Flashy emails
I was in the shower this morning, alone.
It’s a rare treat not to have an audience.
Usually, when I'm mid suds, it goes something like this:
‘Mummy look, Mummy, I fit the toothbrush through the gap in my teeth,’ says a spluttering Elliott, my toothless 6 six-year-old enthusiastically shows me all the things he can fit in the gap between his teeth.
A pair of tweezers fit easily. The belt from my dressing gown, not so much.
Or my audience consists of a life-sized atom that escaped from the hadron collider that is my two and a half year
old.
And those conversations usually go something like this:
“Theo. No. Put the toilet brush down. Don’t play with that. No. NO. THEO. NO. Put that down. Not that… oh ffs.” I roll my eyes, take a deep breath and get out the shower.
Not this morning, though. Oh no.
PRIVACY. GLORIOUS PRIVACY.
The presence of said audience as I carry out my morning ablutions is definitely not conducive to a bit of creative thinking.
So today’s rare treat was made even rarer when I had an idea…
AND NO WHERE TO WRITE THE FECKING THING DOWN.1*
I’ve just finished up writing an article about author emails for the Indie Author Magazine (due out in
February).
It was all about structuring your emails using the HTOC formula2*. I've written about it here previously. You can read it again here if you like...
https://archive.aweber.com/newsletter/awlist6292673/MTU2NDYxMjU=/the-email-formula-big-name-authors-use.htm
Any hoo, as always, with the way my brain works, I thought of million different things I could have said in that
article to make it better… but my brain operates in a different time zone so I my good ideas always come too late.
Typical.
Not so good for the Indie Author Magazine, but lucky for you.
I’ll let you in on a my little idea…
A lot of authors ask what that they should write about in their emails.
It can feel like you’ve got to come up with something epic every week (or whatever frequency you’re sellingwriting to them).
Which isn’t true.
It doesn't have to epic at all.
Often it’s the smallest things that are the most interesting to readers.
It’s how you react to stuff, how you see the world, how you feel about stuff, and what you value that helps to build your relationship with your readers.
And one way to think about it is as though it's a bit of flash fiction for emails—or flash non-fiction in this
case.
It doesn’t have to be war peace, or an Aristotle-like insight. It’s just a little piece of you.
A little moment, like showering without an audience, and use it to slide into the hearts (and minds) of your
readers.
Does that make sense?
Will you give it a go, ? Turn your next email into a little piece of
flash?
Let me know how it goes.
Angie
Footnotes
1* Now, I believe that when this happens, when an idea strikes and you’ve got nowhere to write it down, I don’t worry about it. Why? Because if the idea is good enough, if it’s solid enough, then it will stick in your brain. If not, then
perhaps the idea wasn’t that strong enough in the first place. Just my opinion.
2* I note that since I started banging on HTOC, Nick Stephenson has also started talking about it in his course. Coincidence?
