For at least two decades, I have studied college teaching and learning. My academic degrees are in literature and philosophy, but the trajectory of my career brought me into faculty-development roles on three campuses. I stayed engaged with my original fields in the classroom, but most of my professional reading and research — and especially my writing — has tilted heavily toward pedagogical theory and practice.
Two years ago I had a profound medical crisis that inspired me to think hard about how to spend my remaining years on the planet. One of my conclusions: I wanted to re-engage with the kind of literary and philosophical work that drew me into academic life. I began rereading long-neglected works that I had first encountered as an undergraduate. I formed a philosophy reading group with some friends.
I do my best thinking when I am writing, so I soon began yearning for an opportunity to write about these works. Spurred by a random-shelf pull, I was rereading W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk and found myself excitedly scrawling notes in the margins about his century-old educational insights that seemed relevant to the challenges we face in higher education today. In the grip of my usual graphomania, l began to write, without a clear sense of where it might lead. I had an idea and a draft, but no clear outlet for publication — and just like that, an academic newsletter was born.
Last month, in “Should You Start a Newsletter?,” I wrote about how some academics — eager to connect, share ideas, and debate — had turned to creating their own newsletters on Substack, Medium, and other formats. I focused on three scholars who use their newsletters to stay on top of research, develop their writing skills, and explore ideas. I’m all in with those goals. In the past, what kept me from creating a newsletter was the fact that I didn’t see any focus area that would be different from what I already write about in more formal publishing outlets. Life crisis, a return to my intellectual roots, and W.E.B. Du Bois opened a pathway.
Intrigued by the thought of starting your own newsletter? In what follows, I hope to guide you on how to get started by detailing the decisions I had to make as I went from a vague idea to my first posts on Substack. Probably the most important takeaway for me was that a weekly newsletter required much more of a time commitment than I’d expected. Certainly you can scribble down your immediate thoughts in an hour and send them out — but that approach might translate into a tiny subscription list. If you want readers, you have to put in the time and effort to make your newsletter worth receiving.
Choosing a subject, title, and description. Your rationale for wanting to do this might be straightforward: You have expertise in a specialized area and you wish to reach readers who don’t read academic journals in your field. In a newsletter, you can take a more informal approach to sharing your research, just as you might in the classroom. You can document your thinking-in-process, share early findings, or promote your work in pursuit of new opportunities to publish or speak.
Those are all worthwhile endeavors, but maybe what you really need is a break from your field. A newsletter can be a space where you dabble, expand, explore. I don’t know of any publisher advertising for a public intellectual to intertwine higher-ed problems with literary and philosophical texts. But Substack has graciously designated a tiny corner of the internet for me to play intellectual matchmaker to my heart’s content. You can stray even further beyond your specific expertise, into developing interests, side projects, or even nonacademic passions.
Selecting a title and a description can help focus your thinking. I spent several brainstorming sessions deciding upon the right title for my Substack. I have always believed in the value of general-education courses in a liberal-arts curriculum, which can expose students to new disciplines or methods of thinking. I threw around lots of clever phrases to capture the notion that I would be offering a print version of such an experience, and then realized I was overthinking it, and decided to call it what it is: A General Education.
In decades of professional writing, I’ve learned that writers enjoy clever phrases, word play, and quotes in their titles, while editors prefer titles that are more explanatory and direct. The latter lends itself better to search engines’ guiding readers to relevant authors. When you do see a clever title on a piece of nonfiction writing, it usually has been balanced by an explanatory subtitle. That’s where editors and publishers like to cram in all of the keywords that will capture the electronic eyes of Google and its ilk.
In the Substack universe, when I see a newsletter recommended to me, it shows me a title, an author, and a phrase or sentence describing the content. Don’t neglect that last piece, which serves the same function as a subtitle. It can help a potential subscriber make a quick decision about whether to sign up, or investigate further. Your newsletter’s description can be quick, as in Jillian Hess’s Noted: “Tips from the world’s best note takers.” Or it can be more descriptive, as in Emily Pitts Donahoe’s Unmaking the Grade: “A blog and reflective journal chronicling one educator’s experiences with ungrading and other progressive teaching practices.”
How much should you write? Based on the newsletters to which I subscribe, the typical length of a post runs between 500 and 1,500 words. That makes sense to me, especially because essays in higher-education publications like The Chronicle typically top out at around 1,500 to 1,750 words (with the exception of in-depth reports or Review essays). My teaching columns here run to the top of that range.
