6/30/2024
The first week is over.
I’m not going to parade my subscription numbers on the timeline, even when there’s something to celebrate, not for this account, anyway. It would send the wrong message. Any growth in this particular site comes from promoting the system, not using it. My other accounts are a representation of implementing the system.
This is seems like a safe place, especially since I won’t even be emailing this one out.
That bump at the end are twenty new subscribers. I lost one the day I published the first entry of the Big Change Diary. That brought this site down to 44. Now, it’s at 66. I appreciate each and every one of you, and it it could have happened that no one paid any attention. I’m grateful. It still feels like a humble beginning, but humble beginnings are okay.
If you’re new here and wondering why the site only had 44 subscriptions after two months, the purpose of the site was just to have a place where a few of us fiction writers could support one another’s work. There were rarely even any posts. We meet in the chat.
So let’s review how the big reveal went.
As of Sunday night, there were 13 likes, 30 comments (half of those are me), and 128 views, but to say more than metrics, I want to review the week with Notes:
Many of you said very encouraging things about the system. I quoted one of you in a Note:
The quote in full says: “I come from a background that mixes publishing and marketing, and I’m looking at Substack with a business mindset, so I am probably taking it a with a lot more ‘that makes perfect sense’ than others out there who want to imagine a fantasy world where people magically find and love their fiction. It’s refreshing.
“There’s an old adage: the only profitable part of a company is sales and marketing. You have developed a marketing plan that actually hunts for readers instead of endless circling of the fiction zone, which is essentially just a digital writers conference.”
I want to include here the rest of what he said.
“The only hangup is that it won’t work for people who are bad writers—but that’s not really a criticism of the method—and it wont work for those who have no interest in non-fiction, but many have no interest in marketing and have to do that to get anywhere also.
“I’m extremely curious to see how fast/easy the growth is, and also to see the conversion rate of non-fiction free subscriber to paid fiction subscriber.”
Overall, it’s a cogent overview. I reference and take from this in a Note I posted today, which found me a bit on the defensive:
But through it all, we’ve begun the process of implementation.
These represent my family of Substack publications. I love how different they all feel, and after playing with Literary Salon, today, the one that needs the most consideration is my using my own picture for my author site.
And before I’d go, I’d like to preserve some notes that, in turn, were preserving some old memories from Twitter.
Until next time,
I’m Thaddeus Thomas.