How to Use Write.as

Start your own simple, pain-free newsletter on Write.as — available to Pro users.

Setting it Up

Go to your Blogs page and click the Customize button underneath the blog you want to add email subscriptions to.

Once there, scroll down to Updates. Enable Email subscriptions here, and save the changes. Now you can start gathering subscribers on your blog.

Getting Started

What does that look like? Go to the homepage of your blog. Scroll down to the footer. Notice that there is now an option to subscribe to your blog via email.

Now that we have email subscriptions enabled, let's see what an email will look like. All that we need is an email we can check. Put that email address into the form, click Subscribe, and a message should appear: “You're subscribed to email updates.” Cool! Any time you come back to this section, the message and opt-out option will appear.

Next, let's create a test post for the blog. Head to the editor, write something, and hit publish. With a new post on the blog, we are ready to see what that will look like to an email subscriber. It will take about 15 minutes for the email to come through, so check your inbox soon after.

An email with the subject line of Your Blog Title: Your Post Title? Check it out. There is the post you just published as a beautiful email that links back to your blog!

Additional Features

Shortcode

By default, readers will find your email subscription box at the very bottom of your blog. However, you can also use a special shortcode to insert the subscription form into your posts — perfect for inline calls-to-action, adding to your blog's Post Signature, or adding to a dedicated Subscribe page.

You'll simply enter this shortcode into your post:

<!--emailsub-->

You can find an example of this in action on Matt's blog.

Customizing

You can change the style of the email subscription form with the #subscribe-btn CSS selector. For example, to change the button color, you can add this to the Custom CSS settings for your blog:

#subscribe-btn {
    border: 1px #2988bc;
    background:#2988bc; 
}

Stats

Once people start subscribing, how would you keep track of your subscriber count? That number lives in the Stats page of your blog. Once there, look under the Subscribers heading to see the number of email subscriptions. No open rates, no email list, just a counter. This is kept minimal for a reason. Write.as is built from the ground up to preserve your privacy.

---

With a straightforward publishing interface, easy readability, and privacy respecting stats, our aim is to create an experience that respects the writer and reader alike. Recapture the intimacy of letters with email subscriptions for Write.as.

---