Grow through what you go through 🌿

Reflecting on the newsletter's short past and where it's going

Jun 17, 2020

I’m writing this less than 12 hours before my self-set deadline of Wednesday at 8.30. Despite Conversations By The Sea hitting the inboxes at the same time, on the same day every week, I still find Tuesday nights sneak up on me.

This evening, I joined a fantastic webinar from Anna Codrea-Rado (The Professional Freelancer) and Sian Meades-Williams (Freelance Writing Jobs and Domestic Sluttery) about launching a profitable newsletter and I am feeling inspired to continue the journey I’ve found myself on thanks to this lovely little email (and the community it has created).

I’m not too far off my first 100 subscribers, which makes me feel incredibly proud given I started from nothing in March and I’ve diligently typed away week after week, sharing whatever is at the forefront of my mind concerning freelancing and mental health.

I’m not a numbers-driven person. I rarely check my Google Analytics (despite always monitoring my clients’), I don’t memorise follower count and it could be a week before I realise an invoice is overdue… but the prospect of a newsletter with a three-figure subscriber count is very, very exciting to me.

While the newsletter is not yet profitable, I do see it as an integral part of the brand that I sustain and, in return, it sustains me.

There’s nothing quite like living off the spoils of your own hard work. That’s not to say those non-self-employed folk don’t work hard. I grafted my arse off at companies for years before I fell into self-employment. But the work I do now, and the control I have over the direction of that work, is more fulfilling than I could have ever imagined.

And, even in these turbulent economic times, I do everything in my power to keep going and keep growing.

Considering changing the doodle to books I’ve read this week and stop kidding myself that I do anything else these days. Last week, I gushed about Scythe - the first in the series by Neal Shusterman. I completed the series this evening after devouring books two and three over the last few days. What an incredible trilogy, I don’t want to go too much into detail about the plot as I often think it’s more fun to enter these things blindly, but if you thought The Hunger Games and Divergent could have gone much further into creating a truly all-encompassing dystopian world, then Scythe is for you.

I’m still chugging along with A Little Hatred, the latest in Joe Abercrombie’s First Law universe. There’s a reason Abercrombie is known as Lord Grimdark if fantasy is often a bit ‘airy-fairy’ for you then look no further than this epic collection.

I’ve just started The Alloy of Law, the fourth book in Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn series. At only 333 pages, this will act as light relief while I choose the next series to embark on.

What are you reading? Tell me on Twitter or add me as a friend on Goodreads.

Until next week, this is where I’ll be: