The writing process that helped me publish 100 newsletters
On the craft of the CMO journal, plus all the tools and software I use
As I hit the 100th post on the CMO Journal last month, I organised a session on my process of writing, editing, and producing this newsletter. A group of 15 to 20 readers attended. I kept it small on purpose, I wanted it to be intimate.
I talked them through the newsletter, how I came to writing it, how it got to where it has, and so on. They asked great questions, even made me rethink a couple of my assumptions.
I realised then that there was some merit in writing this down, as a larger audience might find it useful.
The CMO Journal started during the first wave of the pandemic as a way to write my way out of boredom and monotony. I had just joined a new role and was thinking about a lot of things that needed creative release. Plus a recent blog of mine, published on Medium, had been widely read and shared. This gave me confidence to start this project.
Ideas and how I organise them
During the lockdown, I wasn’t short of ideas to write: There was a backlog of marketing things in my head I needed to think through and that gave me enough material for the first few months. I repurposed my old writing, mails I’d written to colleagues and proteges, and even to-do lists from old notebooks that became prompts to start from.
I used a very simple way to structure these ideas into readable pieces: Each edition was going to be a standalone essay and shareable on its own, so I had to start with a title. I was constantly reading marketing stuff anyway, so whenever I read a passage I knew could be used in a newsletter, I saved it.
I use rather simple mechanisms. All my ideas, notes, and passages are saved in a WhatsApp group that contains only me. It’s the easiest way to record thoughts and ideas that occur when I’m out walking, or in a cab, and generally not near a computer.
For example, the "don’t be a but" idea in the screengrab above was saved on 29th January (you can’t see that date), and it became the essay "the one word that will make you a better leader" on 8th February.
The idea "Against the content calendar" is not something I’ve got to yet.
Clearer thoughts go directly into drafts in Substack as fully formed titles and short passages that I can start writing whenever I want to.
These, for example, are a few ideas in drafts:
The writing and the tools
I write on Apple Notes and when I have the internet, directly on Substack. They are the simplest and have no real distractions, so they suit me well.
This particular piece is bring written on a flight because I know the idea and all I needed to do was open Apple Notes and bang away.
For work writing, I prefer Google Docs over Notion for the same reason: I don’t want to fiddle with the software and do cool things. I want to write and I want to share, that’s it.
I have recently been captivated by Otter, the dictation software that can transcribe your speech and save it as text. It looks and feels incredibly useful, but I have yet to use it seriously. It works well enough in the tests I’ve run. But I’m an old school man of letters, and it takes me time to adopt any kind of technology. I firmly believe that before changing stuff, you must understand clearly why the old model worked for you in the first place. Chesterton’s fence is a thing.
For images I simply use Pexels, the free stock images and photographs site. I could do better, I know. Work gives me access to Canva, where I can probably make images that work better as thumbnails, but I again go back to my simple aim with the newsletter: I want to write and share. If I start using Canva, I’ll fiddle with it until I make the perfect image, and I don’t have time for that. Writing is tough enough as it is.
Where new ideas come from
One question in the session was where I got new ideas from. I’m constantly thinking marketing, so I get a lot of ideas, but only a few are worth writing about. And I’m also reading a lot, so there are viewpoints in my head I’m wrestling with. That translates into arguments and opinions, good or bad, that I can use. But the most important point is experience. My experience and learnings from 10 years as a marketer informs and give credibility to this newsletter, which is why you read it at all.
How I edit
I have a hack for this. I change the font on whatever software I’m using, or copy-paste the whole thing into another platform entirely. I then read it again. This is enough for me to pick up things that would get missed. As for the narrative, I rely on my own judgement for what is good and what’s not, but at times I have to move paragraphs and passages up and down to see if it reads better or worse. When I’m confused or doubtful, I ask the lady to give it a read. She worked as a journalist early in her career and understands narrative too. If she says it doesn’t work, I try to improve it from her lens.
And that’s more or less it. I hit send, and then you read it.
Last word
Finally, a word on the consistency. It’s deliberate. Forcing myself to think and write every week keeps me sharp, but it’s not just that. I’ve realised that any craft requires constant, deliberate practice. I need to do it even when I feel like I can’t, or don’t want to. That’s what it means to be a professional.
What I want to be is a better writer. So I write.