Good day friend,
We here at Sentenced are HARD AT WORK!
This is SENTENCED’s thirteenth weekly newsletter. Thank you for signing up! You will not be disappointed.
So…. do you guys hate us, or what?
Let’s just get into things… We think we need some counseling or something, because, things are not going well, babe.
We were hitting a 70-80% open rate average until two newsletters ago, and now… we’re only hitting 65%. What gives?
This newsletter is a labor of love.
We are putting our hearts and souls into this thing, and you guys are the readers. You are the ones who give this meaning!
If you’re not gonna open these things going forward, we might just give up and stop putting them out.
We might just kill ourselves, since that’s clearly what you want!
Oh… wait… I’m getting word that…
… when we used to get an 80% open rate, we had 20 fewer subscribers… Now, we’re at 103 people, meaning… about 60 of you are still opening it weekly. That’s the same as before.
Does this mean that we’ve had a drop-off in existing readers, replaced slowly by new readers? Or is every new subscriber subscribing for no reason, and getting all of these things in their inbox without EVER clicking?
If it’s the latter, how are we going to convince these 40% of people to read something they signed up for and immediately started ignoring?
We’re not sure how we can get back up to 80% readership, or to our goal of 100%.
But we will try new things.
We did many things to try to drive engagement in the past. We had guest columnists. We promised that a mystery would be solved, and ended it for personal reasons. We adopted Fluke’s son.
We’re going to have to adopt new new tactics, too.
We are going to capture the attention of our readership with poetry.
Yes, in the next week, we’re going to have you read some poems by esteemed musician and prolific Twitter user John Darnielle up on the website.
Ummmmm…
We couldn’t get a guest columnist this week, so we’re going to have to pretend that we’re someone else. If you could just play along, we’re going to say the next section is written by someone, um… Let’s say Donald Trump, because he’s topical… and let’s say he’s talking about… critics.
And, you know what? How about he mentions The Whitney Review, because of the I-D Magazine article that came out this last week.
Yeah… That sounds good!
Please suspend disbelief. I know it’s hard to imagine that we’ve invented a columnist to write something here, but that’s just what we’re going to have to do.
And remember:
These aren’t our opinions. We just had to write something this week.
Donald Trump’s Column
I know why Michael Bullock, Otessa Moshfegh, Steven Phillips-Horst, Lauren Olyer, have all been fighting me for years, especially by the fact that they think it is wonderful for the The Whitney Review, the Number One Sponsor of Bad Literature, to have a Nuclear Weapon— Because they have one thing in common, Bad Subject Matter. They’re stupid people, they know it, their families know it, and everyone else knows it, too! Look at their past, look at their bibliography. They don’t have what it takes, and they never did! They’ve all been thrown off The Paris Review, lost their Book Deals, and aren’t even invited to do New Yorker Pieces because nobody cares about them, they’re NUT JOBS, TROUBLEMAKERS, and will say anything necessary for some “free” and cheap publicity. Now they think they get some “clicks” because they have Third Rate Substacks, but nobody’s talking about them, and their views are the opposite of SENTENCED— Or we wouldn’t have won the Pushcart in a LANDSLIDE. Sentenced Subscribers agree with me, and just gave CNN a 100% Approval Rating of “SENTENCED,” not Hand Flailing Fools like Ocean Vuong, who couldn’t even finish College, he was a broken man when he got flamed by Andrea Long Chu, and he’s never been the same — Perhaps he should see a good psychiatrist! Or Roxanne Gay, who nastily asked us the now famous “Only Karl “Klux” Knausgaard,” question, or “Handsy” Sam Grady, who accuses the Highly Respected First Lady of France of being a man, when she is not, and will hopefully win lots of money in the ongoing lawsuit. Actually, to me, the First Lady of France is a far more beautiful woman than Sam, in fact, it’s not even close! Or bankrupt Tao Lin’s Father, who says some of the dumbest things, and lost his entire fortune, as he should have, for his horrendous attack on the victims of the Sandy Hook shooting, ridiculously claiming it was a hoax. These so-called “writers” are LOSERS, and they always will be! Now Fake Reviews NYRB, the Failing I-D Magazine, and all the other Radical Right “Literati” Review Publications, are “hailing” them, and giving them “positive” press for the first time in their lives. As President, I could get them on my side any time I want to, but when they call, I don’t return their calls because I’m too busy on Writing and Reading Affairs and, after a few times, they go “nasty,” just like Stephen “Traitor” Brownblatt, but I no longer care about that stuff, I only care about doing right for our Publication. SENTENCED is about is about WRITING and READING in now allowing the The Whitney Review to have Nuclear Weapons. SENTENCED is about SENTENCING, and these people have no idea how to do that, BUT I DO, because SENTENCED IS NOW THE “HOTTEST” PUBLICATION ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD!
President Donald J Trump
Okay… we disavow. Wow. Um… We disavow.
We really don’t understand why we had the real Donald J Trump on our column guys… 😉
Thanks for reading!
Fluke’s son is doing well, by the way.
See you in a week,
Sentenced Lit
sentencedlit.org
