Welcome All You Wonderful Readers
You are part of something good — and you are the ones making it good!
Welcome, welcome, welcome!
This publication has been up and running for a couple of months now, featuring about 30 articles for close to 100 subscribers plus the occasional readers.
While I am not so much focused on the exact numbers, the statistics, of this publication, I am still happy to see that articles often get around 10–20 reactions — likes, comments, restacks, and shares — meaning that I am indeed writing for real people who read my articles.
Life is interesting! That’s obvious, seeing how the topic has become that popular. We can talk about many things, but the human being and its thoughts and actions is a central topic that all we humans can relate to.
Between Us
At this point in time and in the development of the publication, I find it reasonable to introduce this meta level of writing, the Between Us section, where the publication itself can be mentioned in no particular format, just kept in a colloquial tone for discussing various thoughts.
Maybe this looks more like a traditional newsletter, while the rest of the stuff in here has become articles and stories — a format that I find more appropriate, after having experimented a bit, than the original idea I had, which was to put 1–3 text elements in each newsletter. These could be short stories, poems, a photo reportage, or whatever, but circling around a common topic and with surrounding text to bind it all together.
What I have learned is that readers of anything on substack are very diverse and like to read all kinds of things, but most seem to expect exactly one story in each post.
Several newsletters
Also, there is no 1-to-1 relation between the publication and the newsletter — from the start, I wasn’t really sure how this all worked, but it looks like it is more appropriate to talk about each section of the publication to be a newsletter: You can switch on or off email notifications for each of them separately, but you can still read all the posts on the publication website.
This is a good concept, even though it may be a bit tricky to find out how to switch on and of each of the newsletter. You can do it while watching a post on the website (using a web browser): Click on the Dashboard down-arrow and select Manage subscriptions.
This will open the administration page for your subscription to this publication, and on that page there is a block of switches for all the things you can get notified about. Feel free to pick and choose, so that your subscription gives you exactly what you want:
Each of the sections/newsletters can also be found in the menu line on the publication website, and at least some of them will have a feature section down the page, for inspiration and easy access.
All of this organizing is of course done with the idea that some of the readers might want to read older posts, not just the latest, and this seems to be a very pleasant feature of Substack readers.
Social media in general tends to scroll posts into oblivion within a day or so, after which very few people will read it. Medium let the post have an active life for a few days, but then it ends. Substack, however, and the wonderful users and readers here, do not mind a post being several weeks old - if it is there, it can be read.
So, I find that it makes sense to arrange for all the posts to be easy to find.
More topics
Since starting the publication, it has spread to several sub-topics, as visible from the notifications list above. Some topics are out of scope for the publication, and therefore I have made a few additional publications. These are mainly meant to support all the things I do for work, so that clients and prospects can see what I do, but also for everybody else to read, who are interested in the topics.
They are all in their beginnings, but I intend to add more contents to them soon, making each of them a good place to look for information about their respective topics.
One is about data analytics, which was one of the topics I got involved with early in my career - all about registering, finding, combining, and analysing data, and making sense of them, bringing it all into a readable and understandable form, often for an organization’s management to use in their planning, but really, it could be for anyone. This publication is here:
Another is about technical writing and translation, which have sneaked into my life along the way but during recent years have become what I live from, mainly. Technical writing is different from creative writing in that it usually has a very specific purpose — to instruct someone, give guidelines, or describe some facts.
There are many kinds of technical writing, and in the common understanding of it, it stretches from manuals over study reports to everything that is to be used in a technical context, such as labels, captions, and other texts in an app or on a website.
While I am very happy to write creatively, I also have a sense of structuring and getting an overview of things, and this is, in fact, the same skills that I use for data analytics, and, sometimes, for creative writing as well. So they all go well together.
The publication is here:
There is a special publication as well, also for technical writing and translation – but it is in Danish language. Most of my clients are in Denmark, and I am myself from there, knowing the language as my mother tongue, so it seems obvious to support the Danish speakers in my professional network with some articles about the topic.
It can be found here:
Until next time!
These Between Us posts will appear now and then, so far not with a fixed schedule.
Please feel free to ask for anything you may be in doubt about, or ask for something to be covered by a post. I promise to look at it and think carefully about how I may be able to help.
See you!