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Questions for the Cook

How to improve an abysmal email open rate?

This one comes from Nicole, an oil painter from Australia, who shared with me that her open rate to her emails is around 3%. That’s the lowest I’ve ever heard, and I empathize that it would be discouraging. Who wants to spend time crafting emails when you know very few people will read them?

As shockingly low as it is, there are ways to improve it, starting with your email service provider. Nicole told me she’s using Shopify Email Marketing as her provider, which, from personal experience, is one of the worst for email deliverability. This is what I would do in Nicole’s situation:

1. Change service providers. I recommend Beehiiv for most people (free to anyone up to 2,500 addresses).
2. Make sure what you’re sending isn’t sending red flags to Gmail.
3. DO NOT send from a Gmail, Yahoo, or general public email address. Only use one that is unique to your business (you@yourbusiness.com)
4. Once you’ve moved your list, let people know you’ve moved. It’s possible they haven’t seen your messages in a long time.
5. After sending a few messages over time, clean that list of cold subscribers.

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​I wrote a post on The Dave about re-starting a tired list. In it, I break down all the necessary steps to improving open rates and establishing a new relationship with subscribers.

Self-Publishing Is In a Decline, But Should You Care?

I’ve never met a creative person who didn’t have some level of aspiration to self-publish, whether that’s books, magazines, pamphlets, or fan zines. However, the effort is often a labor of love. Print publishing can be expensive, and finding an audience within your audience to buy those books and zines can be a struggle.

This graph from Google Trends shows that interest in self-publishing has stagnated, if not declined, over the last year (I even went five years out, and the lines are the same, except Amazon KDP). The reality is that most of us don’t have the right size of audience to make self-published projects economically viable.

There’s an expression in the industry, “If you want to make a small fortune in publishing, start with a big fortune.” You won’t get rich in publishing, but there are other considerations.

Legacy: Having a print version of your creativity to show your family, friends, or loyal followers is a worthy pursuit. It doesn’t have to sell off the shelves to be notable to them.

Proof: When you print your own projects, you’ve done a thing that most will not.

Protection: If you combine many of your pieces in book form and then send that book to the Copyright Office, instead of registering individual pieces, you can register them all at once.

Clout: When people who know what you do see the physical manifestation of your creativity, it elevates you in their minds.

Those things are meaningless, though, unless you do it for yourself first. Don’t go into a print project thinking it will significantly improve your business because it won’t. In fact, you might lose money on it. Do it for the love, and you’ll never regret the decision.

Art Snack: Brooke Elayne Hargis

Brooke is a dedicated subscriber, but that had no bearing on sharing her art here today (okay, maybe a little). Since we first connected, I’ve quietly binged her content on Instagram, and I appreciate her loose and fun illustrative style. I’m especially fond of her recent self-portrait, which doesn’t do justice to how ripped she is.

​Website | Instagram​

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Small Bites

📹 - Because a changing algorithm is always the most fun thing to deal with, Instagram shared that longer Reels (90 seconds or longer) can damage engagement only months after sharing they were testing long-form videos.​

🐝 - Beehiiv is the best (in my opinion) email newsletter service for people trying to grow and monetize their lists. Get your first month free. *

💸 - Are you underpricing your art? Probably.​

📖 - You're going to finish that book project, aren't you? Eric Jorgensen is the CEO of Scribe Publishing, and you may not need his services, but ​he's got some deep-cut lessons​ for you anyway.

🕺🏻 - In a move that definitely stopped all the dancing and lipsynching for at least 15 seconds, TikTok’s top lobbyist did the Renegade right out the door after being pressured by Congress to drop the social media app as a client.​

🛍️ - Your kids aren’t like you. We used to go to the mall with our friends. Your kids will buy vintage t-shirts and minimalist art while watching people dance and lipsynch.

🏪 - Instagram is opening up its Creator Marketplace, which means what I just said above is now going to be a more crowded space.

🧠 - Failure is a mindset, and like all mindsets, it can be overcome, even without mass quantities of chocolate.

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Dessert

When someone asks how your "little art thing" is going.