My Approach to Subscriber Perks, Plus Announcing a Place to Share Your Work

throwing stuff at the wall, but with care

I always imagine my subscribers reading pensively in a sepia-toned room

In the past couple months we broke the 4,000 paying subscriber mark. (If you’re curious, we’re close to 20,000 people on the mailing list in total, but not quite there yet.) We actually broke 4,000 twice - right before March 1st, which was my one-year anniversary, and then again in the past couple of days. I was warned by Substack and other people who do subscription-based media that there tends to be a dip at the one-year mark as people who initially signed up for annual subscriptions don’t renew. (A healthy number of those are from expired credit cards that were not reentered, but that doesn’t mean unsubscribing was not intentional.) I also published a couple very unpopular posts right at that point and a decent number of people were keen to tell me they had unsubscribed in response, so it’s a little bit confounded. (For the record, while I value my readers and generally want to keep them happy, if I didn’t ever publish things that compelled some people to unsubscribe I’d be worried.) In any event, the subscriber number has rebounded and we’re growing again, although a little short of the Gross Annualized Revenue number from before. (I would advise anyone doing this that the GAR number, while as good a general metric as any, is not something to get too invested in.)

Big picture, I’m doing quite well on this platform by pretty much any standard. I avoid the Substack leaderboards like the plague and frankly think they should get rid of them - it’s precisely the kind of popularity contest I don’t want writers to participate in - but I’m providing comfortably for my household right now. In recent months I’ve been asked by several people trying to get a subscription newsletter going to comment on the whole process, and in particular how I do subscriber incentives. So here’s a few thoughts.

My approach goes a little like this: I want to keep a majority of my posts freely available to all, partly as marketing but mostly because I want my work to reach a wide audience, so I need to find extra inducements for people to subscribe. As much as I may style myself as someone who disdains popularity, often to the point of self-flattery, I do care that my ideas circulate. If I didn’t want my writing to change minds, to challenge, to entertain, there would be no point. So a lot of my posts are free. On the other hand, the skew towards free posts has actually been significantly reduced in the past three or four months, with more and more posts going behind the paywall. That was always the plan, albeit vaguely. At this point, the number of posts behind the paywall sits at something like 40% of the total, although this includes the Book Club posts, which some may consider a separate deal. Generally, where I used to plan on doing three free posts and one subscriber-only post a week, now I’m aiming for two free and two subscriber, plus the always-free Weekly Digest posts and the always-subscriber-only Book Club posts. But this is all subject to my whims and the content of a given post has to play a major role in what goes behind the paywall.

There are always tradeoffs. Last week was an entirely subscriber-only week. People seemed to enjoy it and we got a good number of signups. At the same time, it was unsurprisingly one of the lowest-traffic weeks in this newsletter’s history, and traffic is necessary for growth. I doubt there’s a perfect approach.

Subscriber-only posts tend to be more ruminative or philosophical or similar, but need not always be. Some people have said that I don’t put any culture war stuff behind the paywall, but that’s not really true; this week’s post “Culture War is Fractal” is right in that wheelhouse, for example, and there have been others. Same deal with media crit posts - mostly free, but some are paywalled. There are several series that are subscriber-only, including the research methods/statistics posts (correlation coming soon) and the new Drug Reviews series.

A big draw for many people is community, and commenting privileges are always subscriber-only. This is both an inducement for people who want to participate to sign up, and also a great boon for me pragmatically as I have to do minimal moderating while still enjoying a robust and remarkably civil conversation. As recent weeks show, commenters are very willing to tell me when I’m wrong, sometimes quite theatrically. Which, I think, is healthy. Indeed, the overall level of the discussion here is remarkable for the internet. I think having to pay to comment ensures that there’s a level of commitment to what people say, and I also think that the community is largely self-regulating and based on friendship. That’s especially important because as the community has grown it’s become harder and harder for me to read most of the comments. I rely on people to email me to say “hey, so-and-so is being a jerk in a way that violates your guideline of being good to each other,” but it’s quite rare for anyone to have reason to do that, and typically it only takes the slightest nudge for me to get people to be more civil. When I first started I wasn’t planning on opening comments, but now I can’t imagine this project without them; they are a good check on my excesses and a constant source of inspiration on what to write about next.

