The companies that run all the platforms tell you that you must publish often, and regularly.
Otherwise everyone will forget who you are, they say.
Well, they may be right.
[ Hello, by the way. I’m John-Paul Flintoff. Remember me? I write and make pictures and give talks but you may have forgotten. ]
One writer who has been a consistent source of inspiration to me is Craig Mod.
He’s published books with big corporate publishers behind him but he created the momentum for that to happen by publishing himself, in book format but also in newsletters, long before anybody had heard of Substack.
One thing I like is the way he gives his newsletters different names. I mean, duh! Of course. It’s like when I used to write for (say) The New Statesman and then The Financial Times. It assumes a different reader, interested in different (if perhaps overlapping) subjects and approaches.
Anyway. One of Mod’s newsletters, Roden, is published monthly. He’s published it for years and years.
Curious to establish just how (ir)regular it is, I looked at the dates of all the issues in my inbox and noticed that he publishes delightfully inconsistently.
Yes, it’s virtually once a month. But sometimes he publishes at the beginning of the month, sometimes in the middle, and less often towards the end of the month. He doesn’t seem to have a favourite day of the week.
Discovering this gave me a great sense of relief.
For what it’s worth, I created a downloadable PDF of his publishing schedule based on some (not all) of the emails in my inbox:
Craig Mod’s Roden.