Zoe Harris

Writing a newsletter every week used to drain me. Now I actually enjoy it.

I have a small wellness practice and a newsletter with about 800 subscribers. Every week for three years I've sent something. Some weeks that was brutal. Not the ideas — I always had ideas. It was the writing. Getting the idea from my head onto the page in a way that was readable and didn't sound like a textbook. I tried AI about a year ago and my whole relationship with the newsletter changed. I voice-memo my idea on a walk. Raw thoughts, sometimes rambling, often incomplete. Then I transcribe it and paste it into Claude with this instruction: "This is my raw thinking. Help me structure this into a newsletter essay that sounds like me — conversational, warm, not preachy. Keep my words where possible." What comes back sounds surprisingly like me. More organised, but still my voice. I edit it — maybe 30% ends up changed — and send. My open rates have gone up since I started doing this. I think because I'm sending more consistently and the quality is more even. When I was writing from scratch some weeks were great and some weeks I was just filling space. Don't be afraid that AI will kill your voice. If you brief it well, it helps you find it.