Hey friends– 

If you signed up for the Rebuild Your Reading Habit series and haven’t received your first email from it yet, you may need to resubmit the form here: https://nonslopfun.com/rebuild-your-reading-habit 

It turns out, technology is a little hard. Sometimes you say “hey, tech tool, if anyone submits the form on this page, send them these emails” and tech responds with “I hear you, I see you, but also no, if there are any query parameters that I add automatically, it will not work.” 

I think I have fixed that problem, but if you resubmit the form and don’t receive an email with the subject line “I own more books than I'll ever read” within fifteen minutes, let me know. 

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My last newsletter about being terrified of the current literacy crisis did better than I expected. It had some of the best open and click-through rates of any of my newsletter issues, and that’s including the first few issues where my partner and manager were the only subscribers. Thanks for reading, y’all!

Buoyed by the performance of my last foray into sincerity and vulnerability, I’m back on my bullshit again. 

For the last week or so, I’ve been trying to figure out what it looks like to grow this newsletter, and I am utterly riddled with self-conflicting ideas about what I ought to do. What I want to do. 

I started writing Non-Slop Fun because I missed having a semi-public channel for opining about art, culture, and what it means to live a literary life. I enjoy writing it for the sake of writing it. At the same time, I’m also open and honest about the fact that I also want to build a platform so that when I’m ready to pitch my fiction, I have a built-in audience that makes me more marketable to a wider variety of publishers. On top of that, I’m a chronic entrepreneur with aspirations of full-time self-employment. 

Between the desire to be more marketable and be self-employed, there’s a very compelling case for taking a conventional and aggressive approach to growing my platform. I could become a BookTokker. Could record and post videos to YouTube. Could even run ads! I could start taking casually shirtless photos with my books by a pool and post them to Instagram. There are so many options. 

But just when I’ve followed a handful of Bookish Instagram accounts and have started planning out how I could learn from the content they produce, I remind myself that (a) I hate performing for social media and (b) I simply don’t have the time to commit to creating high-quality content. Then, I start getting philosophical with myself about why I write and why I want to have a platform, and the very thought of trying to conduct myself like an influencer feels antithetical to who I am and what I enjoy about engaging with literature in the first place. The cultural need to broadcast one’s interests and mediate our interactions with the world via screens is diametrically opposed to the pursuit of literature as a rich, interpersonal expression of humanity. 

So, I find myself constantly going back to the drawing board. How do I grow in a way that is aligned with my goals? How do I balance authenticity with ambition? How do I engage meaningfully with the cultural zeitgeist without emulating that which I critique? 

Another compounding and confounding variable in this equation is also my curiosity about technology and my understanding of both software and marketing. I use a platform called Beehiiv to send my newsletters, and Beehiiv recently released community functionality as a part of what the platform offers. I’ve tried, in a few different iterations in the past, to prop up book club-style groups online before, and the product release for Beehiiv’s community features made me think “oh hell yeah, I’ve got to do that again!” 

But the same pain points and sense of conflict arise when I consider that option, too. Cultivating community is a big time commitment, and the success of a community fully depends upon how readily you can activate and engage the first dozen members. If nobody activates and buys into the community, it’s an extended exercise in shouting into the void and hoping you find the right audience. On that note, anecdote time: the first online book club I hosted had ten people register, three people show up to the first night, and one of those three left when I asked folks to introduce themselves. By the third and final session, it was a book club featuring one other guy and me, and he hadn’t finished the book. 

Amidst all this back and forth, I find myself asking, what, then? What, then, do I do to both build a platform, deepen relationships with others, and avoid having my engagement with creative communities fully mediated by screens? 

More in-person writing events and book clubs are an obvious answer for the non-slopified engagement with other creatives. But what about that entrepreneurial itch? That thing that can scale beyond my personal capacity for time commitments and engages a wider audience beyond my immediate vicinity? 

Here are a few ideas for community concepts I’ve been mulling over, and would love to hear what you think. 

I don’t have a clean answer to any of this yet, but writing is thinking, and so I’m thanking you for letting me think to you in this newsletter, ya know? If you have thoughts or ideas about any of these and would be interested in participating or collaborating, let’s chat. 

Until next time, 

Blake