Thanks for writing this. I will most certainly take your advice and start reaching out to some people who might be in the next few orders of magnitude more well known than myself, and see what happens. I'm in the "write because I love doing it" camp, and I also see it as a way to network with people who share my interests / concerns, but I can see my motivation lagging if I don't have an "event"; writing takes up a lot of time, and it needs to start justifying itself more substantially if I am to continue.
I didn't know you also read Parrhesia; small world, eh?
Parr's a good guy and I like his blog. And yeah, definitely reach out to people with bigger audiences and see what you can get. I used to be shyer about this but very honestly if I think it's worth writing I should probably also think it's worth reading.
I'll try to throw you a plug here in the next week or so!
Great post! Probably the best advice writers could get when it is all said and done. The only thing I can think to add is "Write more, because writing is like exercise: the more you do the easier it is, and the opposite is also true."
I also would add your earlier plug resulted in a rough doubling of my subscribers in the following week! Either that, or people were really into the review on a forge kit, or were hoping I would be posting horrible 3rd degree burn pics shortly there after. Granted, doubling only took like 30 people, but still! I don't even have a twitter account, and most of my family and friends don't have a blog, so pretty much all my traffic is from effort posting in other people's blog comments sections. And now from here :D
I'm gonna be completely honest and say it's fucked up you don't have more subscribers. Why the fuck don't you have more subscribers? It's not like you can't write.
Thank you for the kind words, but it is like you say, you have to self promote to really grow, and I just don’t like promoting myself. Or selling things in general, really. Some modest growth is pleasing though, and I have some people commenting which is really where I find a lot of motivation. Blogging for me is sort of a replacement for teaching in some ways, so having people to interact with about ideas fulfills a lot of my ambition for the project. If eventually I get enough subscribers that accepting money makes sense that would be neat, but I figure at most a side job unless one of my more normal projects takes off and gets me a lot of attention. I doubt I will be quitting my day job till all three kids have day jobs of their own :)
For what it is worth, to add to your anecdata: I regularly read MR and ACX, both of which have linked to RC, but neither link is what made me a subscriber. I think the RC article that led me to subscribe was the one about cities being "walkable." I don't remember how I came across it. I started reading Hammer through reading RC. I started reading Parrhesia from reading Hammer, but upon doing so I remembered, hey, this is a person who often comments on RC's substack.
Watching legends make magic is surprisingly harder than doing the act.
Walt Disney AND Frank Sinatra didn't get big until after the war, as the former started in the mid 1920s, and the latter the end of the 1930s. (perception from someone not from the US-of-A). ~20 years or 1 Kuznets swing for a managed studio and ~5 years or 1 Kitchin cycle for an "indie". Nobody wanted the 10-year Newgrounds-to-Netflix pipeline anymore. http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
A major emphasis is that most writing advice are optimized for the classical mode of "click funnels" (the sales technique, not the the company), and it dodges both grandiose expression and artistic communication. Studying the craft is prioritized over mass content production and corner-cutting. If a new form of media sounds too "start-up-y" and is ready to sell-out (e.g. anything under Chive Media), instead of proper technology "ownership" (see playbooks of Amazon), then it has perverse incentives. https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/maker-studio-manager-studio
The barbell strategy of managing oneself is as such: big players prioritize talent collectivization and balancing between autonomy and production efficiency; small players prioritize niche viewers through effective tacit learning and decrease human dependency. If an "indie" writer is forced to work with people that does not multiply value ala Metcalf's Law, or insisting on writing "self-help" (or whatever easy airport book store drivel is hip), it becomes a "vanity studio" project. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe's_law
TL;DR don't ask for fame, as it will come to you in natural ways. Forcing it will either change you, or make it go away.
Hey, everyone: There's some sort of glitch happening with comments right now. Everything seems to be working from the comments pane (i.e. if you click the word bubble icon at the head of the article) but otherwise it's hard to reply to people right now.
