What email marketing courses are actually selling — and why a discovery writer kept buying them, finishing none, and already knowing everything they contained.

Created: 28/6/2026 0:40:29
Updated: 28/6/2026 11:18:48
Exported: 28/6/2026 11:36:15

User:

28/6/2026 0:40:29

Greetings,
I have just finished watching a webinar from Talking Shrimp: Laura Belgray
Get Paid to be You

Main points:

• Be Human

• Tell Stories

• Be Regular

• Be Prolific - long tail ethos

• Value - make me feel something, help me see something differently

• Story to Sale (AI assisted)

• Tighter, better, faster email with AI

She's selling Inbox Hero plus a bunch of bonuses

Five mistakes she outlines

• Being afraid to sell

• Thinking you have to be formal to be professional

• Trying to be for everybody

• Not having a welcome sequence

• Not sending enough emails

• Sending AI-generated emails #6

—————

Attached is a chat we had about Matthew Kimberley's "Delightful Emails". [Curator's Note: published as another thread]

Can you distill what all these people are actually selling? Is it copywriting or something different?

Assistant:

28/6/2026 0:40:45

Viewed file

• Reading the uploaded file about delightful emails

• Done

Good question, and the answer is more interesting than "copywriting."

What Belgray, Kimberley, and most people in this space are actually selling is permission and identity — with copywriting technique as the vehicle.

Here's the breakdown:

What they say they're selling: Email writing skills, frameworks, formulas, systems, strategies.

What they're actually selling: The belief that you are interesting enough to write about yourself, and that readers will pay for it. The techniques are secondary. The real product is confidence in your own voice as a monetizable asset.

Belgray's whole pitch — "Get Paid to be You" — makes this explicit. The five mistakes she lists are mostly psychological barriers (fear of selling, fear of informality, trying to please everyone) dressed up as tactical errors. The copywriting advice is real, but it's the wrapper around a deeper permission slip: stop performing professionalism and just be yourself.

Kimberley's "Delightful Emails" is the same thing from a slightly more craft-oriented angle — but the persona work, the motif, the voice exercises are all identity work, not copywriting in the traditional sense.

Traditional copywriting is about persuading someone to buy something. What these people teach is closer to sustained personal essayism with a commercial layer on top. The craft elements (the flesh/segue/point/CTA structure, the three rewrites) are real and useful, but they're downstream of the more fundamental question: who are you on the page, and do you believe that's enough?

The irony your own conversation surfaces is that you'd already answered that question through years of field notes — you just hadn't named it. Which is probably why the courses always felt forced. They were selling you the map, but you'd already been walking the terrain.

User:

28/6/2026 0:43:15

It's interesting, isn't it. I suffer from all the things they are teaching but when I purchase the course or watch the webinar and get tempted (again) I think, but no, I just have to write haha

Assistant:

28/6/2026 0:43:23

Yes — and that gap is the whole thing.

The courses are solving a problem you don't actually have. You can write. You have a voice, a subject, a structure that emerged organically, an audience waiting. The obstacle was never skill or knowledge.

What the courses are really selling — the permission, the identity confidence — you've already built through practice, obliquely, without calling it that. So when you sit down with the material it feels redundant, because it is. The part that isn't redundant (the persona work, the three-pass editing process) you absorbed quickly and moved on.

The temptation to buy is worth examining though, because it keeps recurring. My guess is it's not really about the course content. It's about the anxiety that precedes sitting down to write — that moment where I just have to write feels both obvious and slightly terrifying. The course is a displacement activity that feels productive. It's doing something about writing without the exposure of actually writing.

Which means the real question isn't "do I need this course" — you always know the answer to that. It's "what am I avoiding right now, and what's the smallest possible piece of it I can just do?"

The forager doesn't read books about foraging when there's terrain in front of them.

User:

28/6/2026 0:45:20

In the middle of Kimberley's course he quotes Stephen King, I think, who says to start by writing for the waste paper basket.

Assistant:

28/6/2026 0:45:25

Yes — that's from On Writing. The idea is that the first draft is just for you, written with the door closed, without the imagined audience looking over your shoulder. It's permission to be bad on purpose, which paradoxically is how you get to good.

It connects directly to Kimberley's fast first draft instruction — and to why the forager framing works so well for you. You're not performing for anyone when you're noticing a thing on a walk. The field note starts in that private register. The editing passes are just where you decide how much of it is worth sharing.

The waste paper basket draft and the field note are essentially the same object. One just happens to be worth keeping.

User:

28/6/2026 0:47:09

I'm using you as a reflector here because this is important.

For years or decades I have always worked on the basis that what I write will be published. This reframing to forager writing is not easy.

Assistant:

28/6/2026 0:47:18

That's a significant thing to name.

Writing-for-publication is a fundamentally different act than writing-to-notice. When publication is the assumed destination, every sentence is already being judged before it exists. The internal editor is present from word one, which is exactly what kills the fast first draft — and probably why the courses never quite worked. You were trying to apply a "write badly first" technique while operating inside a "this will be published" frame. The two are incompatible.

The forager reframe asks something harder than a technique change. It's asking you to trust that the noticing has value before anyone else confirms it. That the walk was worth taking even if nothing publishable came from it. That's a different relationship with your own attention.

