Today I was planning on sharing this month’s Folklore Friday poem, but I needed to be honest about something, because I messed up. I spammed a bunch of my subscribers–and some of you may not want to be subscribers at all.
Here’s what happened. Until recently, there were ways (landing pages) for readers to download my reader magnet via my old newsletter platform. They’d get an email with the link to A Winter’s Sleep and a link to The Purple Vale, to decide for themselves if they wanted to become a ‘true’ subscriber to my current newsletter, or just get a free short story and move on with life.
I’m transitioning my former platform to use for my pen name, and I had a bunch of emails there from people who had subscribed but never made the leap here to Substack. Honestly, I was a little confused with the whole thing. I wasn’t sure what to do. Just deleting them was probably an ok option; notifying them first was probably the best. But instead, I just exported them here, and they found themselves on the receiving end of emails that they probably didn’t sign up for. Right?
I found the process confusing. Maybe they did too. Still, it was my job to serve my subscribers clearly, efficiently, and with integrity, which in this case I didn’t.
Why am I telling you this? Is it a residual of my compulsion to confess, compliments of high-control religion? A lot of these exports have since unsubscribed, so obviously, people know where to find the unsubscribe button. But transparency is still a value, so, for better or worse, this is my confession.
And, I’m glad to just go with Substack now. There’s far less confusion involved for writers and subscribers, and I don’t have to worry whether I’ve just strong-armed a bunch of people into something they don’t want!
If you’re reading this going, “what is this all about? Why is she sending this boring post instead of writing about fairy tales and the folklore of flowers?” Then thanks for bearing with me, and next week, I promise this month’s Folklore Fridays will arrive in your inbox. Unless you want to unsubscribe, of course.
And, if you’re reading this, going, “oh, so that’s how I ended up here!” then I owe you specifically an apology. From now on, I hope you only get emails you want, and if that means unsubscribing from me, you can do so at the bottom of this email.
Want to rant about a bad newsletter experience? If you write a newsletter, have you encountered any sticky situations? Leave me a comment below.
this sounds like such a nightmare to navigate! i probably would have done the same thing