(Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay)
Friday afternoon/evening (13 August)
On Friday afternoon, I disappeared down another rabbit hole. This one was a holiday rabbit hole after I realised that we hadn’t been on holiday since April 2019. That was almost a year before the pandemic and lockdown, and nearly 2½ years ago.
We did say that the next place that we went would be Northumberland. But we also revived the alphabet adventurers on Sunday with L (or part 1 at least, we go back next week to film part 2).
So when I couldn’t find a single place with a vacancy for 2 adults and 2 pets (cat and dog) in Northumberland below £1,000, I shifted to the north tip of Yorkshire with a view to maybe doing M while we were there…
However, although I started with M as the starting point (it’s a secret, we don’t tell anyone until we’ve been in case we don’t make it or change our minds), the affordable availability circle got wider and wider and wider.
Well, it’s not strictly ‘affordable’, it’s more what we’re willing to pay.
And anyway, by about 11pm on Friday, I’d found somewhere and fired off a tentative enquiry.
Saturday 14 August 2021
They came back Saturday morning and, well, the upshot is, we have a week in Barnard Castle (where Dominic Cummings famously went ‘for an eye test’ during lockdown).
On Saturday the poet went to his first angling match since before Christmas and the idea was that I would do some work. But after finalising the holiday and travel insurance, I took the day off in the end.
Yes, we take out holiday insurance for UK travel too, especially as it could still be cancelled at a moment’s notice with Covid not strictly going away yet.
Sunday 15 August 2021
On Sunday, we dusted off our alphabet adventurers t-shirts and we went off to film L. We did the short walk while we were there with the intention of doing a bit of the longer walk after we’d nipped to the car for a drink.
We’re so unaccustomed to all of this exercise, however, that once we got in the car, we didn’t want to get out again. So we’re going back to finish filming it next weekend.
Monday 17 August 2021
On Monday, there was another one of those darned rabbit holes… and this one went on for the entire day. (I knew I should have got ahead with my work!)
This time I was looking at newsletters.
I’ve been toying with a newsletter for a while, and I’d pretty much decided that I’d do a magazine instead. But yesterday I ended up looking at newsletters once again.
I set up accounts on three newsletters and had a play, but I’m still not certain what to do or how to do it. I think I’d like to run it on one of the platforms, with some of the content free and some of the content paid-for.
But the platform I’m considering doesn’t seem to be set up in the same way as, say, Mailerlite or Mailchimp, in that you get a welcome newsletter complete with a link to a freebie. However, it does seem a lot more user-friendly.
I’m researching Mailchimp further and have my landing page sorted. But I still have that sticky issue of the free gift to thank subscribers. I think it will be a short story, but I don’t know which one. Or it might be an existing book, but I don’t know which one.
Mailchimp is apparently free for me to use for the first 1,000 subscribers. The other one I’m considering is free for life (to me, apart from a 10% commission if I go paid-for), regardless of how many subscribers.
I’m going to run the free for life one alongside the blog with all of my blog posts being free to read. Then I might simultaneously release the magazine as both an ebook and a paid-for newsletter. And in the meantime, I’ll see if I can build up my list on Mailchimp.
There, decision made. I can go and have a cup of tea now…
… only I can’t. Because this morning I’ve been negotiating another ghostwriting contract with a different client to run alongside the existing client.
And, of course, I’m still busy. I have proofreading to do, and I have the current ghostwriting instalment to write. And now I have a newsletter to think about too.
Ah well, if you want anything done, give it to a busy person, eh?
It all sounds great. I’m going to start up my quarterly newsletter again, and I’m thinking of migrating everything to MailChimp. I’ve used Constant Contact for clients, and didn’t like it, and Robly for another client, which I liked, but it doesn’t work for what I want to do. So I figured I’d give MailChimp a try. I’m also looking at MooSend, which a tech-savvy friend suggested. The site looks really nice!
Thanks so much for dropping by and saying hello, and thank you for the nice comments. I’ve been working hard on it since yesterday afternoon!
I have Mailchimp too, but at the moment, I just want to get my blog posts to people’s inboxes, and Substack is quick, free and easy. But I am in the process of building the Mailchimp templates, etc. I know a lot of people who use it. It took me quite a lot of screen-staring to make head or tail of it, though!