There's also at least on my end some slowdown with the site in general that's affecting all my recent articles. I've emailed Substack about it, and hopefully they will get it fixed pretty quick.
Very interesting post. I have a small newsletter in Portuguese - otherwise I would invite you to read it :) My experience is very similar to the one you described by the end of your text. I had 2 successful texts that brought me 80% of my subscribers. Until the last moment, I was unsure if it was even worth it to publish them. They felt very uninteresting to anyone other than me.
After reaching a subscriber milestone, I posted 2 texts that actually cost me a few subscribers. I couldn’t quite understand why - they were not very controversial. But I guess that our writing also selects its audience. I don’t have any intention of earning income from my newsletter, it’s really a passion project. So it felt bad to lose some of the readers I earned, but I trust that over time it pays off to maybe risk a few subscribers in order to build a loyal audience, more aligned to what I’m trying to accomplish.
Often, it's not because of the content of what you posted being controversial, offensive or otherwise "bad" to the unsubscriber. Sometimes people subscribe because of a post they very much liked, or at a time they are subscribing to many things.
Then they don't end up reading as much as they thought they would, and your post (no matter what it is) reminds them to unsubscribe. So it's sometimes what we'd call content-neutral; any post would have made them unsubscribe.
I get unsubscribes more often when I post political material, because a good proportion of my readership is on the political left, and some portion of them do not like to see that kind of criticism. So sometimes it really is the content, but I've never felt like I should change what I write because of it. It's like you say; the writing selects the audience, and in the end your audience is a very small percentage of those who read, only those who liked it best.
Yes, that makes a lot of sense. I was writing for an audience of 40 for 6 months, until I started posting more consistently and building community with other writers. Now I have around 500 subscribers - amazing for me, given that I never wrote prior to starting my newsletter. The growth made me a bit obsessive with statistics. It takes a step back to put things in context. Thanks again for your text!
Hey man, totally subscribed to your blog because SlateStarCodex linked to your Sadly, Porn review. So you're right!
Thanks for writing this. I will most certainly take your advice and start reaching out to some people who might be in the next few orders of magnitude more well known than myself, and see what happens. I'm in the "write because I love doing it" camp, and I also see it as a way to network with people who share my interests / concerns, but I can see my motivation lagging if I don't have an "event"; writing takes up a lot of time, and it needs to start justifying itself more substantially if I am to continue.
I didn't know you also read Parrhesia; small world, eh?
Parrhesia is great! I was just talking about him with some internet friends yesterday
Parr's a good guy and I like his blog. And yeah, definitely reach out to people with bigger audiences and see what you can get. I used to be shyer about this but very honestly if I think it's worth writing I should probably also think it's worth reading.
I'll try to throw you a plug here in the next week or so!
Great post! Probably the best advice writers could get when it is all said and done. The only thing I can think to add is "Write more, because writing is like exercise: the more you do the easier it is, and the opposite is also true."
I also would add your earlier plug resulted in a rough doubling of my subscribers in the following week! Either that, or people were really into the review on a forge kit, or were hoping I would be posting horrible 3rd degree burn pics shortly there after. Granted, doubling only took like 30 people, but still! I don't even have a twitter account, and most of my family and friends don't have a blog, so pretty much all my traffic is from effort posting in other people's blog comments sections. And now from here :D
I'm gonna be completely honest and say it's fucked up you don't have more subscribers. Why the fuck don't you have more subscribers? It's not like you can't write.
Thank you for the kind words, but it is like you say, you have to self promote to really grow, and I just don’t like promoting myself. Or selling things in general, really. Some modest growth is pleasing though, and I have some people commenting which is really where I find a lot of motivation. Blogging for me is sort of a replacement for teaching in some ways, so having people to interact with about ideas fulfills a lot of my ambition for the project. If eventually I get enough subscribers that accepting money makes sense that would be neat, but I figure at most a side job unless one of my more normal projects takes off and gets me a lot of attention. I doubt I will be quitting my day job till all three kids have day jobs of their own :)
For what it is worth, to add to your anecdata: I regularly read MR and ACX, both of which have linked to RC, but neither link is what made me a subscriber. I think the RC article that led me to subscribe was the one about cities being "walkable." I don't remember how I came across it. I started reading Hammer through reading RC. I started reading Parrhesia from reading Hammer, but upon doing so I remembered, hey, this is a person who often comments on RC's substack.
