everything is sales love
on the finance of editorial work & knowing chinese
In a year 2000 profile on the Martha Stewart empire, Joan Didion writes of "an unusual bonding here, a proprietary intimacy that eludes conventional precepts of merchandising to go to the very heart of the enterprise, the brand, what Martha prefers to call the “presence”"...
A proprietary intimacy is just how I feel when catching up with old coworker C. and meaning to send him a link to an agriculture publication I thought would interest him, instead oops! pasted into the chat the second to last thing I copied, reading:
"That line—“the body is an emotional archive”—hits so hard because it reframes these weird little sensations not as glitches, but as language. Like the body’s way of whispering, “Hey, something’s moving. Something old might be leaving. Something new might be arriving.”"
Which prompted a detour, you see, I was asking GPT about somatic responses to grief, like what's the physiological context for why the nerves in my right hand tingle when I feel intense emotion like heartbreak? then realizing what I'm describing isn't heartbreak, it's actually release. The body burping out the toxins.
Later that day I got dinner with old coworker W. and asked how I could play with my etching knife, he clarifies, you mean the thing that looks like a pen but the tip is diamond sharp?
Yes, yes, that! Diamond sharp is mine!
on sales
In the last newsletter I said that sales is a generative process but I could be less flowery about it. When you're the service you're selling, sales is a life-giving process.
Everything Is Peaceful Love could really be read as Everything Is Sales Love when you realize it is all biz dev—buying yourself flowers, pruning them, rearranging them while you wait for A.B.C.D.E.F.G. to return your emails.
on leadership
Speaking of old friends, I chatted with the inimitable CJ Quartlbaum (click to sub to him!) on becoming better leaders. Thanks CJ for literally holding space for me to find my words - such a refreshing approach from furiously paced conversations I often find myself in. So lovely to have this as a spoken companion to my recent piece "Internal Memo: Rainbow Dumpster Fire Retires."
Watch on YouTube here + watch the highlights on IG here.
I’ve been thinking on my definition of integrity that I didn’t quite land on in our chat…
Integrity is absorbing the debt incurred by someone else's decision. Financial and emotional debt you didn't sign up for. Unjust decisions made in a scarcity mindset by rogue actors. Things not spelled out in an employment contract but a tax levied on you as you grow in managerial responsibility.
It reminds me of pricing principles when indie consulting…
on pricing
Price in a way that honors the risk you absorb on behalf of your client. (e.g. they get your expertise and flexibility while saving loads of dough on a FT hire or larger agency)
on the finance of brand & editorial work
Speaking of pricing, I need to report back to my inner CFO tussling with inner CRO and CMO... I've become a personal case study for the work I support clients on, which is often legitimizing brand and editorial decisions/ambitions to finance and investors.
I compared the operating margin of Skin Contact Press with Skin Contact Studio (my publishing press vs my consulting practice) and of course the consulting is multipliers better at generating profit when looking at revenue and expenses. dummy you could intuit this but it at least a) confirms the inherent inefficiencies of doing business and b) redirects towards other types of justifying data.
Comparing my effective hourly rate of Press vs. Studio makes the press look even worse, if we segmented their returns. Time spent on the work is not a better benchmark, but that we already knew that right? urgency is the enemy of success
Of course what the data doesn't show is how my itty bitty art projects operate as preventative measure against head implosion, how they stand as acts of civic engagement in my neighborhoods, or how making things actually makes me into the type of person people want to work with.
Of course not all situations accept this sort of Malcolm Gladwell reasoning, show us the evidence!!!. Sure, there's an irrefutable correlation between my newsletter subscribers and clients. But the real question for CFO Vicky is - what's my ideal weighted average operating margin, and then, what differential of operating margin is acceptable across functions?
Or - what cost does the Studio absorb on behalf of the Press, knowing that defunding the Press would raze off the Studio's edge?
Turning to corporate precedents for the thought exercise - Stripe Press, WeTransfer's WePresents, Mailchimp Presents, Figma's Shortcut...
Stripe Press started because the founders experimented with publishing a friend's blog into a book. (Incorporating under a financial services company seems to be the safest place for ironically, the least financial pressure... see Amex acquiring Resy and Chase acquiring The Infatuation. Finance bro (or finance sis?) as sugar daddy is not a hard one to intuit.)
WeTransfer was acquired by Bending Spoons in 2024, 15 years after founding; Mailchimp acquired by Intuit in 2021, 20 years after founding. Still privately-owned Stripe is 15 years old this year.
And for Figma's Shortcut blog... they redesigned it and revamped the backend in 2023, the same year the $20B Adobe acquisition fell through, 9 years after founding. In 2024 they debuted a brand refresh, working with two agencies for the narrative work and out of home campaign.
Brand work is expensive. With agencies you often rationalize the cost with the accountability to just get the work done.
But "successful" corporate examples don't answer my question on an individual scale. The two trends I can see in robust editorial operations are:
A founder who believes in editorial - who intuits that reputation isn't built by product alone (or who sees editorial as critical product)
An exit timeline that's decades, not years
I (or any company I've worked for) don't have the luxury of decades-long timelines; performance reviews are monthly, quarterly, annual.
This is where I wonder how LLMs can come in to protect the work, help articulate a logic that follows traceable paths of intuition. What happens when we toggle LLMs as inter vs intra language translators? Not English to Chinese, but CMO to CFO speak?
on language
Speaking of language, Jhumpa Lahiri writes of a buying clothes in a shop in Rome, and a saleswoman who assumes her partner speaks better Italian based on his looks.
"I don't say anything to the saleswoman. I thank her, I say goodbye, then I go out. I understand that my attachment to Italian is worthless. That all my devotion, all the passion signify nothing."
In hopes that my devotion accounted for something, last year I started publishing my China Diaries. I began with Hong Kong with the intent of actually making it to China in future installments but then lost momentum.
Retaining my Chinese literacy feels like never actually making it. I could once read the WSJ in Chinese, albeit laboriously. I then switched to the NYT food section, and now I stick to restaurant menus and subway ads on public benefits.
I try to text my parents in Chinese but English prowls near, ever ready to assert its dominance, taking advantage of my impatience to express myself accurately, fully.
Knowing Chinese while living in America is a skill that offers no direct or obvious utility. Knowing Chinese is like being a mother. Exploding with love, unseen and under-acknowledged.
In a time flooded with the dreaded sense that being seen is what engenders success, knowing Chinese is a reminder that much of power is invisible. That having labored means you have loved, waited, started over again.
Secret Granola Club members: Spring prints en route to you!!!! ✿
Celebrating movement: the old leaving, the new arriving.
Made 4 editions of spring postcards, ft. scenes from Oaxaca, Oregon, and Yangzhou, plus a secret little note on the back. Founding members get a special blue backing card instead of standard white.
If I know you in real life I’ve sent to the address I have on file; you should receive this week. (If you’re international I’m going to wait to deliver in person.) For everyone else please reply with your mailing address. (Lmk if you’d like me to keep it on file, or else I’ll delete after mailing.)
If you'd like a card too - join us below for $5/mon or $50/yr and send me your addy. You get quarterly art prints/zines from The Press with the terrible operating margin. Archive here if you’re curious :)
learning chinese portion = chef's kiss