Find the Premise, Purpose, and Market Fit for Your Newsletter

Lesson 1 of 11: Launch & Grow a Newsletter to Boost Your Writing Career

Each month, a different instructor takes over this Substack account to release a writing workshop in their area of expertise. 

When their month ends, we bundle their teachings into a self-paced workshop for writers to enjoy whenever they like. 

We include the exercises and comments generated during the month it ran, so you can benefit from seeing what other writers produced, their questions/thoughts on the material, and any additional expertise shared in the comment section. 

Enjoy!

Hello writers!

Newsletter March Madness is upon us! And the best part is we’re all winners for participating. 

Remember, we started this journey by getting at the heart of our whys. As we continue our brainstorming, I encourage you to do so within the context of your purpose for having a newsletter in the first place. 

Today, for lesson 1, we’re going to determine our newsletter’s premise and make sure it has good content-market fit.

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What’s content-market fit?

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Similar to product-market fit, content-market fit is the intersection of what the market is interested in (what people want to learn about, what people want to read about) and what you can actually write about (your skill set, your experience, and your writing skills). 

I picked up the concept of content-market fit from Matt McGarry, an expert in the newsletter space. In simpler terms, it’s what people want in relation to what you can and want to provide. 

McGarry also recommends:

Pick a niche and then dial that in one to two niches deeper so you can “own” that category.

A lot of people think that they need to start really broad, but if you pick a narrow focus, it’s easier for your audience to find you and determine: What is this thing? What can I expect from it? Is it for me?

It’s counterintuitive, but niching down actually makes your newsletter more compelling and calls out to the people who fit that market, helping your audience self-identify.

Thus, a category like business, wellness, or writing is too broad. You want to find your tribe deeper within that. For example:

• Business → Media businesses → Newsletters (This is Matt McGarry’s niche.)

• Wellness → Nutrition → Keto

• Writing → Fiction → Flash Fiction

For

Podcast Bestie

, my niche looks like:

• Podcasts > Podcast production, marketing, and monetization > Indie podcast production, marketing, and monetization 

What category can you pick that you’re the best in the world at?

Niching down with such specificity also makes your expertise in that subcategory immediately apparent. It would be hard for me to pitch myself as the go-to person in the podcast space. The first person to come to mind for the category as a whole might be Joe Rogan or Tim Ferriss. But my goal was to become the go-to person for indie podcasters, and after 2+ years of running Podcast Bestie, I’m commonly thought of as such.

You can also think of your niche in terms of combining two categories, like Jeremy Caplan’s

Wonder Tools

combines productivity and technology apps.

That’s the framework

Kat Lewis

of

Craft with Kat

uses to think about her niche. She explains, “If your goal is to have fun, your niche doesn’t matter too much. You can just explore whatever interests you. But if the goal is to make money (even if it's just a little bit of side cash), your niche should be narrowed down to two concrete topics that can each be described in 1-3 words. For example, I write about writing fiction and personal development.”

Help, I’m struggling to come up with my niche!

As a multi-hyphenate, I understand how hard it can be to pick a lane. However, it’s a lot easier to attract readers if they know exactly what they’re going to get when they subscribe to your newsletter.

Codie Sanchez of the uber-successful Contrarian Thinking recommends asking yourself these four questions to help determine your niche/topic:

• Where do people ask you for your opinion on things?

• What would you do, even if you weren’t getting paid for it?

• What are the hobbies that you’d like to get into?

• What are you really, really good at?

I would add a few additional questions:

• What content you’ve created has generated the biggest response? (Could be freelance work or even a social media post.)

• What’s been your favorite/most obsessive freelance assignment?

• How does writing on your proposed topic make you feel?

To me, this last question is perhaps the most important. In Atomic Habits, James Clear advocates for reducing friction if you want to build a habit, like regularly posting to your newsletter. My biggest source of friction typically involves feeling overwhelmed by or under-enthused about an activity. So if I feel drained or devoid of passion just brainstorming about a topic, that’s a big clue that it shouldn’t be the cornerstone of my newsletter.

Now it’s time to pick a publication title and draft your one to two-line description.

When you’re brainstorming the name of your newsletter, let your mind run wild. But ultimately, you’ll want to pick one that immediately conveys your publication’s premise AND allows you to own the SEO for that name (and thus organically appear at the top of the search results). Sari Botton’s Oldster is a terrific example. 

