Did you know author newsletters are some of the most opened email messages by subscribers? You just opened this one, right?
Author Jane Friedman writes in The Business of Being a Writer (second edition), “Author newsletters, no matter what they contain, enjoy some of the highest open rates and best subscriber loyalty in the marketing business.” I agree with this statement based on my own experience of this modest effort (and audience number): You are loyal as subscribers and you open my emails. Thank you!
As someone who also subscribes to other author email newsletters, I love reading the latest publications and adventures of my favorite writers. I want to know what they are doing and how they are doing it. How do they find publication outlets, find each other for advice and collaboration, and find reason to keep going? What do they do for fun, that informs their craft?
I learn from their practice (as much as they care to share) and use the envy I might feel as inducement to dig deeper and keep going in my own efforts. The business of writing isn’t straight forward (I consider my writing a business; I do it to make money as well as provide a service to readers and express myself), and finding places for our work does not happen in a vacuum. Writers knock on a lot of doors to get work or find homes for our ideas for a story.
So it’s gratifying when a job comes to me, versus something I pitch. Two editors reached out to me after using search terms “writer bird watching” and “birding writer Washington.” Neither editor had ever heard of me: they found me as a result of the 13 years of describing myself as a writer about birding and bird watching on my website and posted content.
I’ve talked to other writer friends whose work falls into specific niches as mine does, and they report that this has happened to them, too. The slow and steady investment of consistency on a website is not flash like social media, but it paid off for me like compound interest in a forty year retirement plan.
The first editor to find me was for a van-life magazine Rova, and the result was this fun story about how to add birding to your van life. This was an assignment ideal for testimonials from adventurous rarity-chasing birders. Four birders from across North America shared their tips for birding from a car or RV, and below is a screenshot of the first two pages of the story.
First two pages of the August/September 2022 Rova story, with a beautiful photograph of a Cedar waxwing by Emilie Chen, one of the birders featured in the piece.
The next editor to find me was from Reflections Magazine, a membership magazine of The Bellevue Club, in Bellevue, Washington. She wanted a regional story about birding opportunity in Washington State to appeal to her upwardly mobile and outdoorsy club membership. What an opportunity to tell local people from the start how to be ethical birders, and direct them to established birding locations so informed. That story about winter birding in Washington State appears in the March/April 2026 Reflections Magazine.
First two pages of the March/April 2026 Reflections story.
I’ve found a place as a writer in a niche topic area. I never doubted I would find homes for what I had to say, even as specific as “Birding Culture” seems to observers not embedded in my world. I write about what I want to read in my pastime’s media, what I wasn’t seeing written. So I offered to write it and people said yes (the answer is always “No” unless you ask. I asked).
I’ve twice been met with incredulous responses socially when sharing what I write about: “Birding culture, what even is that?” and “Birding culture? Do you find enough work writing only about that?”
Why yes indeed, I do.
Niche writing affords me curiosity about all the other niche markets that exist in the world, and how others are making a satisfying side (or full-time) gig, both creatively and monetarily (I have a full time job that pays the bills. Writing is my side job). All of us odd-balls writing about our obsessions, basically. And when an editor finds us for that exact obsession, yes, indeed.
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