How I Write an Engineering Newsletter

... and have grown it to 2,500+ subscribers in 4 months.

May 05, 2024

Hey, I’m Vikram 👋!

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It's been a week filled with work deadlines and I am traveling to Bengaluru, India, at about the same time this edition goes live. Time has been short to write a deep technical article. I usually take my time to explain hard topics and draw figures to show ideas clearly. Instead of rushing an article with potential for error, I figured I'll write about writing a newsletter.

Pretty meta. Let's do it.

Read time: 10 mins

Newsletter as an educational medium

Most electrical engineering (EE) content is held within moats, and is accessible only through conventional mediums of education such as textbooks and universities. There are situations when these mediums don't apply.

You want to learn some aspect of EE because you find it interesting and cannot justify the cost and commitment of an entire educational degree to learn it.
You find the rigor of textbooks hard to comprehend and difficult to directly apply to engineering situations.
You find the need to apply specific EE concepts at work due to a new project, but have not had a formal education in it.
You are about to interview, and need to review as many concepts as you can in a short span of time.
You would like to directly learn from somebody who has spent their career in EE.

For all these cases, a weekly newsletter offers the option of delivering digestible pieces of technical content directly to the reader. Newsletter might imply actually writing about news, which I do not do at the moment. Techletter is probably a better term.

The downside is that you may not exactly find what you are looking for. For example, I've been writing articles on RF systems of late, but you might want to learn signal integrity or power electronics. Any field of engineering is vast, and I most certainly won't have the expertise to write about all of it.

This is a problem in any domain. However, with sufficiently deep research I find that I can cover most electrical engineering topics at a fundamental level at least. The other solution is to have more people write such newsletters to cover the space of technical topics available. In the rest of this article, I'll describe what my process looks like. Maybe you’ll be inspired to start your own.

Content Workflow

Let us address the elephant in the room. How does one do this with other commitments like a job and family? Good content is not easy to create. It often requires early mornings, late nights and writing/thinking about the newsletter at every possible moment. You should really enjoy putting thoughts into text if you were to do this long term and find ways not to burn out. Sometimes you can’t deliver technical articles on time, like me this week. There are plenty of things to still write about - experiences, advice, things you found interesting, etc. I’ll provide a bit more detail on how I go about creating content.

Topics

I don't overthink this. I just write whatever I am curious about that week, or have been thinking of. I write one off articles that are unconnected to anything. Or, I continue a thread of technical topics. I also discontinue threads, and pick them again later. The main idea is for me to stay interested and motivated. I don't want this to start feeling like a job. It should feel like fun for me to stay at it and not burnout.

Tools

I love shiny software tools as much as the next person. The right answer here is any tool will do, but here is what I use.

Text editor
- I use Obsidian with the AnuPpucchin theme . I like the ability to link to different articles I write. It is free to use, and all documents stay local. This means I can write anywhere even without internet. The whole editor is snappy, and I much prefer this to Notion. I use YAML frontmatter to put metadata into each document I write. I then use the Dataview plugin to automatically sort my articles based on topic and status.
  My Obsidian setup.
Images
- I use the Excalidraw plugin in Obsidian. I simply love the ease of use of this tool and can create pretty complicated diagrams easily. I also like the informal look of the generated diagrams, which gives it a different feel than a technical blog or textbook. I use Canva (free version) to generate thumbnails for Substack and images for social media. In Canva, I have templates with the right image sizing for each platform. This makes it easy to duplicate it each time and create new images.
Knowledge management
- I use Zotero to store all the pdfs, and I read and highlight them in the same tool. It's fully featured and free to use. If your pdf collection grows, then Zotero offers paid cloud storage for a modest fee. But I store my collections on my own home server (yes, I am a nerd, I run my cloud infrastructure.) I also have a paid subscription to Readwise. I can quickly save webpages to it and use their reader app to read and highlight those articles later. Both Zotero and Readwise have integration with Obsidian and highlighted notes are directly imported into my writing tool.
Writing
- I use Quillbot (free version) if I have time or feel that my writing is too verbose. It helps me rephrase my sentences to make it easier to read. I need to do this manually for each paragraph and re-read it after the tool finishes paraphrasing it to make sure the meaning did not change. I've tried hemingwayapp too, but it didn't appeal to me.
ChatGPT
- I use it to explain some concepts to me, or to list out concepts relevant to a particular topic. It helps me get a top level perspective of what I am writing about. I also use it to summarize my own writing so that I can generate some key takeaways. Sometimes I try to generate article titles but ultimately abandon it because it is too tacky.

