Or, at the very least, effectively frozen in carbonite like Han Solo.
Here’s what I mean:
Over the last couple years especially… several people both from my email list (and most recently on Twitter) have been asking me how to go about morphing their current info publishing business into a business like mine with a print newsletter, selling print books, etc.
And with rare exception I try to warn people away from it.
Here’s why:
The costs are way higher than they were even a few years ago thanks to inflation plus a worldwide paper shortage according to my printer last I checked. Plus, the logistics of shipping & delivery are different and far more expensive than selling purely digital. Currently, I do not heavily promote my elBenbo Press book about my publishing methodology because most people on my list or who follow me on Twitter are not ready for it — as they don’t even have an email list (just a twitter or facebook following). And they really think they can do it just by spanking out tweets all day behind a cartoon avatar, and not do all the hard work of aggressively growing and mailing a legally opted-in to list, and that was not scraped together with a bunch of cold addresses.
Then there’s the writing side of the print newsletter business.
Everyone wants to have written, yet nobody wants to write.
But if you are going to do a print newsletter you gotta write, and learn to love writing (and learn to love deadlines), and make it something you’d do even if you didn’t have to do it. You literally live and die by your writing in any kind of publishing business like I have. Some foolishly think they can “prompt” that sort of thing with tools like fapGPT. But people know fools gold when they see it. Dan Kennedy has long talked about how you can’t even let someone else write in your voice (a human, much less a machine) and get away with it for very long when it comes to a print newsletter.
And, as usual, he’s right.
My boys & ghouls in Email Players would not tolerate me pulling that nonsense.
Something else to think about:
If you are going to be in the print publishing business it helps to think like a publisher and not like a writer or “content creator” or copywriter or digital agency owner or coach or consultant or freelancer or anything else. Otherwise you’re just going to hit a ceiling real fast. I know this because I made that mistake myself for the first 6 or 7 years of publishing a print newsletter during my “one email per day” phase.
It was fun, and very low stress, but not-at-all sustainable.
And it put a definite limit on sales potential.
Whatever the case, here’s my doom n’ gloom opinion:
I think it’s only going to be harder and harder to launch and sustain a print model for the vast majority of marketers and businesses. I’ve spent the last nearly 15 years selling various print subscription offers and have things dialed in pretty good. But without that foundation and without everything in place like I have things now, I almost (not totally — because they should know better) feel sorry for people jumping in the print game thinking it’s going to be easy and fun because maybe I make it look easy and fun each day (?), when for most it will be the exact opposite.
More:
This is why I tell anyone who asks me about it these days I’d go with a digital subscription offer — pdf, mobile app hosted content like we offer at Learnistic or social media hosted (like we offer at SocialLair and you can see in “real time” how it works at our Low Stress Trading site), membership site hosted content, paid videos, paid podcast… anything BUT print or physically-delivered offers. And this is especially the case if you’re milquetoast about growing an email list (a social media following is nice, but it’s not nearly as good or stable or reliable or protected from big tech shenanigans as an email list) and mailing it aggressively each and every day.
You can get away with some laziness & flakiness selling a digital subscription offer.
But not so with a physical newsletter.
Unless, maybe, you have a gigantic following so you can replace churn as fast as it happens.
But even then, churn is another thing that catches people by surprise.
But even that is not as big a deal with digital as it is with physical – as with physical you’re dealing with printing costs, fulfillment costs, shipping costs (going through the roof right now), blown deadlines from vendors you rely on, software glitches, flakey delivery people (getting worse by the month) and the list goes on.
In fact, here is a comment I recently got about this about delivery alone:
“We have just started to sell print newsletter 2 months ago, and now I understand what the pain in the ass all this delivery stuff is.”
He ain’t wrong.
There are a handful of people it actually costs me to send to when you factor in printing, shipping, and fulfillment – unless I charge them shipping, etc, which I have so far resisted doing. But, even by generously paying peoples’ shipping, I still get a few greedy and cheap-minded dinks – most of them in the EU – who think because I offer free shipping then that means I’m supposed to pay their country’s customs/delivery fees, too.
Probably next they will ask me to pay their taxes while I am at it.
The countries that require an “invoice” are especially grating.
I am not going to create a special invoice for every customer in every different country, based on each of their government’s invoicing requirements. People can either fugking copy & paste the receipt the carts sends upon the sale and/or when Email Players bills them each month into a template or cancel their subscription and go haunt someone else.
This is just one of many reasons I am aggressively banning EU countries like it’s a sport.
But it ain’t just the EU getting into the act.
In 10 years — assuming the US is still even a country, which I don’t think it will be — I strongly suspect I will only be selling to the US and a few, select other countries not run by communists. And even in the US I will probably end up banning entire states going by the sheeple-like voting patterns of their people, their openly corrupt bureaucrats that make doing business more trouble than it’s worth, and their growing regulations. I would not be shocked if California, for example, starts sending you a tax bill or claiming nexus just for sending a FedEx package that travels through that state to someone in another state.
People might chuckle or shake their heads at that.
But it’s probably more true than not.
Anyway, it is just not worth the trouble in some cases.
Bottom line?
I recommend go digital, get that dialed in, then toy with print later if you still want to.
My too many sense…
But whichever model you use (print, digital, whatever…) if you want to learn some of my best tricks of the trade for using email to sell with see the paid Email Players newsletter.
Details here:
Ben Settle
