What Would Anne Lamott Do?
A few years post-college, I accepted a job with a local hotel and restaurant as their Marketing and PR Manager. Back then, the concept of brands using social media was still relatively new, which meant my tasks involved real-life networking, local collaborations, in-house campaigns, and a handful of print magazine ads.
Even once Instagram entered the picture, I had no planning software, no editorial calendar, no policies or strategies to consult. Rather, I simply walked around the property snapping photos and editing them with the in-app filters, publishing content on a whim, in real time.
Down in the kitchen of our farm-to-table restaurant, my friend Brad1 could regularly be found butchering his own meat. I can’t tell you how many times I’d wander down there for a behind-the-scenes photo, only to be greeted by Brad holding up part of a pig carcass in one hand, a cleaver in the other, enthusiastically offering to pose for Instagram.
(Fear not: it didn’t take a social media masterclass to know this was a bad idea.)
The full extent of my digital media efforts included a little bit of social media, email campaigns through Mailchimp, and a simple Wordpress blog promoting our wedding venue to potential brides. I had a pretty good handle on the few platforms I managed, and did my best to stay creative and innovative. My second year of employment, I won “Marketer of the Year” in a company-wide award ceremony, earning me name recognition not only within my own hotel, but also within the entire hospitality group, a chain of 37 properties in all.
I remember being so proud of that award at the time, positively beaming.
I was definitely on the right career path: marketing.
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When I think of how writing and marketing are connected, I would not hesitate to tell you that writing is definitely, certainly, undeniably part of marketing.
I’ve been a lot slower to embrace the idea that marketing is part of being a writer.
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The year is 2020. Feeling increasingly disenchanted with social media, I decide to create a newsletter.
Starting an email list from scratch is a humbling process. Every time I share an Instagram story with a “subscribe here” link, I feel like I’m standing on the corner of a busy intersection wearing a sandwich board, yelling into the abyss.
Hi! Hello! Yes, you! Wanna sign up for my emails?!! Anyone?? Anyone??
Regardless of the slow growing numbers, my little Flodesk newsletter quickly becomes one of my favorite creative outlets. I like writing longform pieces and showing up in people’s inboxes far more than forcing my stories into 2,000 characters only to battle against an unpredictable algorithm. Because of this, I start Googling, researching, and chatting with friends about pivoting my creative energy.
I ask around, “Hey, if I want to spend less time on social media and more time growing a newsletter, how would I do that?”
The search results, online forums, and my own peers in the industry offer up the same answer, the same secret sauce: If you want to grow your email list, you need to make a lead magnet.
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This directive becomes a persistent buzzing in my ear—lead magnet, lead magnet, I gotta make a lead magnet. Every month I have what feels like a hundred tasks to complete, and “make a lead magnet” becomes that one thing, like calling the dentist, that keeps getting bumped to the next day, the next week, the next month. But it’s always in my head, the golden ticket to growing my email list, the hack I desperately need to implement. Lead magnet, lead magnet, I gotta make a lead magnet.
I start paying attention to other people’s lead magnets, and begin to see them everywhere. Jenna Kutcher has three offers, right on her home page. Get my awesome worksheet! My free download! Free presets! The more and more I poke around, the more I realize how many writers offer lead magnets on their websites. Everywhere I look, there are freebies and guides and downloads galore. Sign up here! Sign up here! Get this Awesome Free Thing!
I suddenly feel dumb, insecure, and woefully behind.
Lead magnet, lead magnet, I gotta make a lead magnet.
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As I am prone to do with my textbook Enneagram 3 energy, I want my lead magnet to be good. Really good.
I start thinking about it while I drive. While I take a shower. While I walk around the grocery store. Finally I land on what I think is a relatively good idea: five creative hacks for getting out of a rut. It’s helpful, addresses a felt need, and feels very in line with my own work and passions. Check, check, check.
I begin writing the material. Because this lead magnet is about creativity, obviously it should look beautiful. Obviously I need the perfect template. I spend five, six, seven (okay, ten) hours researching templates across Canva, Creative Market, and Pinterest.