The Writing

Once I know what I'm writing about, I spend about a day or two reading about it. Not everything I read is deep. I skim through a lot of stuff. Due to my prior experience in the field of RF engineering, I can usually tell what the gist of anything is - even when faced with equations. I'm only looking for the main takeaway at this point.

When I have sufficiently poked through textbooks, web articles, published papers and white papers, I write an outline. I specifically like to do this the night before I start writing an article - a trick I learned from Dickie Bush. I usually start writing at 5am, and at that moment, my only goal is to expand on the bullet point outline I made the night before. I dive right into writing without worrying about how to start.

When I actually write the article, I just go as fast and far as I can without stopping. I ignore spelling mistakes and grammatical issues, and just get the ideas on to the screen. It is much easier to edit content later than try to generate good writing from the get go. I dive deep into books, pdfs and articles that have content related to what I am writing about. I make sure that I understand it thoroughly, and attempt to express that in a simple and understandable way in my article.

I put a lot of emphasis on using short sentences and simple language. I admire the writing style of Paul Graham, and his essay Write Simply is a favorite of mine. The goal is not to write as much as possible, but instead to deliver value with as few words as possible.

Ultimately, I do look at article length because one of the promises I made in this Substack is to keep articles short and readable. I've found that about 2000 words keeps the reading time under 10 mins. If my writing significantly exceeds that, then I just conclude the article in a reasonable way and use the rest for my next article.

The whole writing process takes about 2-3 days. Then I spend a day making figures for the article. I create one Excalidraw canvas per article and in it, I make all the necessary figures. I export each image out as its own png file. I also link the excalidraw file to the article so that I always know where the images are for any particular article.

Finally, I copy everything I wrote in Obsidian and paste it into the Substack editor. I spend about 30 minutes formatting everything to make it look the way I want it to. At this point I insert the figures I created. I create a thumbnail for Substack and schedule it for publishing.

The whole process takes about 10-15 hours per week, depending on the technical complexity of the topic.

Thank you for reading Vik's Newsletter. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Social Media

An often overlooked aspect of writing online is to spend a sizable amount of time delivering value on social media platforms. If no one knows you write content, then it just won't be found. So it is up to you to market it effectively on online platforms. For RF engineering content, I have found that LinkedIn is where most of my readers engage. I got little attention on X, and decided it's not worth it.

On Sundays, I use a tool called Hypefury to write and schedule LinkedIn posts for the week. I try to write bite sized pieces (200 words) that deliver one key concept or idea. The writing style here is even more concise. The main idea is to grab attention to my content. Walls of text in social media just get scrolled past. Attractive images have done well for me because there is something scroll-stopping about a nice picture. Luckily, I have created quite a few when writing my article. So I repurpose most of it.

I include a link to the article I have written at the end of the post, if people want to read more. The main idea is to drive my LinkedIn audience to Substack and get them to subscribe.

It does not end there. It is important to engage with your audience on social media. Online relationships are important and people provide different perspectives on your content. This sparks ideas that fuels future articles. Sometimes, people point out mistakes I have made and this gives me the chance to correct them. As a result, each Substack article is a living breathing document that evolves. The weekly email send is only a time snapshot of the real thing.

Consistency

If there is one secret for any content-creation project to be successful, it is to be consistent. Of all the things about writing on Substack, this is the hardest one. The key is to tell yourself that anything worth accomplishing in life takes time and effort. Like Seth Godin says, eventually every project hits a dip, and at that point you have to evaluate for yourself if writing a Substack is worth it given the time and sacrifices you have to make.

You just have to treat the newsletter like a product you have to deliver to your readers. And consistently try to deliver value in every article. The rest will take care of itself.

This Substack has been growing consistently but I have been at it only for four months. I have had a great time so far and I’ve been pleasantly surprised with how many people are interested in the niche engineering topic I write about. For that, I thank you for your readership and subscription.

That’s it for now. If you have any questions, leave them in the comments below!

Vik's Newsletter