Hi everyone. Just a quick post to note somethings happening here.
Posting
I am still in the middle of a “OMG! Hurry up! Wait… HURRY!” time at work, which is part of the reason essays have been a bit sparse the past month and a half. This will continue for the next couple of months, although it might lighten up as the wait portion gets extended.
Also, I have a non-work project that has been sort of hanging out waiting to get finished, and I always feel a bit guilty working on other writing instead of doing that. However! It should be getting wrapped up over the next week. Hooray! I will be sharing it here once it is finished, and I think you will all find it interesting. Or just aggravating… but in an interesting way?
Partitioning
No doubt you have seen that Substack lets you split up your newsletter into sub-categories, so people can subscribe to one type of content and not another. I don’t find this too useful myself, since if someone writes something I don’t care to read I just… don’t read it. Or come back and read it in a few weeks when I have a long sit ahead of me. Then again, I can understand not wanting your email jammed full of stuff you don’t want to read. If any readers here want me to split things out, maybe between politics/philosophy/economics posts and blacksmithing/hobby posts, or whatever, let me know in the comments. If folks are pretty interested I will set something up.
Paying
Recently Parrhesia and Resident Contrarian did an interview with Infovores on writing, on Substack and in general. Good interview, worth reading.
One of the points made that changed my mind was that there is no reason to not make your Substack blog available to take payments.
Previously I had not bothered to do this because I felt the intermittent nature of posts was irksome, consistency of production being key to deserving consistency of subscription payments, and also because I didn’t want to paywall anything. I mean, I understand why some writers do that, being professional writers whereas I have a day job and all. The trouble is, getting lots of emails with essays truncated after a paragraph that then ask you to pay for the whole thing is something I find kind of irritating, such that I consider unsubscribing if that’s all I get. Likewise I am a bit saddened at how many newsletters I liked reading have just stopped sending out anything after accepting payments. Again, I get it, and I know I am a bit of a skin flint, but part of me just recoils a bit from pay walled online essays as the only content. Part of me thinks that if the ideas are good enough to pay for, they are important enough to share for free. Or perhaps I am just cheap.
In any case, knowing I didn’t plan to paywall anything, and figuring that no one would want to throw money my way just because, I didn’t exert the effort to set up the Stripe payment business.
RC made a good point in the interview however, one I am sort of ashamed hadn’t occurred to me: Who the hell am I to tell someone whether my work is good enough for them to support1? If someone believes they would like to support and encourage my work by tossing me a fiver here and again, why tell them they are wrong?
For someone highly trained in a discipline emphasizing subjective value judgements with regards to goods and services, well, I should have come up with that myself. I generally can’t help arguing against people who say their art is under appreciated because no one wants to pay $10,000 for finger painting, or “fair price” theorists in general, but of course I was making the opposite mistake. Believing no one should want to pay any money for something is as wrong as believing someone should want to pay money for something. Worthiness is in the eyes of the evaluator.
Long story short, you can throw money at the newsletter now. I can’t think of anything that I would pay wall (other than maybe early release versions of essays or other work if people want to see rough drafts or something) so all any payments get you is a warm fuzzy feeling and a nice email or something saying thanks. I mean, if I get a ton of paid subscriptions I will absolutely quit my job and do this full time! The numbers for that are pretty far off from where I am now though, so you are really just buying me books, coffee and metal, the three main ingredients of this blog.
Man… “Books, Coffee and Metal” would have been a great title for the newsletter.
So! Nothing should change now that I have gone paid. In fact, I went paid almost a month ago, so yea, nothing has changed.
One thing to keep an eye on though: Substack posts default to being “Paid Subscribers Only” and commenting on those posts default to “Only Paid Subscribers”. I don’t want either of those clicked, ever. If you find that you can’t comment on a post, or you get a little half sized version or something, I assure you that is an accident. Please post a comment in another essay and I will fix up the error.
I want all the comments, trust me. Hearing from you guys is pretty much the only reason I write.
So, go read RC and Parrhesia over at Infovores, and thanks again for reading here!
And if you really want me to quit my job…
Gonna need a lot more subscribers :)
Paraphrasing.
Thank you for sharing that interview and your thoughts. It inspired me to enable the paid option just because. The only downside I see is that Substack is a bit aggressive in "leading" people to choose the paid subscription, so this might keep some people from subscribing and choosing "none". Then again, you can be precise in your wording, and "quality over quantity" applies I suppose...