Publishing strategies for digital gardeners
I know I wanted to do Digital gardening, to nurture My forest garden of the mind, but I also want to build an audience around that garden, to share my work there to others who could find it useful. How do other digital gardeners share their work and build a following?
- They publish a monthly newsletter via TinyLetter. The newsletter is just a short one to two-paragraph piece that contains links to changes in their software and new page addditions to their digital garden website.
- No newsletter. You can get updated with changes in the forest via RSS.
- No newsletter. He has a subscription form in his website but doesn’t really send emails. He seems to engage with a curated audience in Patreon.
Gwern.net
- Monthly newsletter. No longer updated since April 2021
Nikita
- No newsletter. Shares on Twitter and IG. GitHub. Has a Telegram group.
Swxy
- has a newsletter. But no longer updates. Getrevue.co
https://aengusmcmillin.com/newsletter
- substack
- Weekly
- Progresses and recommendations
# My solution
Intellectual work produces lots of notes and artifacts in my forest garden. These accumulates. If I do a monthly piece like Hundred Rabbits, I end up with a lenghty almost unreadable piece. An obvious solution is to cut the publishing process to weekly. I will still do a quick newsletter linking to works from the forest garden.
The only problem with weekly newsletters is I had a hard time maintaining them in the past. If I will do them, here are rules I need to follow:
- Do not be compelled to share everything in the forest garden, just the best hits and the most related to your life work’s main theme: the quest to wisdom.
- Do not write an essay. You won’t sustain a weekly one.
- Start a newsletter somewhere new like Substack.
- Filter out existing subscribers by sending new opt in form.
- Write an introductory newsletter to new members and introduce the newsletter.
- Make the form simple. Just point to the best hits in your forest garden.
Remember that you have two goals when writing:
- Primary: To process my thoughts, experiences, and emotions so I can improve understanding.
- Secondary: To leave footprints and archetypes for others in a similar path to make use of in their own journeys.