Writers in the Storm

by Lisa Norman

Less math, more magic

I left the panel feeling horrified. A talk meant to inspire had been hijacked into a cascade of numbers: list size, open rates, categories, schedules. The room grew quieter and quieter. Writers weren’t scribbling ideas with excitement. They were sinking under the weight of all the shoulds.

Afterward, several people came up to me, the quietly encouraging one, not with praise but with trust. “Could I pay you to just do it for me?” one asked. They weren’t encouraged. They were overwhelmed.

I walked out angry.

Common newsletter advice had left writers so swamped they wanted to hand the whole thing over to someone else. That panel went against everything I believe in. The voice of should had drowned out quiet encouragement. The statistics of one author’s experience had overridden every other perspective.

I have statistics too—drawn from hundreds of authors across genres. I’ve watched beginners get their first subscribers and seen bestsellers with huge lists.

And here’s what I know: numbers often obscure the real value. Tiny lists can outperform massive ones. Accidental lists sometimes succeed where years of shoulds have failed.

The Promise and the Pressure

Numbers aren’t bad. They can give you insight into how your readers engage. But when we elevate stats into commandments, they become overwhelming, and sometimes misleading.

I once had a newsletter show a 97% open rate. Impressive, right? Except… it wasn’t real. Metrics glitch. Privacy settings block tracking. Numbers can’t tell the whole story. There's a lot more to having a newsletter than just a marketing tool.

A 10,000-subscriber list might work for one author. Another might have greater success with 200. What matters isn’t the number at the bottom of your dashboard, but the relationship with the people behind those numbers (linked post has stats and graphs).

The Myths That Overwhelm

Myth 1: Bigger list = better results.
Truth: Engagement matters more than volume. A smaller, invested audience can sustain a career. One reader who replies to every email is more valuable than a hundred who never even open.

They’re also cheaper to maintain.

Myth 2: Newsletters must go out every week.
Truth: Frequency works best when it fits your rhythm and your readers. Some authors thrive with a weekly note, others connect best once a month or less. The right schedule is the one you can sustain with joy, the one that gets readers excited when it hits their inbox.

Myth 3: Readers should be sorted into neat categories.
Truth: Readers are people, not data points. They rarely fit into perfect boxes, and often surprise you.

Instead of worrying about segments, share something genuine that resonates across categories. Humanity connects more than labels.

Myth 4: Sign-ups are just transactions.
Truth: A newsletter thrives on relationship, not obligation. When readers choose to join because they connect with your voice, that bond is stronger than any clipboard sign-up or funnel you force them into (Alicia McCalla is a fantastic example of an author who knows her readers).

A single heartfelt yes is more powerful than a hundred reluctant sign-ups.

Readers aren’t transactions—they’re treasures.

What a VA Can (and Can’t) Do

A virtual assistant can absolutely help with the technical side: formatting, scheduling, automations. That’s a gift. But the heart of a newsletter can’t be outsourced. The most powerful emails come in your voice, carrying your personality, speaking directly to your fans.

3 Quick Ways to Make Your Newsletter More Human

• Tell one small story. Share a glimpse of your writing life, your desk, or a struggle you overcame. Readers connect with moments, not marketing copy.
• Ask a question. Even something simple like a favorite book that month creates dialogue. Want to make a reader’s day? Connect to them as a person.
• Offer a gift. A sneak peek, a short story, or even a recipe. A gift shows you value their presence.

Readers Are Hungry for Connection

Your email shows up in a person’s inbox. If you’ve built rapport, they’ll glance at the subject line. Hint at something they want? They’ll skim the teaser. If they trust you, they’ll open. They’ll skim, maybe read.

Give them an experience and they’ll stop. They’ll reply. They’ll engage.

Give them something fun or meaningful, and they’ll pass it on to friends.

Quick: go to your inbox.

Are there any emails you want to read right away? Why? Any you want to save and savor later?

Starting Over

Forget the word newsletter and every guilt-ridden should tied to it. We’re really talking about two simple things:

1. A list of people who love you and what you write.
2. An email, a note from you to a fan.

Can you write an email?

You’re writers. Of course you can.

Can you write something people want to read?

I’m betting you can.

Building Connection

If you’ve ever felt buried under all the advice about newsletters, you’re not alone. Many writers have done everything they were told and still felt like it didn’t work. Maybe the problem isn’t you. Maybe it’s the weight of shoulds piled on top of what could be a simple, joyful way to connect.

You don’t need to master statistics or funnels. You need a way to connect with your readers that feels sustainable, human, and yours. If you’re reading this on WITS, chances are you got here through an email. That’s proof enough that it works.

Your newsletter isn’t a spreadsheet. It’s a conversation. And conversations, real ones, are where relationships—and careers—truly grow.

