I used to work in daily emails, agonizing over 50 character subject lines and 150 words of painstakingly edited body-copy. Which is why I get such pleasure from Stephen Elliott’s email, The Daily Rumpus. Elliott writes in text blocks that can range upwards of two-thousand words, has a sending schedule best described as aspirationaly daily, usually writes about his romantic life, his creative work, what he’s reading. It should be as unbearable as a stranger’s journal, but it’s 10x more engaging than any other daily email. Put it this way — we’ve all hit send in Outlook or Gmail and thought: that was brilliant. Elliott’s emails actually, reliably, are. 8,000 subscribers — he seems to be as transparent about his numbers as he is about infatuations — apparently feel the same way.

Elliott’s a writer who published novels and non-fiction, created an app, recently directed a film, and runs the literary website The Daily Rumpus. He’s not getting rich from books, but he’s doing something that’s almost as hard as making a fortune — capturing and engaging and keeping an audience, day after day after day.

Digital publishing ventures can learn immensely from Elliott. Take his most recent project. Yesterday, he launched Letters In The Mail — a subscription program where you can pay to receive 3 to 4 handwritten letters a month from luminaries like Jonathan Ames, Marc Maron and Margaret Cho. He describes the economics as tight — but they work. And he’s already got, I’d guess, more than 300 subscribers — which means he’s already making money.

Elliott’s building an audience. He’s already an author. But I’m thinking he won’t make the bulk of his money, in the future, from books. He’s going to make it from initiatives like this, from other work, from what he can generate and bring to his audience. The books will come. The books will help. But books —and particularly eBooks — you can see as another piece of what a corporation might call a ‘coherent digital content strategy’, and which a smart writer might call giving people a lot of different things they want, and maybe didn’t know they wanted.

A lot of companies, Websites, news corporations, entertainment entities already have the pieces Elliott’s building: an audience that comes to their site or their business every day. All they’re missing from that digital content strategy is the book piece. Digital’s going to make the books easy to put together and deliver; hopefully making eBooks a business-decision no-brainer.

What remains is to put the right things in books. For Elliott’s audience, that’s hearing about his youth on the streets, being bored at an Internet company, dealing with heart break, why you’re lucky anyone reads you ever.  But pay attention. He gives us what we want. And because we like his work, he’s got us paying for real world subscriptions.

That could be an interesting goal for any digital program — when your audience trusts you so much they go IRL with you.

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