3 things I learned from writing this newsletter

Plus, the best 25 books I read this year

Next week is that magical maniacal holiday week, where Tuesday feels like Saturday and early afternoons feels like late evenings and movies run into each other and sugar highs turn to lows and panettone is for breakfast, lunch, and dinner until it runs out.

So before it all begins, I am basking in my final moments of solitude. I am sitting in the delightful Ace Hotel lobby, reviewing my year. I try to do this every December: I look back at my year’s goals, see what I accomplished at home and at work and in life, give myself a high five, review the projects I abandoned, and start to form intentions for the new year.

First up: This newsletter. I started it (and my gratitude-focused social feed) in anticipation of my book launch in April 2021. The two formats allowed me different ways to share my knowledge and passion for non-cheesy gratitude, all while getting the word out about my book, of which I am so proud.

This year, I paused on my newsletter and social for a time because I wasn’t exactly sure why I was here. I wasn’t sure what my goal was, if it wasn’t selling books. It’s something I tell my content marketing clients all the time: First, set your goals. And then we can make a content plan to support them.

So what are my goals with this newsletter and my Instagram, moving forward?

To help me answer that question, I am taking a page from my content marketing work and looking under the hood. I was curious which newsletters performed the best and worst this year, hoping it will help me formulate a plan for the future. Here are three insights:

Insight #1: Vulnerable writing resonates. The post with the highest open rate and the most likes was Why I’m trying to read LESS: Unexpected takeaways from a job search. In that post, I was trying to figure out what I want to be doing in my work and my creative projects, with this newsletter and my free time. (Today’s newsletter picks up that conversation.) I included a confession about my book journey: “Sales were modest. I put a lovely book I was so proud of into the world. It was translated into two other languages. I still on occasion receive a handwritten, very personal piece of fan mail about it. It was a wonderful experience, but it was not game-changing.” (The real insight here is probably that I should be writing more intriguing subject lines! I tried to for this one—did it work??)

Insight #2: I don’t need to be unfailingly positive. The post with the most comments and shares was Should we all stop trying to be likable? I'll go first, about the day a substitute tennis teacher ignored me and made me feel invisible. I’m rereading the post right now and LOLing. (Sample line: “I felt heat start in my belly and rise to my cheeks and then, after he clapped for a fellow tennis player, I blurted out, with a big smile, ‘Well, I guess my serve is PERFECT, because you haven’t said one word to me about it!’”) I mean, how wonderful that this sort of petty airing of grievances was one of the most popular posts in a gratitude newsletter! We all contain multitudes! As Bruce Feiler says: Write about your toothaches. Meaning, write from a place of indignation and righteous anger. Write what eats you up inside. And for me, what drove me insane this year was a tennis instructor pretending I wasn’t there. (Another sample line: “It’s become a cliché, that women become invisible as we age. But if we’re treated like ghosts, we might as well start haunting.”)

Insight #3: You are an incredible community. You are 2,700 people strong, and you really read my emails! The 2023 email with the lowest open rate—Anyone else thinking about gratitude?—still had 50%, which just wows me. (20% is a good open rate benchmark.) People are too busy to open their emails! But you open mine, and I am so grateful for that.

When I looked back at this year’s newsletters, mostly I learned that I LIKE writing them. In 2023 I slowed down on this newsletter because three years past my book launch, it’s been hard to justify the time it takes. This newsletter doesn’t exactly pay me my hourly rate! But gratitude is looking at “the contours of what is there, instead of the shadows of what isn’t,” to paraphrase my own self in my book’s final chapter. And what is right here is an engaged community of 2,700 people who are legitimately interested in what I have to say. The contours are beautiful. It will be my privilege to make time to write letters to you next year, and I promise to write from my toothaches and from my soft and tender places. I won’t plan it out too much, and I won’t hold back. Here’s to more connection and joy and gratitude and grievances in 2024. I wish I could serve you all a messy Korean fried chicken slider.

Bonus: book recs!

In this year’s most liked email, I explained why reading 78 books in 2022 wasn’t actually a great thing for me, that I was using it as a crutch, that I was reading instead of doing. I set a more modest reading goal for 2023: 50 books. I hit it almost on the nose!

Books I read in 2023: 48 (might be 50 by EOY—I have some delightful reads on my TBR and a lot of couch time ahead)

Books I hearted: 29

Books I hearted twice: 3 (Demon Copperhead, Brother of the More Famous Jack, Holes)

Books I hearted that you probably already know about: Tom Lake, Sea of Tranquility, Sam, I Have Some Questions for You, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, Crying in H Mart, Happy Place, Meet Me at the Lake, The It Girl, Bury Your Dead and Trick of the Light (# 6 and 7 of Louise Penny’s Gamache series; start with #1)

Books I hearted that you may not have heard of: Sorrow and Bliss, Homecoming, Again, Rachel, Run Towards the Danger, Wishful Drinking, Georgie, All Along, What You Are Looking For Is in the Library, Someone Who Isn’t Me, The Woman in the Costello, I’ll Have What She’s Having, You, Again, Amsterdam: A History of the World’s Most Liberal City

Before I go, I want to veer off topic and say that it’s been a hard time to be alive, a hard time to be online. The violence, the celebration of violence, the loss of life, the casual anti-semitism—it’s all been heartbreaking, to say the least. My New Year’s wish for all of us is to get to a more peaceful, empathic place. I will end with a quote that’s been ringing in my head. It’s from one of my hearted books, Amsterdam, from a Holocaust survivor: “Life is absurd. It has no meaning. But it has beauty, and wonder, and we have to enjoy that.“

xo Gina