That’s the real magic: less math, more connection, more joy.

Question for you: What has your experience been with newsletters? Have you felt overwhelmed by the shoulds? If you’ve given up, could the thought that it might simply be about connecting with your fans make it worth trying again?

About Lisa

Lisa Norman's passion has been writing since she could hold a pencil. While that is a cliché, she is unique in that her first novel was written on gum wrappers. As a young woman, she learned to program and discovered she has a talent for helping people and computers learn to work together and play nice. When she's not playing with her daughter, writing, or designing for the web, she can be found wandering the local beaches.

Lisa writes as Deleyna Marr and is the owner of No Stress Writing Academy. She also runs Heart Ally Books, LLC, an indie publishing firm.

Interested in learning more from Lisa? Sign up for her newsletter or check out her school, No Stress Writing Academy, where she teaches social media, organization, technical skills, and marketing for authors!

Top image by Deleyna via Midjourney.

by Kathryn Craft

Movement is a transfer of energy. You may have learned this in high school physics, but for me, the lesson became an indelible experience in dance. I could feel energy transfer from muscle to bone, from myself to a partner. I could imagine drawing energy from the earth through my body to the top of my head and beyond; I sent it from my gut through my fingertips and into the audience so that they, too, could join in the dance.

I’ve spent the last three years exploring how story also benefits from a transfer of energy, and the most important parallel is this: the choreography that coordinates dance movement is not a series of steps any more than a story is a series of black marks on a page. What captivates is the intention the mover brings to the connection between steps, just as story movement relies on the energy between words.

One of the many benefits of this fresh perspective is that you’ll stop thinking about how to tell a damn good story. Instead, you’ll build a story that your reader can enter. Once you perceive your story’s spaces, you can invite your reader into it—and then, through managing their expectations, convince them to stay.

Here are five techniques that will extend that invitation.

1. Capitalize on sweet anticipation.

Those who read novels are drawn to the long guessing game that results when story questions are raised and their answers are delayed. They want to linger in that moment when he might or might not kiss her. To inhabit a character’s dream for a bit longer before their world comes crashing down around them. To see if the journey they were on has changed them enough to face their nearly impossible climactic dilemma.

Anticipation relies on stopping short of inserting explanation into the action-reaction chain that drives a novel. Unexpected reactions pique the reader’s curiosity. And guess what our emotions are? Energy.

As your reader asks, Why would this character act that way, picture them leaning into your story, reading on to find out. You may need to reinsert the backstory later—but if you do it will be much later, when the character is now acting against their best interests and the reader must simply know why.

2. Make use of genre expectation.

The appreciation of story is subjective and quite personal. One person might read only horror; another might read anything but. Raise the right question in your opening, though, and you’ll be able to use genre expectations to invite the right reader to move into your story.

Some genre expectations:

• Suspense: How will the protagonist prevail against the threat?
• Thriller: Will the protagonist be able to save everyone from the threat?
• Horror: Will the protagonist be able to vanquish the monster?
• Adventure: Will the protagonist succeed in his quest?
• Women’s fiction: Will personal growth lead to a fresh sense of hope?
• Fantasy: How will otherworld elements help the protagonist achieve their goal?
• Mystery: Will the protagonist be able to figure out who did it?

If a novel opens with the discovery of a dead body and a forensics team finds a disturbing clue, your reader won’t wonder if the female detective will fall in love with the victim’s brother. They’ll recognize a murder mystery in their preferred subgenre of the police procedural.

A genre question is a springboard.

Non-stop action doesn’t create story movement in thriller any more than sex automatically creates story movement in a romance. You must bait your hook with a challenging story goal for the protagonist. In the case of our detective, she may recognize an artifact at the crime scene that pertains to the disappearance of her father ten years ago, but since she’s up for a promotion, she’s loath to share this potential weakness with her male colleagues.

Now the reader is trying to imagine how this evidence will point to the killer, and whether its personal significance will compromise the detective and affect her promotion.

3. Add a watcher.

Show a character undressing for bed? Meh. We all do this every night. Show someone watching this action through a second-floor window from the street, though, and the dynamic of the scene changes. The resulting tension raises reader expectation: this will be important.

Any story with a stakeout, a stalker, paparazzi, an anonymous protector, or a nosy neighbor features a watcher. Someone standing in the wings, literally or figuratively. Ghosts are effective watchers. Santa Claus sees you when you’re sleeping. A believer would argue that God is the ultimate watcher—but even a pet’s watchful glare can raise the tension when its owner is about to lie.

