Close readings of bookstore email newsletters
I'm a bookseller at Port Book and News in Port Angeles, Washington, and I write the store's monthly newsletter. Like most booksellers, I'm subscribed to a stack of other stores' newsletters too. I started reading them properly: one store at a time, five or six months of issues, every section and every subject line, until I could say what each one is doing and whether it works.
These are those readings. Each one goes through a single newsletter the way you'd go through a book you wanted to learn from: when it arrives and from whom, whose voice it's in, what the subject line promises, what it asks of a reader, what it looks like on a phone with the images turned off. The stores are named, and so is what's thin.
The first three come from a town of a few hundred people at the edge of a national seashore, an academic bookstore across the street from the University of Chicago, and a store on the Kitsap side of the water from us that's about to turn fifty. The one I hold all of them up against is Phinney Books in Seattle. The newsletter I write was modeled on it, so I'm not neutral, and its reading comes fourth.
If you write a newsletter for a store, these are for you.