketing newsletter that is a little bit less about the offering itself.
[25:06] Does provide a little more freedom, especially if you feel really comfortable where the rest of your income streams are coming from.
So like I mentioned, if you are teaching classes or have a profitable podcast or are getting generous book advances or you are booked and busy with one-on-one clients, or you're playing sold-out concerts, or selling all your paintings at an art show, right?
Maybe you are feeling abundant in your cashflow in other areas of that business ecosystem.
And if you aren't, then maybe you do wanna think about monetizing part of your newsletter, right?
You could make a video once a month.
Now that Substack has video, that's really cool.
I also wanna just pause that like, if morally or.
[25:55] Values-wise, you don't like any of the platforms I'm talking about, whether I ever mention Instagram or Substack or Patreon or MailChimp or whatever it is, Flodesk, insert whatever container you want it to be, right? That's sort of why I say newsletter, email marketing, you know, these terms that sort of like Kleenex is a tissue, but not all tissue is a Kleenex, right? We're We're talking brand names a little bit, but if you have, maybe you have like a Mighty Networks or a membership site and you wanna be thinking about like the monetization of that or the tiers of that, like I hope that this can, you can sort of take what you like and leave the rest and translate some of this into that.
[26:39] So with Substack, or like I said, if you, maybe you wanna do this on Patreon or somewhere else that has a subscription service where people are paying you every month, You can embed videos, or you could do like a little talk.
Like you could literally give your own mini TED Talk that nobody asked you for, that I'm telling you you should do once a month. You can embed audio, right?
It's important to me in terms of accessibility to always be providing transcriptions for those.
But there's all of these different things that you can do that you can choose to put behind the paywall.
So you could have these sort of free emails still, but then have certain parts of your work be behind a paywall.
And one thing that you can do in Substack is you can email all of your subscribers without having it publish to the homepage of your Substack.
So there are options to kind of give a quick announcement, this thing is happening, or things that don't have to necessarily be like the most polished thing ever that goes out to your readers.
[27:50] So, before we end, now that we've talked a little bit about where to start, what to put in it, I want to give you a little bit of a pep talk for sending your first email newsletter.
Or maybe you are someone who already makes a newsletter and you're feeling kind of stuck, or maybe you sure aren't, or maybe you still aren't totally sure if it's right for you, is to trust God and hit send.
And so I say that a little bit tongue-in-cheek, but also I mean it, right?
And if you ever hear me say God, talk about God, write about God, insert good orderly direction or spirit of the universe, clouds, rain, water, whatever it is that you like to think about, something, anything that is greater than you, trust that, even trust yourself, trust the higher power that lives inside of you, and hit send, right?
If I would have waited to hit send in December of 2012 until I felt like I was ready, I probably wouldn't have ever hit send on that newsletter, right?
So as listeners of Common Shapes, we are committed to not waiting to feel ready to hit send.
Whether you are a novice newsletter creator or you have been making newsletters for years and years and years and years. You are also not too late to make a newsletter, right?
[29:18] I really ran up against this storyline when I was making this podcast was like, everybody has a podcast. Why would I have a podcast when everybody has a podcast, right?
The more and more people who do move to Substack, it could be easy to be like, well, everybody has a Substack or everybody has a Patreon or everybody has an email newsletter.
[29:40] We don't talk like that to ourselves here. We hit send anyways. We want more art in the in the world, that is what we want. We want more behind the scenes moments, right?
It's like behind the music on VH1.
That was so cool to watch.
And people want that. People want more from you as an artist.
And in terms of the frequency, you can hit send once a month, you can hit send once every other month.
I hit send once a week, plus one to three more times a month for my paid subscribers, but you don't have to go all in, right?
I had some faith that I could move the numbers of my former Patreon members and my Instagram followers over to Substack and convert that into paid subscribers, and that has grown really steadily.
You can do that. You can chip away at getting those subscribers to be paid subscribers and be really interested in what you're doing, or if the subscription that's paid is not the goal and the goal is to get people into your class, into the seats of your dance shows or your theater performances, send the newsletter.
Just hit send. It doesn't have to be perfect. In fact, I imagine people might see your imperfections and think, oh, me too.
[31:04] Me too, I feel that too. I have typos. I misspell things.
I put words backwards sometimes. You know, whatever it is, Let your anti-perfectionism be an invitation to your readers that it's okay to be clumsy and start anyways.
[31:23] It's okay to be mediocre and still hit send. That's what I want for you. So, in order for all the projects that you dreamed up and started writing about in episode one, you invited your spiritual comedian in episode two. You invited your spiritual comedian in episode two. And now we are preparing for our art to be an act of service, by making it public or by sharing it privately, but we're gonna be thinking about sharing it publicly.
And so to do that, I encourage you as a listener of this podcast to have an email list.
[32:11] Start your list today if you haven't already. And we'll keep digging into this space as the weeks go on of season one. This will not be the last time you will hear me talk about the email newsletter.
When we're talking about art as service in episode four, we'll even dig in a little bit deeper to some of the ways the newsletter itself is of service and it's of service to you, right?
It's serving me every week to dig in to that mirror of the self of like, what's happening in my inner and outer world?
How can I write about and synthesize this for the people? So there's so much, there's so much.
The art of the newsletter is juicy, it is fun, it is exciting, it's a cool place to go.
It's a place that if you think that it's cheesy or whack or just not cool enough, you're wrong.
[33:09] And if you're still feeling like, who am I to make a newsletter? You are the only you there will ever be. And I really hope that you experiment in this space, right? It can be an experiment to try out having a newsletter. If you hate it, you never have to do it again.
But I promise you that it will become a channel to reach the people who will take your classes and show up for your offerings, right?
Whatever shape your offerings make, this, I have found, is the most direct way to bring those people deeper in to your ecosystem. So, many blessings.
I hope that you have so much fun either reworking your newsletter or taking it a little less seriously or inviting people to subscribe.
Whatever it is, I hope that you have many newsletter your email list blessings rain down upon you.
[34:10] Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Common Shapes.
If you haven't already, you can download the Creative Ideation Portal at marleegrace.space slash common shapes.
That's my free three-day email guide where I walk you through visioning your projects and focusing on your art as service. I want to thank everyone who makes this podcast possible.
Thank you to Softer Sounds Studio for editing.
Thank you to Salt Breaker for our music.
And thank you to Lukeza Branfman-Varissimo for our podcast art.
And thank you so much for being a listener. I'd love if you subscribed and shared it with a friend.
Thank you for listening to Common Shapes.
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