If you’re new here, welcome! On a typical week, I’ll send you short fictions or philosophies on Mondays, and a new chapter from my serialized novel on Fridays. Wednesdays are a wild card.
Today, it’s a buffet.
In this post…
None of these seem to deserve their own separate posts, so I’ve decided to batch them all together and slap a table of contents at the top. Feel free to skip over anything that doesn’t interest you.
Hazards of a Bad Title - In which I retrospect Monday’s post
The Great Substack Story Challenge - A post-mortem
Coming Soon! - My collaboration with a fellow Substack writer
Fiction v Nonfiction - What’s next?
Growth Update - Remember the Status Report? Here’s a quick follow up
Alright alright alright!
Hazards of a Bad Title
The horrible thing is that I tried so hard. I wanted to capture the essence of the post as accurately and succinctly as possible, and unfortunately, I’m pretty sure I succeeded.
This was my least-opened email in months:
Now that I’m looking at it in the cold light of a rainy Wednesday, the utter dullness of that title is obvious. I don’t blame anyone for ignoring it.
The reason I’m bothering to bring this up at all is that the people who did open and read it seemed to really love it. The ratio of opens to engagements (likes, comments, shares, etc) was WAY higher than normal.
I’m taking this lesson to heart. From now on, all clickbait all the time.
The Great Substack Story POST-MORTEM
Back in November, I volunteered to run The Great Substack Story Challenge - Part 2. We kicked it off at the end of January, and then for ten straight weeks (that’s a lot of weeks!) we posted a new chapter across all the authors’ respective Substacks.
Last week, the final chapter dropped. This week, I wrote a post-mortem.
Will I be doing this again? Probably not anytime soon. But also probably not never! I hope you’ll give this beast a skim, and send the authors of your favorite chapters some love.
Coming Soon!
By far the coolest upside of working on that project was cavorting with other terrific writers.
And one of the coolest and most terrific of those writers is
, who writes the conspicuously delightful .So I says to Meg, I says, “Maybe you and me, we do some kinda collaboration?”
And she says, “Hell yeah, what do we call it?”
And I says, “Well shoot, I hadn’t even thought of giving it a name. Do you have any ideas? I’m real bad at titling.”
And right outta the gate she says, “How about The Dispatch Stock Exchange.”1
Here’s what we decided to do —
Each of us wrote a first draft of a short story, and then we swapped them to rewrite. So, I took Meg’s story and rewrote it to make it my own, and she did the same with mine.
This turned out to be much more difficult, and also much more awesome than either of us anticipated.
Next week, we’ll be posting and cross-posting those stories to our respective audiences. If you’re wondering how excited to get the answer is very.
Fiction v Nonfiction
I have some exciting plans for this project.
For those of you who have joined Dispatches in the past few months, here are the original three articles I wrote to kick it off:
Fiction v Nonfiction - Can great fiction do more for your personal development than all those self-help books?
Atomic Habits v Dune - Local versus global impact, instruction versus incantation, information versus magic
Everything Is (Not) Entertainment - How to avoid drowning in the bottomless soup of distraction
Expect to see more soon.
Growth Update
A little over a month ago, I sent The First Official Dispatches Status Report to 164 people. Today, the total number of subscribers is 240.
Huge, sloppy thanks to anyone who has helped this Substack grow.
Speaking of which, I’d like to try an experiment.
I’ve been hustling on my end to try to get the word out, but I’m not much of a marketer or growth hacker. It occurs to me, though, that some of you might be.
If you’re the sort of person who has smart and/or out-of-box marketing ideas, I want your help. Leave a comment, or email me directly with your suggestion2, and I'll not only try it out, I'll write about it, and credit you if it works.
I’m not expecting to get a flood of interest, here, but I’m betting that a few of you are really into this kind of thing, and would love to get involved. If so, hit me up.
I haven’t told her this yet, but from now on I’m going to have Meg handle all of my titles forever.
If you didn’t know it, replies to any email that hits your inbox from the Dispatches goes directly to me. I respond to all of them.
Congrats on the newsletter growth! And I’m very excited to read your and Meg’s collaboration draftandrewrite stories! What a cool idea.
If it's alright with you, I'll be borrowing your DSE origin story for my post this weekend. With a link back here, of course.
I can't believe how much growth you've seen in a month! I swear to Substack I'm dead in the water over here by comparison. Here's hoping your generous assessment of my coolness brings some of your terrific people over to my story planet. It's delightfully conspicuous! You can't miss it!! 😂
So excited to post and cross-post our stories next week! SQUEEEEEEE!!!!! 😊😊😊