On small audiences

A thousand readers who answer your emails is not a consolation prize. It's the whole thing, and it always was.

We inherited a metric from an industry that needed warehouses. Print runs, shelf space, radio play — those businesses required bigness because distribution was expensive. Yours isn't.

What a small audience gives you that a large one can't: you can read every reply. You can remember names. You can write the next piece toward a specific person instead of toward an algorithm's idea of everyone.

The work gets stranger and better when you stop writing for people who were never going to read it.