My previous post described a struggle to send emails to subscribers because I hate to think I’ve swallowed wholesale the marketing view of what “personal” writing means.
But I need to clarify: I’m not rejecting marketing altogether. I can’t, because I sell things.
I have a shop!
Portraits, books, courses, memberships, occasionally artworks. I run events. If nobody knows it exists, it doesn’t happen. So what kind of marketing is OK? I thought it might be useful to put something down here, for accountability and transparency.
First of all: would a sentence get past a good editor without being struck out as hyped, coy, manufactured, or fake-personal?
More specifically…
I’m going to allow myself:
- Announcing that Contain Multitudes opens at Burgh House on such-and-such a date. Describing what someone will see.
- Explaining what a portrait commission is: how long it takes, what it costs, what the process feels like from the sitter’s side.
- A well-written page about A Modest Book About How To Make An Adequate Speech that says what’s in it and who might want to read it.
- Telling the newsletter I have a new post up, or a course opening, or an event coming.
- Segmenting a list because a life-drawing workshop is relevant to some subscribers and not others. That’s saving people from mail they didn’t want, not manipulating them.
But not this:
- “Hi [FIRST_NAME], I noticed you bought A Speccy Man Has A Breakdown…” when it was a database that noticed, not me.
- Scarcity theatre. “Only three spots left!” when there aren’t. “Closing tomorrow!” when it isn’t.
- Withholding key information – price, dates, what the thing actually is – in order to trigger a “reply for details” that pulls the reader into a sales conversation.
- Free-video-one, free-video-two, free-video-three, now-buy-my-course sequences. The exact Sophist pattern I’ve written about before.
- Testimonials that have been polished until they no longer sound like the person who gave them.
- Guilt, urgency, FOMO. Anything that works by pressure rather than by clarity.
I don’t imagine this list is complete, or that I’ll always know in the moment. If you see something that seems off, jp at this domain name and tell me.