I’m madly writing essays and cleaning up another book, but I promise that – soon – I’ll write something other than crumbs. Maybe after I finish my site updated which I thought would take a long weekend, but it’s been two months now. I guess I could say this isn’t a crumb, but I’d be cheating.
My topic today is email. Just like you and everyone else I know, I get dozens a day and confess to subscribing to many. I’m a sucker for the science site that says, “Register here with your preferred email address to receive a daily dose of the best medical research pulled straight from yesterday’s journals.” I did medical research once, and harbor a love for several topics, and kind of salivate waiting for the next day’s email. I get it at six in the morning, and it’s an advert for a special membership tier where I get even better articles. I’m never sure what a better article is but there’s one thing I’m sure of: it coast more money.
The marketing for said site and for the magic membership tier never stops. I get three more emails by day’s end and, getting the same barrage everyday for a week, finally and unceremoniously smack unsubscribe, which typically means only another month of annoying prattle and begging. Apparently, coders haven’t figured out how to automatically delete followers who hit unsubscribe. I’ll talk to my daughter about this who works on these questions about coding until way past midnight. .
Authors shilling stuff are just as bad. Of course I’m interested in the latest book news: I write books. Yes, I love a well-told story. Why don’t you cut to the chase and send me one instead of a dozen pieces of advertising ‘content’ written in marginal English and not even grammar-checked for free on Grammarly.
So, my email plan is easy. I give you a day. If I sign up for x and you send me y, I delete it and you. If I get sixteen emails from you on any day, on any topic, of any length, I delete and unsubscribe no matter how deeply held the publishing secrets you want to sell me are. I’ve lived this long without them and can probably make it ’til next Thursday without them.
When I feel generous – or busy – that’s all I do: hit unsubscribe. But if I grab my wife’s coffee lousy coffee in the morning, and am still crabby about it, I go to Twitter and tell friends who you are and why they should stay away. Don’t worry much: it’s never worked.
And, per my most oft-used saying, there’s another side of this coin: my Plough Daily Dig, Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac, Our Daily Bread’s daily reading, and even the CNN Daily Business News bring me joy each morning, so I keep them, ala Marie Kondo.
