What Do You Guys Want This Thing to Be?

plus call for July subscriber writing!

First of all, it’s time that time again! This is a call for submissions for my bimonthly roundup of subscriber writing, where I publish links to the written work my subscribers want to share. All submissions should be made via this Google Form. Don’t worry about formatting in terms of bolding and linking, just enter the information as requested in the form. Deadline for this month is Friday, July 18th, at 10 PM EST. At that time I will disable the ability to submit new responses in the form until the next call, so get your submissions in on time. If you’re an old hand at this, you can click over to the form and submit your work. If you’re new to this, please read the submission information in the footnote below to help us all out.¹ Don’t email me, use the Google Form! Non-subscribers, if you want to take advantage of this forum to share your work, you know what to do.

That out of the way, I think it’s time we talk about what we want this newsletter to be moving forward.

The newsletter has steadily been losing subscribers and revenue for several years. This hasn’t been and still isn’t a disaster. When I reached a peak in early 2023 or so I knew that I would fairly quickly reach a stage of managed decline - that is, I was pretty sure that my concern would inevitably be maintaining rather than growing. Which, despite what you might think, I was fine with. When I started this newsletter I had been fired from CUNY and my reputation was shattered and I was generally in a complete financial conundrum; working to hold the line feels like a privilege in comparison. And of course there are many deserving people on this platform and in this profession who would kill to have my level of financial success. So I don’t mind managed decline. There’s also of course been cyclical elements to all of this, with some months seeing pretty significant growth, even if the overall trend continued. Lately, though, the decline part has definitely outrun the management part. I’m still making more than I ever thought I would make, to be clear, and I’ve never stopped being both surprised and grateful for my financial success around here. But whereas I used to be able to find the levers to press when subs headed too hard south, lately none of that’s working.

The first thing I should say here is that I think it would be a mistake to try and extrapolate from my experience to the paid newsletter economy as a whole or to Substack specifically. My position has always been too weird for that to make sense. There are peers in this business who seem always to be rooting against paid newsletters, which I find really strange; even if you work for a traditional publication, I would think you would want the crowdfunding alternative to be a robust and viable option. Either way, though, my own thing here is not indicative of broader trends and I don’t think you should represent it as such.

Part of this steady decline is just the way it goes. People drift. Tastes shift. Algorithms algorithm. Some of you probably subscribed two jobs and three political awakenings ago. Others signed up because I wrote a post you liked in 2021 and now I’m the email equivalent of that one podcast you keep meaning to unsubscribe from but haven’t gotten around to yet. That’s part of the game. But conditions have changed sufficiently that I’m falling further and further behind when it comes to making up for the natural attrition and churn that are a part of this business. Some headwinds:

• The paid newsletter space is far more saturated than when I started. Every day there are more writers competing for a finite pool of subscriber dollars.

• As much as I hate to admit it, my greatest reach has always been achieved through criticizing liberals and liberalism from the left. I don’t think that’s my best or most important work but it’s the most marketable for sure. And these things are naturally countercyclical; we’re in the depths of the Trump administration and the “vibe shift” of an ascendant cultural conservatism, so my critiques are less necessary and feel less vital. Of course, the worm will turn again, but I don’t think anyone wants to think about just doing the same thing for that long. Anyway, I have stopped writing a particular version of culture war piece because social justice politics have been in stark decline in prominence and influence in the past several years - a condition which I predicted a long time ago. I’m facing some challenges thanks to the very inevitability I saw when I examined American politics in the late 2010s.

• The demise of Twitter has really, really hurt. Yes, I get the irony of that, given my longstanding complaints about how that network hurt the industry and my own history with it. But that irony doesn’t change the reality that people arguing about my work on Twitter was a big driver of traffic. Elon Musk’s takeover led to profound algorithmic changes, most importantly the squelching of traffic to outside sources (especially Substack). And the kind of people who helped me generate attention through controversy - that is, liberal journalists and pundits - left the service in droves. The rise of alternatives like Bluesky and Threads have not resulted in anything like the same critical mass needed for that kind of publicity. So I’ve lost one of the core elements of discoverability, with nothing new to fill the gap.

• Speaking of, I haven’t gotten any traction on the Notes app, which many people on Substack have identified as a key driver of growth. I don’t really know how to use it and as is often the case I feel too old and tired to learn. I was opposed to its initial integration with Substack, in part because I thought that it gave a lot of ammo to the platform’s most disingenuous critics. I have sort of fallen into it over time, but while there are some good conversations happening, I have not cracked the code for turning Notes into more subscribers, in part because of the same old algorithmic inscrutability that’s such a curse in the modern era.

• The media industry is in broad decline, and written commentary in particular is suffering as platforms and publishers find video and podcasts to be more easily monetizable than writing. And one of the many deficiencies in podcast and video is that you can’t embed links within them, not in any kind of elegant way, meaning that they have a tendency to not drive traffic to anyone but potentially other YouTube channels or podcasts. You can stitch this into a narrative about the inevitable decline of writing as an industry or a profession, but I’m skeptical. Those predictions have been made again and again in history and the word adapts in time. I just don’t know if I know how to adapt, personally, in this format, right now.

• Though I have unusually wide-ranging interests, compared to many writers, the fact of the matter is that I’m a guy with a certain number of opinions and eventually my readers are pretty familiar with them. I don’t feel like I’ve run out of things to say, but it’s clear that some people feel that they know my opinions on things and don’t need to keep paying to read them.

