An Editor's Guide to Effective Newsletters That Rivet Readers
The trick with editing is to know where the auditor wants to go - or should.
As with any writing, the effectiveness of any newsletter is based on one thing:
The selection of the effect any writer is trying to produce on the reader.
Newsletters are story writing. The essence of any story, whether fiction or non-fiction, has been the same since recorded history, before the Greeks. And in its basics, writing effective content is simple.
The complexity begins where you have untrained writers producing content like their English professors taught them.
Composition as taught is stodgy. Rhetoric in college courses loses the point of using technical devices to involve and persuade.
Both of these English department failures are due to their constant analysis of writing pieces against formulae - instead of analyzing against reader reaction.
Editors, who work well outside of the ivory towers of academia, classify the articles and stories that they accept by their readers. Anything that won't maintain or expand their circulation will hit that waiting circular file (rejection pile).
It's no less true that these apply to every single newsletter you write. They follow the same models and technical devices as effective fiction stories and non-fiction articles.
What you are about to read applies to your books as well as your newsletters. And I’ve worked to keep this simple. But once you know the basics, and you’ve practiced them, then the your newsletters become simpler to write, and more effective in persuading or entertaining or inspiring your reader.
3 Styles of Newsletter Types
We can use the traditional types of popular magazines to define our newsletter.
Popular magazines are classified as "quality,” ‘‘slick,” and “‘pulp". The quality magazine is intended for people who enjoy ideas; the slick magazines are aimed at readers whose chief interest is emotion, sentiment, passion; the pulps are for those who prefer action, adventure, strong and simple emotions.
The quality magazines address themselves mostly to adult readers of education; the slicks address themselves to people who read not only for amusement, but in order to learn how to get ahead in the world of business or to be reassured that their standards of life are better than any others; the pulps are intended for readers who desire escape from discouraging conditions of life into brightly colored dreams.
So authors then have to fit their writing into the types that readers demand and editors uphold.
In our personal newsletters, we have no gatekeepers, and no rejection letters when people unsubscribe from our work. Our guiding star then has to be our own personal theme and experience we write from, as well as the style we've chosen as most comfortable. Then stick closely to these. Because our readers resonate with what we write and how we do.
This is what makes newsletters interesting. It's not in how long or short they are, it's in how they keep their readers interested - it’s in how they make the reader feel at the end.
And that’s why the best newsletters borrow and use technical devices just as any fiction book or short story.
And whether your editing your own work, or someone else’s, the classic rules govern what makes a good newsletter good.
The Mix of Fiction Devices in Non-Fiction Writing
You'll see in the above that there's a mix of fiction and non-fiction in any magazine - and this applies to any newsletter you publish on your own. It's not too surprising that authors of each borrow the same technical devices from the other. Non-fiction is most successful where it includes episodic stories of people who somehow answer the question at hand. Because the reader is reminded that this is real life we are talking about. Facts tend to sit on a page, but people eat and breathe and bleed.
And effective non-fiction books also involve the author leaving cliff-hangers, either an interrupted action or emotional shift. Such that the reader literally has to turn the page to find out what happens next.
Both fiction and non-fiction are based on the Greek three-act play. And there are many structural models that support this.
Walter S. Campbell ran one of the most effective writer training courses of all time for some 20 years. He covered the gamut of writing submissions with his students, whether submitting their works to book or magazine editors.
As he wrote:
"Every composition, whether poetry or prose, must be cast in a form which fits the habit of thought of the reader. There is an ancient four-part formula which explains this and which is the basic pattern of all compositions. It makes sense whether these are sonnets or biographies, epics or novels, short stories or essays, for this formula is based upon the mental habits of the human being. The formula has four steps:
"1) We must first catch the reader's attention.
"2) Having caught his attention we must convince the reader that the matter under discussion is one which concerns him, since otherwise he will not continue to read.
"3) Having secured his attention and having made him believe that he is concerned, we must then get down to cases and show him that we have not misled him, by bringing forward such facts, ideas, or emotions as will hold his interest.
"4) Having gone thus far we must finally leave him with the conviction that his effort of attention has not been in vain. We do this by providing him with some result of his effort, by suggesting some course of action or attitude of mind derived from, and justified by, what we have shown him.
"One of my pupils has suggested that this formula may be expressed in only four words, for convenience in remembering it, as follows:
(1) HEY! (2) YOU! (3) SEE? (4) SO! “
He goes further to explain that for every story has both mechanical and emotional patterns that go into it.
Many conventional story structures confuse these two. They are interwoven tightly in any successful book, but when you separate them out, you get a far wider approach to writing on any subject. And yes, this is also true of both fiction and non-fiction work.
Story Structures
Strictly speaking, there are five over-arching physical structures (mechanical patterns) that guide all stories and articles:
Adventure
Romance
Mystery
Redemption
Non-Fiction
Adventure is the Hero's Journey. A quest.
Romance is girl meets boy, girl loses boy, girl finds boy, happily ever after.
Mystery is almost a reverse adventure, where a crime is committed at the outset and the rest of the story is discovering who did it, why, and preventing them from doing it again.
Redemption can be patterned after Dickens' A Christmas Story, or Shaw's Pygmalion (aka My Fair Lady). The hero has a change of heart and improves their life because of it.
Non-fiction is outlined above - Hey! You! See? So...