Here’s inspiration from a couple of newsletter writers to help you get started:

Diana Ostrom of Faraway Places: The basic premise of Faraway Places is news from Paris specifically and France generally, and thoughts about travel — especially solo female travel — broadly. It was meant to address what I felt was a gap in the Paris media space — or at least the anglophone Paris media space — which was event listings and that sort of thing, like a Time Out for Paris by email. I would see posters in the metro promoting openings and exhibitions I wanted to remember, and I thought other people might want the same thing. Originally, I was thinking of my newsletter as a way to build a community for when my new novel is published — that was, and I guess remains, the long-term goal.

Sarah Wheeler

of

Momspreading

: I call it “the inexpert endeavors of a supposed parenting expert” — that piece taps into my adventures as a parent, unraveling what I was taught as an educational psychologist, and pulling out what’s actually useful. But it meanders into many other areas of interest — modern womanhood, sex and relationships, neurodiversity and disability, basketball, the underappreciated B-sides of Boyz II Men.

Meera Lee Patel

of

Dear Somebody

: Dear Somebody is a weekly newsletter that chronicles five things that I’d like to remember a year from now. I re-ignited my newsletter in the beginning of 2023, having become disenchanted with marketing and social media in general. Marketing is an endless slog, and I found myself creating content to build an audience when what I really wanted to do was devote myself to my craft. I changed the premise of my newsletter, which was built to serve my audience, to serve myself instead. Now, I write for myself, for myself–and because I write more honestly, I find that it resonates with my audience more deeply than it used to. [Editor’s note: This is the opposite of future advice in this course, proving there are no hard and fast rules for this stuff.]

Valorie Castellanos Clark

of

Unruly Figures

: The tagline is “Stories of real people who refused to play by the rules.” The ‘stack revolves around tales of rebels, rulebreakers, and revolutionaries of all stripes. I dive deep into their lives and times to contextualize how these folks broke their society’s rules and changed their communities. I launched in September 2021. I have a Master’s in History and Literature, but at the time, I wasn’t engaging with that part of my mind as much as I would have liked. It was a way for me to write about history without bowing to the pressure of going back to grad school and/or working in academia, where all my work would be inaccessible to the general public. 

Caitlin Kunkel

of

Input/Output

: My newsletter is called Input/Output, and the tagline is: “filling up our creative wells so we can draw from them.” I’m very interested in the cycles of creative life and talking about strategies to recognize which season you may be in and what you can do to refresh your writing and/or artistic practice. I don’t really believe in traditional writer’s block, but I do believe you can be creatively depleted and need to refill the well before you can write!

Paulina Pinsky

of

newly sober

: Newly Sober: “I know only a little, but I've drank and smoked a lot” — a marijuana addict and alcoholic writing through early sobriety. The basic premise: a newsletter dedicated to documenting early sobriety as it unfolds.

Zachary Zane of BOYSLUT: My newsletter, BOYSLUT, publishes first-person, nonfiction erotica essays. It isn’t just “smut,” though it is very raunchy. Every story speaks to something larger about the intersection of sex and another topic, like modern dating, non-monogamy, technology, community, and so on. I started my newsletter in May 2020. I began it for a few reasons. One, I knew I had a book coming out in 2023 titled Boyslut, and wanted to have a list of contacts that I could email directly about my upcoming book and events. Two, I feared that I was going to get kicked off on Instagram for my sex-positive content, and wanted a way to stay in direct contact with my followers and readers. 

Kailey Brennan DelloRusso

of

In the Weeds

: In the Weeds is a newsletter where I dive into the process of writing my first novel while also working in the service industry, specifically waiting tables at a country club. Tagline: “Untangling the writing life while working as a waitress.” I wanted a place where I could be honest and shed light on the often stigmatized yet incredibly flexible roles in the service industry, like bartending and waitressing—a world I have been a part of for over ten years. These jobs, often labeled as 'dead-end' or 'not real'’ are, in fact, lifelines for many creatives like me, providing the financial stability and flexibility needed to pursue our artistic endeavors. But we still seem to shame people for working them! I wanted to talk about making money while writing. The service industry is funny and fascinating and filled with story ideas, so I knew I would have some content to work with. 

💬 Feel free to share your premise and tagline in the comments or post a question if you need help whittling down your niche or picking your best publication title. I’m happy to help!

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✍️ For your lesson 1 homework, please pick your niche, come up with your publication title, and write a one-line description of your newsletter → Comment what you come up with below.

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Next Lesson:

Who's Your Who? Identifying Your Target Reader Avatar

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