How long should a newsletter be?#
Short enough that a reader can finish it without deciding to. For most small senders that is four hundred to nine hundred words, one story and the notices, which is two or three minutes on a phone.
Word count is the wrong unit to think in while writing, because it counts the masthead and the footer as though they were prose. Count reading time instead: read the draft out loud at the pace you would talk to a person, and if it takes more than four minutes you have written a monthly piece and are sending it weekly.
How long should a weekly newsletter be?#
Three hundred to six hundred words. A weekly letter is a conversation with a beat, and the value comes from arriving rather than from depth. The failure mode of a weekly issue is a second story that was cut from the monthly draft and does not need to exist.
If a weekly letter keeps coming out at nine hundred words, the problem is usually the calendar, not the writing: either the cadence is too fast for what you have to say, or there are two newsletters in the file.
How long should a monthly newsletter be?#
Six hundred to fifteen hundred, with one long piece and the rest short. A monthly issue can carry an interview, a photo with a caption that does some work, and an explanation of what the money or the hours produced.
The reason monthly tolerates more is not attention, it is expectation. A reader who has waited four weeks has already decided you are worth the wait, and an issue that is three hundred words thinner than the last one reads as a month in which nothing happened.
How long should a quarterly newsletter be?#
A quarterly letter is the long one: fifteen hundred to three thousand words, an archive rather than a note, and it works precisely because three months of material has accumulated into something worth a reader's sitting.
Two things to get right if you go this long. Break it with headings every couple of hundred words, since a quarter is skimmed rather than read, and put the dates on everything, because a March letter describes a January that has already been forgotten.
How long should a newsletter email be?#
One column, and the first hundred words carrying the whole argument. In an email the reader scrolls without committing, so a piece that needs five screens to reach its point is a piece whose point most readers will not meet.
A useful shape for a longer letter in an email: the summary at the top in three sentences, the story underneath, then the notices as a list, then the link to the full web version if you have one. That serves the two-minute reader and the twenty-minute reader from the same file.
How long should a Substack newsletter be?#
Substack issues are published as articles and delivered as email, so the reader can arrive in either mood, and eight hundred to two thousand words is ordinary there. The format that suits it is one argument in the first screen and the evidence after, because the copy that a reader chose to open is not the same reader as the one who met it in a feed.
The length question on any publishing platform is a question about the reader's starting point rather than the word ceiling, and both change with the product. Check your own editor and your own dashboard before building rules on what somebody remembers from a conference.
How long should a LinkedIn newsletter be?#
A LinkedIn issue is read inside a feed by somebody who never left it, which is the most competitive reading situation of the five on this page. Five hundred to a thousand words, with the case made in the opening paragraph, because a reader in a feed decides in a sentence rather than a scroll.
The trade-off worth knowing before you commit to the format: the audience belongs to the platform rather than to you. A newsletter with twelve hundred feed followers is not a list you can move, and before you write a year of issues there, look at what your own dashboard will give you back.
How long should a newsletter article be?#
Inside a weekly letter, two hundred and fifty to four hundred and fifty words per article. Inside a monthly, one long article of six hundred to nine hundred and the rest under three hundred.
The article length that hurts most is the one that matches nothing: four articles of four hundred words each is a newsletter of sixteen hundred words pretending to be a short one. Pick which piece is the article, cut the others to notices, and the letter gets shorter without losing content.
How long should a newsletter be in pages?#
For something printed or handed out as a PDF, one sheet of A4 front and back is the working number, and two sides is where a reader stops turning. A page is a different medium with different rules: columns are fine, links are not, and nothing in the second column gets read on a phone.
If the deliverable is a PDF attached to an email, you have made two documents and nobody will read the second one on a small screen. Write the email itself as the letter, and put the page on a web page where it can also be found by a search.
Does length decide whether people read it?#
Length is one of four things that decide it, and not the biggest. The other three: whether the reader wanted this in the first place, whether the opening is about something that involves them, and whether your mail arrives at all. A short bad letter does not get read because it is short.
Also worth saying plainly: an open is a picture being fetched, not a decision to read, so the number that appears to prove a length theory is the weakest number in the report. Clicks and unsubscribes are the two that move when content changes. Why an open rate is a guess covers the arithmetic.
What happens if I write too much?#
Nothing dramatic, and that is the danger. Clicks spread thin across a long file, the last item gets no attention, and the list drifts: a few people leave each month because the letter has become a chore, and a chore is the reason an ordinary reader unsubscribes.
What happens if I write too little?#
On a weekly beat, nothing bad at all. A two-hundred-word letter that says one true thing and gets out is a better newsletter than an eight-hundred-word one that takes three hours and skips a fortnight. The risk of short is that it reads as nothing happening, which one specific sentence fixes.
How do I make a long issue readable on a phone?#
- A heading every two hundred words, so a skimmer lands on something.
- One column, and no two-column layout because a template said so.
- Body text at sixteen pixels or more.
- Paragraphs of three sentences or fewer, since a screen makes a paragraph look twice as long as it is.
- The notices in a list rather than in prose, because nobody reads notices as prose.
- Nothing important written inside an image.
Should I split one long issue into two emails?#
Only if the two halves want different readers. Splitting one argument into a part one and a part two is how a sender doubles their frequency and halves their patience, and the second one gets opened by the people who liked the first.
When a split is right: the second half needs a different action. A story about the programme and then a dated signup for the course are two emails; a story and the rest of the story are one.
How do I find my own right length?#
Cut one third out of next month's letter, change nothing else, and compare the two sends on clicks and unsubscribes rather than opens. If clicks hold with a third fewer words, the letter was too long and now it is not. If clicks fall, you cut the part people came for, and you have learned something no benchmark could tell you.
One variable, two sends, no more than that. Anyone who tells you they know the right number of words for your audience is describing somebody else's list.
| How often you send | A sensible first length | What it must still hold |
|---|---|---|
| Weekly | 300 to 600 words | One thing worth a reader's two minutes, and the dates |
| Fortnightly | 500 to 900 words | One story, the notices, one ask at most |
| Monthly | 600 to 1,500 words | One long piece and everything shorter than it |
| Quarterly | 1,500 to 3,000 words | Headings, dates on everything, an archive feel |
| Where it is read | Words that work | Why that number |
|---|---|---|
| An email only | 300 to 900 | The reader scrolls without committing, and the first hundred words decide |
| An email plus a web version | 800 to 2,000 | The web copy is chosen rather than arrived at, so it can ask for more |
| A feed, such as LinkedIn | 500 to 1,000 | Read by somebody who never left the feed, deciding in one sentence |
| A printed sheet or PDF | 2 sides of A4 | A page is a different medium, and nobody turns a third |
Write it as long as it needs to be and see what happened after: Campaign Kicker counts clicks and unsubscribes per send, keeps each design in one column with headings that survive a phone, and shows both halves of an A/B separately. The free plan mails 5,000 emails a month and holds as many names as you have.
Send a newsletter that fits