The Habitable Attic
How I Hit Over 4,000 Subscribers on Substack in Only 5 Months
This is the sort of thing I studied today.
I’m convinced Substack is the place for me to be, for now, even though …
… there is something ‘better’.
***
In the beginning there was the Wordpress, and it was good and even perfect in a way. I put the words onto the page day after day. There was no external platform necessary, or desired. I took sole personal control of every aspect of it and no one could really tell me what to do with any of it, from the theming to the content.
All throughout those seven years until the present day, the people that saw me and read me and heard me there numbered roughly in the single digits.
Monetizing didn’t matter because I had a job for money.
When I didn’t have the income of a normie job anymore, I eventually went to YouTube, looking for more eyes upon my Work in the hope of eventual monetization. YouTube is the very opposite of Wordpress. It is a mega-corp platform over which I have almost no control. After something like six months and fifty videos, I have no strikes against my account. But they could hit at any time, destroying the enterprise instantly and for no good reason. I’ve seen it happen to people who have strong opinions that resemble mine.
I continued to act as if I were free, for the most part, in my videos, but I didn’t ever show my face there or explain cogently what I was up to … so while my audience roughly tripled or quadrupled from the simple pressed Words, that still leaves me a very long way from making a single dime from YT yet. I need a thousand subscribers to even be eligible to make money there. I have ten.
I won’t stop trying and I won’t stop modifying my approach, to try to find a balance between doing what I believe in, and being … marketable.
Doubtless I will continue to err heavily on the side of my believings, and, frankly, on doing whatever the hell I want to do, at the expense of being successful by more conventional metrics.
But if I want to keep eating decently and living well, if I finally want a truly rent-free roof over my head, if I want new tires for my truck, or a new truck … if I want to have seven or fourteen thousand dollars laying around when a fresh pretty acre strikes my fancy …
Compromises and accommodations will have to be made.
Just typing this, here, on a platform I control so minimally, is one of them.
***
The point of Substack, as I see it, is to develop an email list, a list of ‘subscribers’, a regular audience, and then over time to ask them for money one way or the other, via paid subscription, or via adjacent platforms like Patreon or even Venmo.
I’m going to try it for a while and see if I can get it to work just like that.
I won’t stop blog-posting or making videos either—I’ll keep other irons in the fire. Lines in the water; choose a more adventurous metaphor.
I feel how my voice is different already in this space as opposed to the one where my rule is absolute.
Different is not always bad, ennit?
I plan to embrace the difference, experimentally.
***
I also found out about a very Wordpressy variation on Substack, called Ghost.
Ghost.org Complete Tutorial - Turn Your Blog into a Subscription Business
I saw opportunities like that and my instinct was to jump right toward them instead of giving Substack a real shot. But then I stopped myself.
I could have Substack functionality and yet retain full control with Ghost.
But that would just be trying what I already tried for seven years, essentially.
Substack is not just a web app. It’s a potential gathering place in a way that transcends a self-hosted application, and beyond that, fortunately, it seems to have its free-speech values held high and proud.
I still have time to experiment with that some, and to hope and pray, before things get too serious and I have to consider the ultimate fail of things like employment contracts, human resource departments, or turning myself into a drop shipper, or god help us an influencer.
Walk with me a ways, please.
I can promise I’ll be true at least, and not an exploiter. I still have no talent for it, and I’m glad of that much already.