Laura Fenton is a journalist and author who has been writing about home design and sustainability for more than 20 years, with bylines in Better Homes & Gardens, New York Magazine, and The Washington Post.
She’s the author of The Little Book of Living Small and The Bunk Bed Book, and she writes Living Small, a top newsletter on Substack.
This is an abridged version of our conversation. Listen to the full episode right here, or find it on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Tell me a little about who you are.
I’m a freelance writer and book author, and I publish a newsletter called Living Small on Substack. I spent most of my career in traditional media as the home editor at general-interest women’s magazines. I’ve been freelancing for about six years now.
How did “Living Small” become a thing?
My first book was also called The Little Book of Living Small, and I pitched it out of frustration. I was living in a small space, and it felt like all the small-space books were about somebody’s vacation house, or an Airbnb, or a pied-à-terre. It didn’t seem like how real people were making it work, and doing it with style. The book came out in the spring of 2020.
About three years ago, I launched my newsletter, and I started thinking about living small in a bigger sense: How can we live more lightly on the earth? How can we have a life that’s simpler, with less consumption? So today my writing is still sometimes about small spaces, but much more about these bigger themes of what it means to live small.
When you went freelance, how did you find those first clients?
My number one marketing tactic is to cultivate relationships in my industry, and to be someone people want to work with.
Back then, I had people I could email. It wasn’t a cold email — it was an email from someone they’d worked with, who knew me, and knew that if they hired me, I was going to do a good job. So it was a mix of me reaching out directly to individual people, and then, once the word was out that I was freelance, people would say, “You could hire Laura Fenton. She’d be great for this.”
You’ve earned a lot of media coverage. How did that happen?
When my book came out, I decided to act as my own publicist. Book publishers don’t have a lot of resources to devote to publicity — they usually have a couple of people on staff handling many books, so they’re stretched really thin. Some authors hire a publicist to get buzz that way.
But I’d been on the other side of book pitches for my entire career, so I knew I could do it myself. I sent the kind of pitches you’d normally hire someone else to send. It was easier for me because I already knew the right people to reach out to, and I really knew the publications that would be a good fit. I wasn’t starting from zero.
What’s a mistake you saw other authors make that you were able to avoid?
We photographed my own apartment as part of the book, and typically when you’re pitching something like that, you offer an exclusive to one outlet. A lot of authors would have wanted the most prestigious traditional print media. But I had a hunch my readers might be somewhere else.
So instead of trying to get a home magazine to publish my home, I went to Joanna Goddard at Cup of Jo — which isn’t a home magazine, it’s a women’s lifestyle publication that sometimes publishes homes — and offered them the exclusive. It sold a lot of books and brought a lot of new people into my world.
The mistake to avoid is getting swept up in trying to get press in the fanciest-name place. It’s more effective to figure out where your customer or client hangs out online.
How did you grow your audience on Substack?
Really, through writing. I built an initial email list the way any small business owner might — gathering emails on Instagram, putting a form on my website, and telling all my friends I was going to launch a newsletter. When I launched in March of 2023, I had maybe 500 people. It was a little less noisy on Substack back then, so it was easier to meet new readers. But mostly people came slow and steady over time.
A lot of that goes back to cultivating relationships. I’m pretty good at reaching out to another writer in an adjacent space and saying, “Hi, I love your work,” and then building a relationship where we support each other — commenting on each other’s stories, sharing them, linking to them — in an organic, authentic, sincere way, rather than a 10-page-marketing-plan kind of way.
Intentionality is a big theme in your work. How does it show up in how you run your business?
It goes back to living small. I’m sort of at this juncture of working small — trying to find a better balance between work and life. When my son was very young, I worked a nine-to-five and commuted an hour and 15 minutes every day. I was always racing to get him from daycare.
When I went freelance, the unexpected pleasure was that I had so much more flexibility and so much more time with my kid. I love being a solopreneur because I can decide when I work and how much I work.
I’ve also done a lot of different kinds of assignments over six years, and I’ve come to realize what’s not a good fit. I worked on one project that was supposed to be a set number of flexible hours, but they also wanted me on the team Slack. That kind of thing is constantly distracting when you have other clients, other projects, and your own newsletter. So I’ve become more selective. I look for work where I can get the assignment and then figure out how to fit it into everything else I’m doing.
How do you structure your work and your different revenue streams?
Writing my newsletter is only a small piece of my working life. I still write for magazines, I write for brands, I write for websites. So day in and day out, I’m writing a lot of different things that aren’t just my own personal newsletter.
The newsletter is a small part of my income, and the way I mostly make money from it is through people paying to subscribe. For the most part, I’m not trying to sell them something else. I do talk about my book, and I hope people will buy my books, but I’m not doing anything more, like a community or anything else. I’m also not really pursuing affiliate revenue, just because my whole theme is anti-consumption. They’re not likely to be interested in being marketed to in that way.
What does growth mean to you?
I don’t necessarily want to work more, and I don’t even want to do different work — I’d just like to find ways to be better compensated for the same work.
Self-publishing has been an interesting way to think about that. With the subscription model on Substack, I’ve been writing once a week for more than 150 weeks. My income has grown, but it’s the same amount of writing. That’s how I think about it: finding ways to earn more for the same amount.
How do you stay connected to other people when most of your work is solitary?
Every small business owner or solopreneur needs a couple of colleagues — people in a similar position you can talk to about work. I have a writing accountability partner, and we’ve been meeting every other week for about six years. We just talk about work for an hour, and that’s it. Having someone like that is so valuable.
If I were a personal trainer, I’d find another personal trainer to talk shop with. They can help you get out of a rut, or push you out of your comfort zone.
My friend Shira Gill asked me to co-teach a class with her a couple of years ago, and I was hesitant — but we had a great time, and we’re doing it again. I never would have done that on my own.
What does success mean to you?
I feel pretty successful just because I’m content and have a lot of work I’m proud of. Bigger success would just be if more people were reading my writing, and more people knew who I was. That would be a delight — especially if more people were getting the message and embracing a more sustainable way of living.
Listen to the full conversation with Laura wherever you get your podcasts.
Laura’s Newsletter: laurafenton.substack.com
Laura’s Website: laurafenton.com
Laura’s Instagram: @laura.alice.fenton
Laura’s Pitch & Get Press Class: Pitch & Get Press
Brittany’s Website: downeystrategy.com
Brittany’s LinkedIn: Brittany Downey