Kreizman’s Tumblr account’s 160,000 followers dwarf her approximately 1,000 TinyLetter subscribers, she prefers the more intimate relationship. “Of course I couldn’t just do one promoting myself, because that’s stupid, so it became a way for me to weigh in on all the things I loved that week,” she said.“If it were a ton of work, I would stop - this is a little side thing.” Kreizman began her newsletter, which runs down her weekly media diet, after her book based on her popular Tumblr, “ Slaughterhouse 90210,” was published and she still had events and writing to publicize. If I knew it was going to be published, I’d be freaked out and probably not do it.”
Curry’s self-explanatorily titled TinyLetter, “ Coffee & TV,” “was for my friends who don’t live in New York, and coffee and TV was a way to organize my thoughts to do something that wasn’t just a diary entry, to keep my powers of observation sharp,” she said. “I was a blocked writer and wanted to start writing something that was low stakes and didn’t have to be perfect,” said Ruth Curry, a co-publisher of the independent literary imprint Emily Books. Their creators, though, tend to profess modesty. Unlike a personal email or postal letter, however, TinyLetters go to multiple recipients, just like that old family newsletter, and a performative element inevitably enters into the composition. The newsletters are titled and usually follow a theme, such as Justin Wolfe’s daily “thank you notes,” nearly all of whose sentences begin with the words “I’m thankful” and which functions as a gratitude journal.īucking the stricter limits of Twitter and Facebook posts, these TinyLetters can be any length, and can be seen as an epistolary backlash to the complexity-stunting brevity of social media. With its twee name and Etsy-fied graphic design (the “i” in “TinyLetter” is sometimes dotted with a heart), it’s more of a small-batch brew tailored to the creative class, particularly those seeking to hone their prose skills in a semipublic forum.
TinyLetter, a free service, caps subscribers at 5,000 per newsletter (users who want more can pay for a MailChimp account), so it is not a platform for celebrities who want to capitalize on their popularity.
Thanks to, among other services, TinyLetter, a division of the email marketer MailChimp, people who want to apprise a subscriber base of their thoughts and goings-on have a new, straight-to-inbox outlet.īut this is not quite the Wild West of standard social media, in which just about anyone can follow anyone and comment on or repost previous updates.
We now find ourselves in the era of the personal email newsletter, an almost retro delivery system that blurs borders between the public and the private, and mashes up characteristics of the analog and digital ages.