(Part of those hours involve loading some of my content into said template, deciding I don’t like it, and then starting over with a different one.)
Finally I land on a design, and start creating my PDF—page by page. I dutifully copy and paste paragraphs from a Google document, only to realize I have written way too much text for the space allotted in the perfect template I have spent ten hours designing. So I copy, paste, and then delete half of what I wrote. Repeat. Then I need photos to accompany each page. Export images from Lightroom. Upload to Canva. Repeat. Repeat.
Another seven, eight, nine (okay, twelve) hours later, I finish the PDF.
Export the file. Find a typo. Fix typo. Export the file again.
Now I have to figure out how to actually create the lead magnet flow in Flodesk. The process is somewhat intuitive, but it still takes me one, two, three (okay, four) hours to finish setting everything up.
Then I realize I need to build a form to promote the lead magnet, and I’m not going to tell you how many hours that took but it was more than one and less than six. It takes me something like seven tries with different images and graphics to get the form looking good on both desktop and mobile versions.
Finally, FINALLY, the lead magnet is built, set up in my email provider, with working forms on my website and social media bio.
This process, from start to finish, takes roughly 31 hours to complete.
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The night I finish my lead magnet, I wonder who else, of my personal writing heroes, might have a newsletter I am not yet subscribed to. I go searching for Anne Lamott’s. Surely Anne Lamott has an email list to share book news, interviews, workshops, etc, right?
Within minutes, I discover not only does Anne Lamott not have an email list, she also does not have a website. And it’s there, sitting on the edge of my bed, holding my phone in my hand, browser open to the domain www.annelamott.com, which is currently for sale, that I begin howling with laughter.
My husband looks at me as if I am drunk. The joke is getting funnier by the minute. I cannot contain myself. I laugh and laugh and laugh, until my stomach hurts, until tears are rolling down my face.
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I have been writing my entire life, and have been fortunate enough to even make writing part of my career, a privilege I do not take for granted. And while I forever want to be a writer’s writer, I can still get swept up in the tornado of marketing advice out there.
In Rembrandt Is In The Wind, Russ Ramsey writes,
The mastery of something leads to a greater enjoyment of it. Singers, musicians, painters, writers, athletes, and artists of all stripes know this. The harder we work at something, the more we are able to enjoy it. Annie Dillard said it another way: “Who will teach me to write? The page, the page, that eternal blankness.”
There’s nothing wrong with building a lead magnet, of course, but spending 31 hours building a lead magnet is not going to make me a better writer. Developing a social media strategy is not going to make me a better writer. Creating a Pinterest plan and listening to the Jenna Kutcher podcast and doing whatever X, Y, Z advice promises to help me sell more books is not going to make me a better writer.
The thing that is going to make me a better writer is the act of writing. Practice, practice, and more practice. (Also reading.) (Also having my work critiqued.)
Here’s something I am learning and re-learning: part of being a writer’s writer is knowing how to put—and keep—marketing in its proper place.
Please hear me when I say: I’m not trying to pitch writing and marketing against one another. I believe they can co-exist in harmony. What I am saying, though, is sometimes we have to prioritize our creative energy. And I’m not sure that spending 31 hours on a lead magnet was a good use of mine.
Listening to all the trendy marketing gurus does not lead to the mastery of what I actually want to master, which is the craft of writing. I want to master the craft of writing for my own enjoyment, as Russ Ramsey suggests, but also for the delight and fulfillment of obediently stewarding my God-given creative gifts.
I believe this is a good and important question for writers to come back to: What, exactly, do we want to master?
And, hey, if you need a little help answering that question, maybe start with this: What would Anne Lamott do?
Journaling prompt:
Write about a time you got swept up in a tornado of advice about marketing or platform-building. Be honest. Be funny. Lean into the ridiculousness of it all. What did you learn in the process?
*Brad is his real name, and he is a famous chef now.
**My sincere apologies to any vegetarians reading this.
