The idea: a mailing list that sends your best work, not your newest

About a year ago I launched Saturday Comics, a weekly email list that sends people a programming comic every Saturday. I did not announce it on this blog at the time, so now seems like a good moment to explain how it works and what happened in the first year.

The broader idea is useful beyond comics: if you want a mailing list but do not have time to write new email every week, consider a list that cycles through your best past work.

Why the list exists

The idea came from three problems I kept hitting:

  • Not everyone is on Twitter. Most of my draft zine pages are posted to Twitter, but many people are not there, for good reasons. Posting progress only on Twitter left those people out.
  • Weekly lists were unfinishable. I had tried several times to maintain a standard weekly mailing list. The pattern was always the same: announce, collect subscribers, then email the list once and never again.
  • Good work was hard to find. I have a clear sense of which of my comics are most useful, but nobody else had any way to locate those without digging through everything.

Sending favourites instead of fresh pages

Unlike this blog, which mostly shares new work, Saturday Comics uses a different model. Subscribers get a favourite comic — something I think represents the most valuable or interesting pages, rather than whatever draft I happen to be working on that week. New readers are more likely to connect with that kind of curated back catalogue than with current progress updates.

Mechanics: an automated sequence

The list itself is simple to describe: one programming comic lands in an inbox each Saturday. But it is not a conventional newsletter. Rather than sending the same newest issue to everyone, there is one fixed sequence of emails. Anyone who signs up starts at the beginning of that sequence.

For instance, the first email in the sequence is the comic “bash tricks.” If a person subscribed today, that is what they get this Saturday, regardless of when anyone else subscribed.

Implementation is done with a ConvertKit sequence. The tool shows a list of subject lines with schedules — the first email goes out immediately, and each subsequent one goes out one week after the previous one. Editing content is straightforward.

Reality check: 29 weeks over the first year

The sequence is currently 29 emails long, covering about seven months of Saturdays. Note this is less than 52: producing an email every week did not happen. In practice, I add a batch of five emails, those go out weekly for five weeks, subscriptions go quiet for a while, then a new batch appears and weekly delivery picks up again.

Sporadic weekly cadence is not what one might call perfect. But it is still a large upgrade over “never emailing the list at all,” which was my prior track record.

To date about 5000 people have subscribed. Engagement looks encouraging: I regularly receive replies along the lines of “thanks for the comic this week, I loved it,” and I also see people posting on Twitter that they enjoyed that week’s email.

I treat this list as marketing, but over time my view has shifted to seeing marketing for a business like mine as simply building trust by helping people learn things. Optimizing conversion rates has never been helpful for my situation. Instead, the goal is to email content people will genuinely find useful. Each email links to the zine the comic came from if someone wants to buy a copy, but the feel is low-pressure — buying is welcome, so is just enjoying the Saturday comic.

Thinking of a mailing list as distributing your favourite previous work rather than your latest work was new to me. With roughly a year of distance, I am happy with the experiment so far. If you are curious, you can sign up here.