These structures are physical because certain actions have to take place at certain parts of the text. And yet, you can't robotically craft some melodramatic work and have it succeed. Your characters have to infuse their reader with emotional response. The reader has to have a gut reaction to what is happening in a story, even a non-fiction article or newsletter.
Emotional Story Shapes
Emotional patterns were first defined in a graphical format by Kurt Vonnegut in a rejected Master's thesis. He referred to these as "story shapes". The emotional rise and fall of the character's feelings could be traced through a story.
In 2016, a couple of computer researchers teamed up from Vermont and Adelaide with access to a supercomputer, and generated emotional story arcs for nearly 2,000 works of fiction. Their conclusion was they arcs fell into 6 main types:
1. Rags to Riches (rise)
2. Riches to Rags (fall)
3. Man in a Hole (fall then rise)
4. Icarus (rise then fall)
5. Cinderella (rise then fall then rise)
6. Oedipus (fall then rise then fall)
You'll see there that there are three main tragic endings, three happy endings.
But further, that you aren't stuck into the apparent emotional pattern of your chosen story structure.
And that's where the tools of an editor come into play.
Consider there are:
3 types of reader preferences,
5 story structures, and
6 emotional story shapes.
This then gives you 90 possible combinations for any newsletter subject in just using these pure forms.
So you can then do some major sorting at the outset. Read the opening episode, and then skip down to the ending.
Then you can ask yourself: Type of reader this appeals to? Tragic or comedic? Crime at the beginning or call to adventure? Happily ever after at the end? A deeply flawed character introduced immediately?
Yes, the great writers blended in most or all of the story shapes and structures into their long books. A tapestry that involves you. And heroes are best identified with if they have their own redemption story arc. Any mystery is sweetened when there is a romantic interest that evolves alongside. And the length of any work tends to have cyclical emotional rises and falls through-out, practically every chapter if not more often.
To make sense of any submitted work, an editor can discover the over-arching structure and main emotional story shape and help the author tweak their work to keep everything lined up for the effect they want to create on the reader.
But what about plots?
Newsletters have plots? Some do. Non-fiction should follow the four part Campbell structure above. Most kinda, sorta try - because it’s wired into us.
Plots probably have their origin in critics and academics trying to sort out what happened in a book. The term plot itself is borrowed from real estate, where it means "the lay of the land".
In Edgar Allan Poe's essay, "The Philosophy of Composition", he dissects his own problems in writing, and forwards the idea that the effect the writer wishes to produce on the reader is the foremost guide. He held that anything that doesn't contribute to that effect should be removed from that story.
He says nothing about plot. And if you re-study Poe's works, you'll find little of what modernly is held as plot exists in Poe's writings. However, his stories do factually induce horror, almost regardless of action in each story.
Scenes are more important than plot, as Campbell held. You can write scenes without a plot, but you cannot plot a story without scenes. His concept is that the plot is actually the end result of the scene endings - where they tie into the next-upcoming scene.
And that then enables the use of fiction-type scenes in non-fiction - where every sentence is designed to require the reader to read the next. One of the core rules to any writing is to keep the reader reading.
Our greatest writers are known for mastering the cliffhanger at the end of their chapters. Yet the final bit of each scene carries the same function. The reader is compelled to read past the break and pick up the story again, with the hope of resolving the new question raised by the last scene.
The editor, then, is right to reject any story that doesn't immediately involve him in its characters or actions. And drop that story just as quickly when that editor finds themselves with eyes glazed over and no longer interested in or following what he's mechanically reading.
Taking On An Editing Job
I've had to dig through many submitted pieces for a compiled non-fiction work, where the best opening paragraph in an article was buried part way or even at the end of the story. And then I'd have to rearrange paragraphs and sections so that the text flowed smoothly and held the reader's interest all the way through.
My main complaint throughout that volunteer project was that if I ever had to do this again, I'd start with holding some short training with the authors so that they would submit viable work.
Above is how you survive with wits and hair intact when you put on an editor's hat - either as paid, volunteer, or having to do your own.
You can take these immediate steps once you receive any story or article.
First, read the first scene or chapter. Then skip to the last chapter or scene. Then you can answer the questions below:
1) What's is the effect the author wanted to create in the reader?
2) What story structure was chosen?
3) What emotional story shape was dominant?
4) List an outline of your scenes according to their result, starting at the end. Then see if they are crafted to flow toward that end from the beginning.
Voice, grammar, all these things are secondary. You delight in having a piece in front of you that instantly transports you into the work, carries you though it's many changes, and then deposits you with a sense of satisfaction that everything turned out all right.
That is a story.
That is an editor's dream.
And that is how you as a writer will get a check from your editor for buying your article or story.
It's no less true than when you self-publish and you are your own editor. Perhaps even more so.
And the degree of satisfaction in every single newsletter you write is how you determine your own subscribe and unsubscribe rate.
Over to you.
Building a Course for Core Basic
It’s in beta now, and will start in the first week of January.
In 28 lessons over one month, we are covering the core essentials of getting set up to learn as a writer and set your writerpreneur business up for a real income stream.
This is material pulled from classic and out-of-print textbooks from the world’s most successful writer training course of all time.
Around 90 minutes of video, included PDFs, just the core data. What you need to get started earning income from writing and publishing books.
Delivered right here on Substack for Founding Members.
Only 19 seats left.
Enroll here: https://calm.li/writerpreneurOS