Watching legends make magic is surprisingly harder than doing the act.
Walt Disney AND Frank Sinatra didn't get big until after the war, as the former started in the mid 1920s, and the latter the end of the 1930s. (perception from someone not from the US-of-A). ~20 years or 1 Kuznets swing for a managed studio and ~5 years or 1 Kitchin cycle for an "indie". Nobody wanted the 10-year Newgrounds-to-Netflix pipeline anymore. http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
A major emphasis is that most writing advice are optimized for the classical mode of "click funnels" (the sales technique, not the the company), and it dodges both grandiose expression and artistic communication. Studying the craft is prioritized over mass content production and corner-cutting. If a new form of media sounds too "start-up-y" and is ready to sell-out (e.g. anything under Chive Media), instead of proper technology "ownership" (see playbooks of Amazon), then it has perverse incentives. https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/maker-studio-manager-studio
The barbell strategy of managing oneself is as such: big players prioritize talent collectivization and balancing between autonomy and production efficiency; small players prioritize niche viewers through effective tacit learning and decrease human dependency. If an "indie" writer is forced to work with people that does not multiply value ala Metcalf's Law, or insisting on writing "self-help" (or whatever easy airport book store drivel is hip), it becomes a "vanity studio" project. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe's_law
TL;DR don't ask for fame, as it will come to you in natural ways. Forcing it will either change you, or make it go away.
Hey, everyone: There's some sort of glitch happening with comments right now. Everything seems to be working from the comments pane (i.e. if you click the word bubble icon at the head of the article) but otherwise it's hard to reply to people right now.
There's also at least on my end some slowdown with the site in general that's affecting all my recent articles. I've emailed Substack about it, and hopefully they will get it fixed pretty quick.
Very interesting post. I have a small newsletter in Portuguese - otherwise I would invite you to read it :) My experience is very similar to the one you described by the end of your text. I had 2 successful texts that brought me 80% of my subscribers. Until the last moment, I was unsure if it was even worth it to publish them. They felt very uninteresting to anyone other than me.
After reaching a subscriber milestone, I posted 2 texts that actually cost me a few subscribers. I couldn’t quite understand why - they were not very controversial. But I guess that our writing also selects its audience. I don’t have any intention of earning income from my newsletter, it’s really a passion project. So it felt bad to lose some of the readers I earned, but I trust that over time it pays off to maybe risk a few subscribers in order to build a loyal audience, more aligned to what I’m trying to accomplish.
Often, it's not because of the content of what you posted being controversial, offensive or otherwise "bad" to the unsubscriber. Sometimes people subscribe because of a post they very much liked, or at a time they are subscribing to many things.
Then they don't end up reading as much as they thought they would, and your post (no matter what it is) reminds them to unsubscribe. So it's sometimes what we'd call content-neutral; any post would have made them unsubscribe.
I get unsubscribes more often when I post political material, because a good proportion of my readership is on the political left, and some portion of them do not like to see that kind of criticism. So sometimes it really is the content, but I've never felt like I should change what I write because of it. It's like you say; the writing selects the audience, and in the end your audience is a very small percentage of those who read, only those who liked it best.
Yes, that makes a lot of sense. I was writing for an audience of 40 for 6 months, until I started posting more consistently and building community with other writers. Now I have around 500 subscribers - amazing for me, given that I never wrote prior to starting my newsletter. The growth made me a bit obsessive with statistics. It takes a step back to put things in context. Thanks again for your text!