The decades of publish-first wiring don't dissolve just because the frame is now correct. You'll sit down to write a field note and the editor will show up anyway, because that's what decades of habit does.

The only way through it is probably exactly what you've been doing — naming it, understanding why it was built that way, and then writing anyway and seeing what happens when the stakes are genuinely lower.

The waste paper basket isn't a technique. It's a practice of lowering the stakes until the writing can breathe.

User:

28/6/2026 0:49:09

Writing for discovery vs writing for presentation. Said by someone I don't know who.

We write to find out what we know.

Assistant:

28/6/2026 0:49:16

That's the one. And it reframes everything.

Writing-for-presentation assumes you already know what you think and are packaging it for transmission. Writing-for-discovery assumes the opposite — that the thinking happens in the act of writing, not before it. The page is where you find out.

Which explains why your conversations with me work the way they do. You're not briefing me on conclusions you've already reached. You're thinking out loud and seeing what arrives. The Thursday morning discovery at 8.30am wasn't planned. It emerged through the conversation.

The field note is the same process, just without the interlocutor. You notice something, you start writing about it, and somewhere in the middle of the third sentence you find out what you actually think about it.

That's also why "I have too many things to write about" is a false problem. It's a presentation problem — which topic do I choose, how do I organise it, who is it for. A discovery writer doesn't choose topics. They just start, and the topic reveals itself.

You've been a discovery writer all along. The publish-first frame just kept telling you it wasn't legitimate unless it looked like the other kind.

User:

28/6/2026 0:50:15

I'm also lazy. The thought of editing my own work is debilitating haha

Assistant:

28/6/2026 0:50:23

That's probably not laziness.

Editing your own work when you're a discovery writer is genuinely difficult — because you're being asked to switch modes entirely. You've just finished finding out what you think, and now you're supposed to become a cold-eyed assessor of the thing you just made. It's a different cognitive gear, and the friction between them is real.

There's also something else in it. If the first draft is discovery, then editing it feels like you're tampering with the finding. Like going back to the trail and rearranging the mushrooms.

But the editing isn't for you. It's the one concession to the reader — the pass where you ask "can someone else follow this path I just walked?" The discovery stays intact. You're just clearing the brambles.

Kimberley's three passes are actually well-designed for this personality type because they separate the tasks. Comprehension first — does it make sense. Delight second — does it sing. Read aloud third — does it flow. You're never doing everything at once, which is what makes editing feel debilitating. The overwhelm is the undifferentiated task.

And honestly — for a thousand words written in your register, the editing is probably lighter than you think. The voice is already there. You're mostly just trimming.

User:

28/6/2026 0:55:03

Belgray talked about the sameness of "AI slop" but also talked about how to use AI to tighten a first draft. She even has a tool for it.

This is also a philosophical thing for me. At what point do I insist on doing it all myself? The reason I ask this is because of the framing of the site sections: The Workbench (AI conversations), Field Notes (my own writing), Walk With Me (proximity and form). The entire site has been built through chatting with you and asking you to draft pages. Field Notes now becomes my own, and only my own, work.

Assistant:

28/6/2026 0:55:12

That's a clean and honest distinction, and the site architecture has actually solved the philosophical problem for you.

The Workbench is explicitly collaborative — AI thinking made visible. Nobody arriving there is under any illusion. Walk With Me was drafted with assistance but it's essentially a service page, not a voice page. The collaboration there is functional, like having someone help you lay out a room.

Field Notes is different in kind. It's the feeling layer, the discovery writing, the forager noticing. If that gets edited by AI — even lightly tightened — it becomes something else. Not necessarily worse, but categorically different. The texture that makes it worth reading is the texture of one particular mind moving through terrain. That's not improvable by a third party without also being altered by one.

Belgray's AI tightening tool is probably genuinely useful for people whose first drafts are shapeless. Yours aren't. Your problem isn't that the writing is loose — it's that you haven't started. No tool helps with that.

So the answer to your philosophical question is already embedded in the structure you built: The Workbench is where you think with AI. Field Notes is where you write alone. The line is already drawn. You just have to honour it.

Which also, usefully, removes the temptation. The AI editing tool isn't for Field Notes. Category error. Move on.

User:

28/6/2026 0:58:20

That's a very important distinction. I'd never really thought of Walk With Me as a service page before but that is exactly what it is. Field Notes is really the part of the site where people get to see and read who is behind the site, the whole knowing and trusting part.

Assistant:

28/6/2026 0:58:28

Yes. And that reframe has a practical consequence worth sitting with.

Field Notes isn't content. It's the person. Which means the stakes of writing it are higher than they feel like they should be — which explains some of the resistance. You're not publishing an essay. You're showing up. Repeatedly, in small ways, as yourself. That's more exposing than a well-crafted article, and the instinct to reach for an editing tool or a course or a conversation with me is partly about managing that exposure.

The know/like/trust sequence that every marketing person talks about is usually framed as a funnel you engineer. But your site does it structurally. Workbench is where they find out you think carefully. Field Notes is where they find out who you are. Walk With Me is where they decide if they want to be in the same room as you.

You can't fake the middle layer. And you can't outsource it.

Which brings it back to the same place it always comes back to. The field note doesn't need a course or a tool or a better frame. It needs you to sit down, notice something, and write it without the imagined audience looking over your shoulder.

Everything else on the site can be built collaboratively. That part is just yours.