Last September, when writer and digital strategist Laura Olin started a TinyLetter called Everything Changes, she had modest expectations.
“I thought my friends would subscribe and it might top out at 100 readers,” she says. “I would have been happy with that.”
But since then, the newsletter—the theme of which is that its theme is always changing—has found itself a much, much bigger audience. It caught the eye of a literary agent, and she’s now working on a book based on some of the newsletter’s issues. She was also approached by The Awl about sending Everything Changes from their mostly-dormant MailChimp account. In April, when her first Awl-backed issue (“Animal mascots rooting for their own demise”) went out, it appeared in 13 times the number of inboxes she expected to reach last fall.
Part of Everything Changes’ appeal is the element of surprise. From one week to another, Laura might deliver inspirational messages paired with corgi GIFs, a collection of reader responses to a question she posed the week before, or Joe Biden fanfiction. It’s an exercise in embracing email’s ephemeral nature, but even the silliest issues gesture towards certain existential depths. (If you’ve never felt spine-shivering fear while reading a short story inspired by the dancing bunny girls emoji, you’ve never read Everything Changes.)
Laura is no stranger to the internet: She ran President Obama’s social media strategy during his 2012 reelection campaign (“which is a fancy way of saying I tweeted as @barackobama, among other things,” she says), and now works at a small digital consulting firm. But even she has been surprised by the newsletter’s popularity.
“I thought it would be too weird for a big-ish audience,” Laura says. “So the fact that it’s gotten a bigger audience is a nice affirmation …Read the full story
Source:: Mail Chimp