4. Foreshadow.

Readers love to be knocked off-balance when an expectation isn’t met, but you must take care to create a world in which this unbalancing event could be expected to take place. Introduce a witch on page 50 and the reader might throw the book against the wall; show a flower making noise as it struggles to emerge from frozen ground and that page 50 witch won’t seem so far-fetched—in fact, her presence might meet expectation without having to explain a thing.

5. Add prose support.

If you’re anything like me, you waste too much time fiddling with phrasing in your first draft. But know that the longer you spend on phrasing, the harder it will be to replace it when you realize that those words could not create the narrative momentum you’d hoped for. The truth is, prose can’t create story movement—remember, story intention lives between the words—but prose can support it.

Turns out, your goal isn’t to tell a damn good story after all.

From the flat surface of a page, you must build a story that invites the reader in. Not once, at the opening, but again and again in every scene, by raising fresh questions that manage reader expectation.

Do so and your reader will experience a story that moves.

How do you  manage reader expectations? Which of the techniques above resonated with you? Do please share with us down in the comments!

About Kathryn

Kathryn Craft’s two-decade tenures as dancer/choreographer, dance critic, and freelance developmental editor have merged to inform the perspective about story movement featured in her October 7 release, CRAFTING STORY MOVEMENT: Techniques to Engage Readers and Drive Your Story Forward. Building on her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in education, it has been her great joy to share the craft of writing by mentoring novelists, most recently through her Your Novel Year program, and by speaking at dozens of venues where people thirst to write, from writing groups, conferences, and libraries to in-patient rehabs and grief support groups. She is the award-winning author of two novels from Sourcebooks, The Art of Falling and The Far End of Happy. She lives with her husband in Doylestown, PA.

Kathryn's New Book - now on pre-order, releasing on October 7!

Some other WITS posts by Kathryn:

Where an Author's Story Begins

The Story that Holds You Back

Our Capacity for Brilliance

by Laura LeHew

Questions, questions, questions. So many questions. How can you determine if you have enough poems for a book? How do you put a manuscript together? What can you do so that you have the best chance of creating a publishable manuscript? What’s the difference between a chapbook and a book length manuscript? What is the narrative arc, how do you tie a book together, how do you order your book, sections, what is the heart/theme of your book, is the title important (yes it is)? 

Margaret Atwood says that “Publishing a book is like stuffing a note into a bottle and hurling it into the sea. Some bottles drown, some come safe to land, where the notes are read and then possibly cherished, or else misinterpreted, or else understood all too well by those who hate the message. You never know who your readers might be.”

Step 1: Print It Out

Trying to decide if you have enough material for a book length manuscript? Print everything out. Published, unpublished, mostly ready to be published—could maybe use another round of editing. Alphabetize everything you’ve printed out. Now comes the fun. Warning you’ll need a large roll of painter’s tape. Starting at the leftmost side of a room and depending on volume of poems, tape 3-5 poems down the length of the wall, starting just above eye level. See photos 1-6 from my June, 2025 writing residency at Hypatia-in-the-Woods in Shelton, WA.

Step 2: Read Your Work

Once the poems are all on the wall, read through everything out loud. Is anything tied together by language, tone, chronology, geography, topic? Something else? As you read through a second time, grab your pens and highlighters and write a one- or two-word summary of the theme/heart of the poem in the upper right corner: love—divorce—death, etc.. Circle or highlight any words or themes that are repeated like a red or raven. From this you will see the patterns of theme. 

Step 3: Find the Theme

Rearrange (lump) the poems together by the emergent theme(s). The back/last wall should now be used for poems that don’t quite seem to work. You still want to leave them up, they might get woven back into your manuscript later in the process. 

Once you have your theme like love (and) divorce the real work begins. A chapbook is approximately 26 pages or a chapter of a book. A book of poetry is typically 90 pages. Now you know if you are working on a chapbook or a book. If you have more than 26 and less than 90 you will get to decide whether you want to cut some poems out or add some more poems. 

Step 4: Ordering Your Poems

The ordering of your book is an art, a balance and there are a million ways to accomplish this. You should examine the ways other books are organized which means reading books both similar and dissimilar to your manuscript so that you can get a feel for what and how you want to order your book. Will you have sections, will they be numbered or titled or both? What is the placement or order of your poems. Is the order cohesive, does it flow correctly, is there a narrative arc within each section?

Pick your best poem and your second best poem. Place your 2^nd best poem at the beginning and your best poem as the last poem on the wall. Then try it the other way. These will cement your theme and draw your reader in. After the first poem is on the wall find the next one. The last line of your poem should flow into the first line of your next poem. In my book Dear John— the first poem is “Thermals” and the last two lines are … “you were still so angry I wrapped myself in a frost / & told you all was well.” The following poem “You Have No Punctuation” the first line “In this time of war. This thumbtack. This porch. …” keeps with the anger and builds the disappointment from the first poem. You will do this line-by-line and poem-by-poem.