Lately I’ve been supplementing the discussion on posts with open threads, which people have responded to very positively. Some have asked that I create a separate section of the website for these so that those who are not interested can turn off the emails, which I’m thinking over. I am always looking for ways to reduce the number of messages for those readers who are sensitive to the total volume of emails. But I don’t want to bury the open threads for those who might discover and enjoy them. (Yes, it is somewhat self-parodic that I have to have instructions on how to read my newsletter.)

The Book Club is a really positive development that came directly from a reader request. Some commenters were saying that they’d enjoy doing a book club in this space, it seemed like a cool idea, and now we’re off and running and about to get started with our fourth book on Wednesday. The number of people who participate in the book clubs is relatively small and the traffic on those posts is consequently low. But people who participate tend to be very deeply engaged with that section and with the newsletter in general, and I think that’s something for anyone who does this to consider: there’s the overall numbers of mailing list members and subscribers, but there’s also the cultivation of the most invested readers. Both are important, I think, and the Book Club is a reflection of my interest in the latter. Incidentally, the nonfiction read-along of The Buried Book - not Book Clubs per se because I don’t expect anyone else to read the book, just to get my impression - is happening soon, I swear. I found myself recently having to devote more time to a book project (which may prove to be a good thing, we’ll see) but will turn around posts there soon. We’ve also recently done our first short story and will be doing more, which hopefully pulls in readers who can’t currently commit to reading a full book.

So, if you’ll forgive me for burying the lead, here’s an announcement: starting in April I will be running a monthly “What I’ve Been Reading” post that shares books and articles I’ve been digging into recently. After I go through those, I’ll have a section where I’ll post links and one-sentence synopses to work that’s been written by subscribers, whether on their own blogs or in professional publications or wherever else. I will do some light moderation on these, and won’t post anything that’s likely to get me into deep trouble. But that would have to be something quite extreme, like directly racist or homophobic or something. Otherwise, I’ll be happy to share, including pieces that I deeply disagree with. I know a lot of people who read this newsletter are writers too, and often want to share work without seeming spammy. You can always do so in open threads (they’re open!) but this will actually put your links into people’s inboxes.

I’ll run an announcement closer to when the first post approaches and may share a separate email address then to make organizing a little easier. I’ll be using your subscription email to ensure that you’re currently a subscriber, so best to submit your links via whichever email you’re using here. When I inevitably accidentally leave something off the list, let me know and I’ll make sure to include it in the following month’s list.

So subscribing here gets you sixish subscriber-only posts a month, commenting privileges, participation in open threads and the Book Club, and now a place to share your work with my mailing list. I’ll run another subscriber book review contest when we approach the one-year anniversary of the first one. More importantly, subscribing helps keep this project alive so that writing can remain my profession and I can keep sharing my thoughts on politics and culture with a broad audience. Ultimately my approach is to keep experimenting and iterating to find new ways to entice people. The economy is in a weird place right now and people are justifiably skittish. I want to make the $5 a month/$50 a year seem like a good value proposition. And my philosophy to doing so is less about offering one big thing, which I would be doing if I took the whole newsletter behind the paywall, and more about offering a bunch of little enticements so that more people find something worth paying for. So far I think it’s going well for me. I want this space to have enough nooks and crannies that many people find some to snuggle up in.

Really I’m just immensely grateful for the opportunity to do this as my job. By nature I always assume that disaster is right ahead of me, but having the ability to do this full-time is a privilege and one I will never take for granted. Thanks for your patronage; you’re collectively the Medicis of your time. I’m excited for what’s yet to come.