But limiting my columns to that length always challenges me, and requires the help of a hard-working editor. I’d hoped to keep my first Substack post under 1,500 words but failed that challenge. I spent several editing sessions hacking the post down to 1,900 words — still far too long. While that length afforded me the space to articulate everything I had to say, it probably resulted in some potential readers skimming or skipping it altogether.
Academic writers have to strike a delicate balance here. We favor complexity, and we know a lot of stuff. But the reading context matters. Most of us bring one kind of mind-set to reading a disciplinary journal article or book chapter. I will often save such reading for the late afternoon or evening, with less distractions pressing on me. But I usually read newsletter posts in the interstices of my day — before settling in for the morning, at lunch, or when an email link arrives just when I need a break. In those moments I want 1,000 words or less, not 3,000.
My advice: If a topic demands more than 1,500 words, slap the label “Part 1” on the title and space it out over two or three newsletters.
Do you need to add images? I prefer to get my ideas from words, but apparently some of you people like visuals, too: photographs, graphics, illustrations. I do recognize the value of images in nonfiction writing, especially when essays or books are on the long side. When you are churning through a series of long explanatory paragraphs, an image can offer your eyes and brain a respite. You catch your cognitive breath before plunging back into the words.
Give the people what they want — and need. Use one or two images in each newsletter. Selecting those images took me much longer than I expected, largely because I wanted to ensure that I was not violating any copyright laws in the process. After doing a little bit of reading on copyright rules, I was so flummoxed that I reached out to my friend Tom Tobin, an inexhaustible font of good will, good writing, and good ideas for higher education — including his ninja-based comic book on copyright issues.
As he pointed out, while you can certainly just cut and paste images from the internet into your posts, and many writers do indeed take that route, you shouldn’t. Although it’s unlikely, you could get sued for copyright violation. But the larger issue is that even if your fellow creators share their work freely, they deserve credit for their work. To stay on the right side of the law, you can create your own images, purchase some from commercial repositories like iStock, or find licensed alternatives on places like Creative Commons.
Tom sent me links to several websites where writers can search for images, including ones that have collections with a specific focus such as “Disabled and Here” or one that allows you to “add a little Canada” to your work. I have found Pexels the most useful of his recommended sites; it has a vast collection of royalty-free images. Note that while you do not have to credit the individual photographers from Pexels images, you still should. Stick the photographer’s name in the caption.
Sending, promoting, responding. Once your newsletter is assembled, Substack will email it to your subscribers. Immediately after I had completed this step, I was reminded yet again of the value of a good editor. My first emailed post contained a few typos and missing words; I didn’t notice them until I reread it a day later. I corrected them on the web version of the essay, but it was too late for the emails. If you can enlist the help of a fellow writer, or even a spouse or friend, ask them to proofread your posts before you send them.
Naturally you will want people to read your posts, which means you have to promote it on your social-media accounts and websites, and mention it in the bios you have online. More substantively, cultivate relationships with readers by encouraging comments on the web version of your piece and responding to them. While a Substack newsletter can provide space for deep thinking, it shares some qualities with social media, in that you are not only sharing content but gathering a community around you. Both responding to readers and posting comments on the essays of writers whose work you admire will establish that community.
Just posting and responding to readers might prove enough for an author with an existing readership. I posted links to my social-media accounts, and picked up a few hundred followers. But Substack offers a robust set of statistical tools to analyze the reach of your account, and I learned from that information that more than 50 percent of my subscribers were not coming from places like LinkedIn but from recommendations made by other Substack authors. When you make your account, the setup process will prompt you to recommend other accounts to your followers. After I took this step, it apparently had a welcome scratch-my-back effect: Once I recommended other accounts, some of them began recommending mine.
My community has plenty of space to grow; I haven’t been as assiduous as I should have been about targeting new subscribers or engaging with other readers and writers. But I was energized by the work of conceiving a new intellectual project, and I had lept the highest barrier: getting started. I made mistakes here and there throughout the process, but that’s perhaps the most appealing quality of an academic newsletter. It has turned me into a learner again, and learning entails making mistakes along the way.
Or so I’ve read. Maybe I can find a good poet or philosopher to help me think a little further about that. …