Your Book's Narrative Arc

You are building your narrative arc. You will begin to see other patterns, do you have themed sections or is this all one contiguous book? If you have sections you will need to find the beginning, middle, and end to each section. Each section should itself work to build the overall arc of your book. What is the heart/theme/message/focus of the book? What is the heart/theme/message of each section? Does each section move you towards the overarching theme of the book? Much like stair steps the approximate middle poem of each section should mark a turn towards the resolving poem in each particular section. And, the approximate middle poem of your entire book marking the penultimate turn (climax) of the book towards resolution (also known as your last poem).

You will be rewriting old poems, writing new poems, grabbing poems from the wall behind you that now fit into your theme. When you are all done arranging and rearranging. Read your manuscript out loud and make any final changes, any little tweaks. Number the pages as you take them off the wall. 

Step 5: Title and Format

Give your manuscript a title. It might be a title of one of the poems in your book and that title/poem will have greater weight, it should work towards enhancing the theme. In my book Dear John—the last poem in my book is also titled “Dear John—” and speaks to the overarching theme of love. If your title of the manuscript is not a poem in your book it should also reflect the theme of the book. The working title of my current manuscript tis A Whisper of Night Moths. Night Moths are symbols of transformation. Coming from the dark to the light. This manuscript is themed around what women hold within them, that they keep hidden—rape, stalking, other hidden sorrows and how they overcome it, transcend it to be one with the world. Though there is no poem titled A Whisper of Night Moths the poems contained within are reflective of the theme of transformation.

Combine everything into a single document. In Word always use styles. Title, Heading 1 for section break, Heading 2 for poem title, etc. Use a common font like Times New Roman. Poem titles should be formatted consistently like all caps or all lowercase. If you use “&” as opposed to word “and” or other interesting formatting be sure to use the same throughout. Include a title page with your name and a title page without your name. Place a single poem on each page with a page break to the next page/poem. At the top of the page Poem Title, blank line, first line of your poem:

Poem Title

…first line

If your poem goes over to another page indicate that at the bottom (continued) and at the top of the next page include the poem title and whether it is a continued stanza or a new stanza. Two lines breaks and continue the poem. 

…

last line on page (continued)

top of next page—

“poem title”

(new stanza)

continued poem

Now that you’ve used styles insert a table of contents. Proofread proofread proofread. Make your manuscript as clean as possible. Do not give an editor a reason to reject you.

Where to Send Your Manuscript

Do the research on where to send your manuscript.

Here are several of my go-to resources for submitting. They include detailed submission information for magazines, journals, and presses. Some are free; some cost money.

1. Duotrope's Digest
2. CLMP—The Literary Press and Magazine Directory
3. Newpages.com
4. Poets and Writers
5. The Poet's Market, ISBN-13 978-1-58297-499-6
   • online for a fee, www.writersmarket.com
6. The Writers Chronicle
7. winningwriters.com
   • free for the best 150 free poetry contests
8. Emily Stoddard newsletter
9. Two Sylvia's Press

And of course, check out links on social media, get on email lists, subscribe to electronic newsletters from your favorite magazines.

Check the submission guidelines and always follow them. If you have any questions about the guidelines, don’t hesitate to contact the editor at the publishing house. Send it out.

What additional resource can you recommend for submissions?

About Laura

Laura LeHew grew up in the Midwest where she spent her childhood summers playing Man from U.N.C.L.E. and chasing fireflies. Widely published her collections include: Let Widows Be Widows (Unsolicited Press) 2022, themed around the elegiac, Dear John—(The Poetry Box) 2021 themed around love and divorce, Buyer’s Remorse (Tiger’s Eye Press—Infinities) poems on abuse, Becoming (Another New Calligraphy) a non-linear discourse on alcoholism and dementia, Willingly Would I Burn, (MoonPath Press) themed around math and science, It’s Always Night, It Always Rains, (Winterhawk Press) murder/noir and Beauty (Tiger’s Eye Press) fairy tales. She is actively seeking a home for her manuscript The Whisper of Night Moths.

Laura received her MFA from the California College of the Arts. She was on the steering committee for the Emerald Literary Guild. Laura held various positions for the Oregon Poetry Association including President, Contest Chair and Cascadia editor, she co-hosted a reading series, Poetry for the People, and has received residencies to Hypatia-in-the-Wood, PLAYA, the Montana Artists Refuge, and Soapstone. Laura currently facilitates the ;unruly poets, owns and edits Uttered Chaos, a small press and is the recipient of the 2021 Oregon Poetry Association’s (OPA) Patricia Ruth Banta Award. She spends her days taking photos of rivers and roses. Find her at: www.lauralehew.com | www.utteredchaos.org .