Hello Reader How to get readers to read your next work - the next book, social post or email? Anybody who publishes - anything, anywhere - knows this problem. How do professionals deal with it? (Hello. This is my newsletter.) This week Audrey Ward, serials editor on the Sunday Times, told me how she chooses the best material for publication, then separates it into episodes so that readers who finish Part 1 are eager - desperate! - to read Part 2. Audrey, Zooming from the office. As it...

Hello Reader Greetings from Umbria in Italy, where I’m working this week with my friends at The Idler Academy. As usual I’m drawing pictures, in intervals between sessions teaching rhetoric and impro. But im also thinking of Special Projects members, of whom there are several new one this month. Hello!, members new and not-new. Thank you for putting your trust in me. I’m writing this email on my iPad, and have a strong suspicion it may raise as many new questions as it answers old ones. If...

Hello Last week, without giving it a lot of thought, I posted on Instagram a photo of the last pill in my last packet of anti-depressants. I'd originally taken the photo, and marked it up, as a kind of mini-celebration to share with people in my house. Obviously (?), I felt a bit exposed sharing this on Instagram, but why the heck not. After all, I’ve posted all kinds of things about having been mentally fragile in the past. Indeed, I've stood in front of huge numbers of strangers in busy...