From Here to I'd-Rather-Be

5. What do you want out of what you're putting in?

A quick note, if you haven’t yet read article 4, it reveals the kernel of the Right Reader system. It’s for paid subscribers only, but I’m upgrading all subscribers to six-months paid for free.

From Here to I’d-Rather-Be

Substack metrics are lovely when we’re getting started. They give us the feedback we need to feel like we’re accomplishing something, and I couldn’t be more grateful for the positive feedback loop they created. Having said that, they can be a trap.

Know your goals. Base your decisions on those goals, not chasing the next point in the Substack video game.

I asked in Notes how many people were hoping to make money here, and among those who responded, most didn’t care about money. They’re independently wealthy warlocks and are here to collect the souls of the unsuspecting, and that’s okay. You don’t have to be focused on filthy lucre. Choose your goals based on what’s important to you.

I’m going to fill a room with gold coins like Scrooge McDuck and swim in it, except instead of a room, it’ll be a plastic cup, and instead of gold coins, I’ll use pennies. I believe in starting small with goals you can reach but that will move you forward in the direction of your dreams.

Seriously, though, what are your writing goals and what goals do you have for Substack in helping you achieve those goals? How much time do you want to give to Substack and what do you expect in return?

To answer the question about time, it might be important to know how long your newsletter should be and how frequently it should come out. According to this article at reletter.com, when considering all LinkedIn newsletters and all free Substack newsletters, the average had a length of 451 words and published every 19 days. The top 50 publications, however, averaged 871 words every 13 days.

They couldn’t gather information on paid newsletters because of paywalls.

I’m trying to imagine publishing on a 13 day rotation instead of daily. Even on vacation I posted every other day. I probably should slow down, but once every two weeks seems so excessive. It would allow for a sustainable presence, one where we could easily manage multiple publications and still produce our own fiction.

Even with my four publications, I’d only have to publish twice a week. I’d say that it would allow for posts to be longer, but mine already often push and sometimes break the limit allowed for emails.

You could have a Trojan horse publication and an author website, post weekly on both, and still have time to work on your fiction and maintain a life. With Notes, you can maintain your presence on Substack.

Here’s the reality though: a slow publication schedule means that every post has to be a winner. You have two opportunities a month to convince people you’re worth their time and possibly their money. That’s a bit intimidating. There’s less room to try something risky.

Still, there’s a lesson to be learned here. I was writing the article to publish Saturday. Instead, I’ll show some restraint and schedule it for Sunday morning. We don’t have to flood our subscriber’s inboxes.

Restraint is hard!

What about “monetization”? Across Substack, there are about 2 million paying subscriptions which account for 5.71% of all active subscriptions. My suggestion is that you turn on the paid option and don’t worry about it. Work on fulfilling your awesomeness contract, and people will begin to support you. When they do, and this has only now begun to happen for me, it changes your mindset. This is real. This is possible. With a paid subscription or two under your belt then you can reconsider your goals about making money on Substack.

As I mentioned before, I asked people on Notes if they had expectations for getting paid, and very few really cared. They had other goals. Some were just looking to share their stories and build an audience. Some saw Substack as a means to motivate their writing process. Many wanted to bring people over to their books. All of those are legitimate goals. It doesn’t matter what you want, if you know what that is, you’ll be more likely to achieve it.

Once we know our goals, how do we get from where we are to where we want to be?

One concern I have about where we are is our followers. As we begin to make these changes, we’re still fishing in the same follower pool. We’re going to have to take some proactive steps to expand our reach into new waters.

Again, using Jamie as an example, (remember to subscribe):

He needs to expand his reach from the fiction pool to the self-help pool, and that means researching other Substacks in that category, following, subscribing, and interacting. With that engagement, he’ll gain followers from others in that community.

Although we need to move beyond our fiction followers, they’re still an asset in this journey, obviously so, when it comes to our fiction, but they’ll react to our articles as well. As we work to grow in the new categories, their engagement will give our work the boost it needs. Even so, don’t neglect the work of follower expansion.

We’ve all seen the complaints about people following instead of subscribing. The truth is, we can only subscribe to so many publications before our subscriptions become meaningless. Being quick to follow and slow to subscribe makes sense, no matter how frustrating it is as a publisher. If you’ve chosen to expand beyond one Substack publication, the issue switches from a negative to a positive. We can’t carry our subscribers from one publication to the next, but you only have one pool of followers. You start your first Substack with no followers and your second with hundreds.

Okay…

I just checked by plugging this post into Google Docs, and (including this sentence) the article has now reached 961 words. I’ll confess that this was a difficult post to write, and I’ve deleted some 500 words of nonsense to get here. I began by exploring the relative usefulness of metrics in relation to the statistics drawn from across the platform, but I couldn’t get anywhere near making the metrics we’ve been given be more applicable to the goals we’re trying to achieve. Subscribers is one of the few hard, meaningful numbers we have, but if that’s what we’re chasing, we’re going to make choices that are irrelevant to our goals or which get gray and spammy. That’s no good. At all costs, we must avoid the Spamstack syndrome.

The theory we’re pursuing is psychologically sophisticated in its delivery of fiction to a targeted audience, but the choice to downplay our use of fiction in our publications is not dishonest. We are doing what all good businesses should and delivering more than what we promise. With a method in mind for attaining your goals, there’s no reason to be seduced to the dark side and sully your reputation.

Together, we’re going to do this the right way, and get to where we’d rather be.

Until then,

I’m Thaddeus Thomas.

(1160 words)