Dear Readers,
As a fledgling newsletter author, I’ve found that being discovered is not easy.
You have no built-in audience, and at least initially, little in the way of search engine traffic. One thing that helps in this case are newsletter directories, where you submit your newsletter for inclusion and audiences interested in newsletters might find your entry, click on it and check it out.* It also helps build backlinks to your site, which, assuming I understand it correctly, improves your search engine status in some way.
*For those interested in a listing of newsletter directories, I recommend this one by Casey Boticello of
and this one by Newsletter Crew.What I’ve learned is that, sadly, very few of these directories included ‘film,’ ‘TV,’ or ‘media’ as categories of newsletter, not to mention that very few film and TV newsletters appear on them in general. An exception is the excellent Inboxreads, which recently created a ‘film’ category, one that as I recall was not there when I submitted my newsletter a year ago.* But even with this, there were little to no dedicated sections, despite the fact that there are numerous film and TV newsletters across Substack, Revue, and other sites (though primarily on Substack).
* My fellow Substackers, I strongly recommend submitting your publication to Inboxreads if you haven’t already. It is, in my opinion, the best overall newsletter directory out there, it is not hard to get accepted, and it can drive some good traffic/subscriptions to your site.
Launching FTNC
So, after doing some thinking, I decided to make my own directory and make it all about film and TV newsletters, hopefully shedding more light on the subject, and helping some publications with discovery. It took a while to determine exactly how and where to place it, how many entries to include, etc.
One of the biggest issues was the formatting.
I had considered placing it on Medium for a while, as Medium has excellent embedded links, so the post would arguably look more visually interesting. But I ultimately came to realize Substack was the best home for it, as most of the links would be Substack publications.* Thankfully, Substack introduced more formatting options over the past year or so, including anchor links, mentions and pull quotes.
This allowed me to come up with a simple yet effective final design for what I’m calling FTNC - The Film and Television Newsletter Catalogs.
*I initially had a few non-Substack newsletters listed as well, but the majority were from Revue, and Revue unfortunately wound up going belly up by the time I was ready to publish this, so I decided to exclude them for the time being.
I didn’t know what to expect and I am really quite floored by the positive reception of the directory. Thank you to everyone who has liked, shared, commented on, or signed up after reading FTNC! It means a lot and I hope you find it to be a valuable resource.
Coming Attractions
If you’ve been following me for a little while, you might’ve noticed that the posting in December-January has been a little erratic, and this is due to the fact that there was a lot of stuff to do IRL during the Winter Holiday months.
My regular publication schedule has been disrupted. So, the time has come for T.V., like a network series back in the olden days, to go on hiatus, so production can catch up with the airdates. That is, I will be taking a break from publishing for the month of February (with the exception of a digest entry).
Hopefully, by March I will have managed to get things back on schedule, so the final 3 reviews of Servant S2 and a long tentpole article should be showing up next. And then, I intend to keep doing 4-5 posts regularly per month until the end of July.
But we’ll see. The best laid plans, and all that.
Also, since I’m addressing everyone directly here, a belated Happy New Year!
Best,
Mikhail Skoptsov