The biggest thing driving subscriptions right now is just consistently doing subscriber-only posts and sending out a preview to the overall mailing list. (Which continues to grow.) In particular, I’ve tried to be realistic and publish a little more stuff that’s directly relevant to cultural war issues, which tend to be subscription drivers for anyone; like it or not, left-right controversy sells. To be clear, I never write anything I don’t thoroughly believe, I don’t have it in me to write pieces that I have no authentic interest in, I’m not trolling for controversy’s sake…. Nothing like that. But I have been emphasizing certain aspects of my work that align with culture war incentives. Trouble is, it hasn’t really worked, and increasingly I’m entirely unable to predict what people like (in terms of both views and subscriptions) at all. I’ve always known that I have to subsidize writing about stuff I really like to write about by doing more general interest things too; certainly I knew going in, for example, that this recent series on writing as a profession wasn’t going to drive much traffic at all. But that’s always OK as long as I feel like I have some sense of how to balance low-traffic posts with high. Lately I haven’t been able to consistently make those predictions. Sometimes that’s when posts do unexpectedly well, but more often it’s the opposite.

I have wondered whether it’s because I gradually streamlined the newsletter by no longer doing the weekend roundup posts or the book clubs, but it’s hard to justify that belief given that those posts simply never got much engagement in the first place. The book clubs were a ton of fun but also a lot of work and rarely even cracked the 1000 view mark; the weekend roundups did a little better but still were not opened by the vast majority of readers, and it became very hard to justify the time investment. I am still planning on returning to book clubs eventually, to be clear, because they’re fun and the readers who participate tend to love them. Hopefully in the fall our baby will be willing to sleep in a bassinet and I won’t be doing 10PM-4AM shifts anymore and will have more energy to do one. They will return eventually.

Another common talking point is that I’m still told by people, newsletter writers and readers alike, that I publish too much. But it’s already hard for me to restrict myself to three posts a week as it is. And I’ve never quite understood the complaint. Still, you tell me here:

The big thing I hear from other people in the business is simple: I should raise the price. This newsletter is still $5 a month/$50 a year, the least Substack will allow. That appears to be quite rare now if you browse the top newsletters. Some have said I should do this simply to track inflation; that $50 a year was the price in 2021, which would be the equivalent of just less than $60 today. And a peg to inflation doesn’t seem unreasonable. But I’m still just so loathe to change the price. It still feels right. I guess I just like the attractive round numbers. I do wish that the lower price served as more of an advertisement for the newsletter, but it’s not like people are looking at an Amazon listing of newsletters to sign up for, seeing the prices for each, and saying “Wow, only $5? What a steal!” Well, the price is staying where it is for now, barring Substack raising their minimum.

Anyhow: the comments of this post are open to all of you to tell me what you think I should do more or, do less, do better, or whatever. I’m listening. I won’t reply to many comments but I’ll read them all.

I’m going to tell you right now: to a degree this is bound to be an exercise in frustration. From the day I started this thing, I’ve been amused by how directly and repeatedly I’ve learned the lesson that readers all want different things. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve written a post that’s a little outside of the wheelhouse and gotten one email saying “Why are you wasting your time with this? This isn’t what we signed up for,” and another saying “This is exactly what you’ve been missing!” For every single topic I regularly post about - social justice politics, mental illness, education policy, Israel & Palestine, whatever - there’s a cohort of readers that’s just not interested and a cohort of readers who find that topic the most essential reason to subscribe. Still! I’m listening to advice with an open mind, and I’m seeing this as a good opportunity for some creative thinking. I’m optimistic and happy to tinker. I just don’t like the feeling of flying blind.

Again, I’m in the privileged 1% of people who have paid newsletters, and I’m not complaining that I’ve been wronged or anything. I’m just someone who has never been very good at marketing his blogs, largely because for a decade I didn’t have to. And I’d like a little more info on what I could do that would prompt people who have drifted away to come back into our orbit here - enough that I’m happy to open myself up to some schadenfreude from my enemies. Let me know what you think. Please keep it civil.

1. For those who are new, let me take a moment to let you know what this is all about. As a regular feature, I present an opportunity for paying subscribers to share some of their writing with my mailing list of ~65,000 readers. This is a subscriber perk, and it’s also something I really love to do because I’m very passionate about writing and writers and want to help people who are trying to build an audience. I emphasize that this is for sharing subscriber writing, not your podcast, your Twitch stream, or your Instagram. One thing that I have to reiterate here is that this is the opportunity to link to writing that’s already hosted elsewhere; it’s not, as some people assume, an opportunity to actually post your work here. If you’re looking for someplace to host your writing, why not start a free Wordpress or Substack, or use another blogging or newsletter service? Then you can link to your work here. You can highlight a blog or newsletter or similar on its own, but it may be most useful to link to a specific post or story. If you’re plugging a book, make sure to link to a publishing house listing or Amazon page or some other place where your book can be accessed by readers.

I’ve now had dozens of readers tell me that they meaningfully expanded their audience through this service before. That’s very gratifying for me, and I hope that when the roundup post is run, you’ll check out what some of your peers have put together; their work is very often worth reading.

Make sure to use the Google Form!

If I messed up previously and promised to include your entry in a later edition, please respond to this email to remind me! If you submitted something before the submission period began, submit it again! And if you don’t use the Google Form, I have no sympathy if I fail to include you. I look forward to seeing what you come up with. Yes, I do check your email against the emails on the subscriber list, so if you ordinarily use a different one, point me to your subscribed email in the form.