The Future of the Future Proof Newsletter

Forgive the meta title that makes it sound like I am going to stop writing this newsletter. I’m not going to stop writing it, in fact I intend to write it more regularly and with greater enthusiasm. It’s just that I’m going to start properly charging for it.

As of next week, I will be on paternity leave for a bit. I’m planning to take a couple of weeks away from everything (including this Substack) and then a couple of months away from specific things (not including this Substack). Which means, for people who await these emails (like the glimmers of light in the dark that they are…) there should be limited interruption to service.

That said, this does also offer me an opportunity to pause and think about what I am doing with this newsletter. I have, apparently, published 179 posts on this Substack over the past few years. To begin with, I saw it as a place where I might migrate some of my readers from Medium, pushing them towards a platform that I could more easily monetise. But like so many writers dealing with the modern creator economy, I have found myself trapped between two ambitions: to make money, and to be read.

In the good old days of journalism, those two things went hand in hand. You got a mysteriously well paying job at a magazine or you contributed freelance pieces to national newspapers for a fee of a dollar, or more, per word. But, increasingly, there are few staff writings jobs (and those that still exist pay less well than ever) at publications (and those that still exist are less read than ever ever). Equally, most places are barely taking freelance pitches anymore, preferring to work with a small coterie of established writers, whilst slashing both word counts and fees. There are a few places I regularly freelance for, and whilst I enjoy that part of my ‘portfolio’ (a very shudderable term) career, I am fortunate to not absolutely need to make a living from it. All in all, it has become extremely hard to be both well paid and widely read.

Which is where Substack – and other similar platforms – have stepped in. They have created an incubator for “brand journalist”. Excellent columnists and commentators – the sort who had keenly curated their personal followings on sites like antediluvian Twitter – have migrated here where they can find an active, engaged audience and also set their own prices. For a small, select minority, the rewards have been rich. But I have never been part of that crowd. To some extent that’s a result of my pathway here: I had always published my pieces free on Medium, where I have 78,000 followers. To move things over to Substack and then start aggressively charging felt like a betrayal of whatever it is that my readers had found in my work. Plus, I could always tell myself that the writing was in service of a broader good: business development.

My business has, for the past decade, been podcasts. And much of my writing was, originally, on that theme. But the remit of the Future Proof newsletter has expanded to take in my plural interests, and the clear link between my day job (podcasts) and my hobby (whining about the industry) has been eroded. It’s been quite a while since I’ve published one of my trademark “the podcast industry is actually a house of cards built on sand in a great glass-ceilinged bubble” mixed metaphor rants. And so the newsletter has become a thing in itself. A medium-successful thing, with a medium-sized following, and a medium amount of energy being expended on it. But over the next few months, when I’m not scurrying around London and when I hope to be spending more time here (at home, at my computer), I’d like it to be more than that.

Which is why, from henceforth, I will be more strictly paywalling pieces on the newsletter. This gives me no pleasure, but my current model (encouraging people to vaguely “support my writing”, even though they get nothing tangible in return) has resulted in a product that I enjoy writing but which makes no business sense. I have a couple of thousand subscribers to the newsletter and (hopefully) some people find it interesting, but the conversion rate to paid subscribers has been dismal. I can’t blame you: after all, I’ve paywalled about 5 posts ever, which is not exactly a value return for paying subs. It has resulted in me essentially paying myself a word rate that even an Albanian bot farm would reject.

179 posts, probably averaging around 1,500 words. That’s roughly 268,500 words – almost exactly the length of Ulysses by James Joyce. And while I hope that these blogs have been more accessible – dare I say it? intelligible – than Ulysses, I do not feel like they have afforded me Joyce levels of career progression. And though it’s some solace that Joyce lived and died basically in poverty, that was not exactly my dream for a publication analysing box office receipts and lampooning tech oligarchs.

I know that the writers who have had the most success on Substack have been disciplined. They have set the terms of their product and stuck to it, even as it must have felt, for many, that they were suddenly speaking to a much smaller – more choral – group. National newspaper columnists went, overnight, from having hundreds of thousands of readers to writing directly for a few hundred. That must have been a shock to the system, even if the monetisation mechanics meant they were earning as much, if not more, than they did before. This is the fundamental question for me: do I have the energy to write if I do not think it is going to be read? We will have to see.

Share

For now, I really would encourage you to take out a paid subscription to Future Proof. I have priced it as low as Substack will let me, so that it is about the same price as a cup of coffee per month (or a cheap lunch, per year). Subscribing will be helpful to me on paternity leave and also in producing more episodes on my little podcast, The Ned Ludd Radio Hour, which some of you may enjoy. To be honest, if you’ve made it this far through such a self-indulgent piece of writing, surely you can take a punt on $5-a-month? (or whatever the price actually is). Each time I get a new paid subscriber I get a weird little dopaminergic thrill. Can you put a price on remotely affecting the brain chemistry of a stranger?

(Oh, and if you would like to do some sort of corporate sponsorship (and, honestly, I can’t imagine that you would) then do drop me a line, any time, to nick[@]podotpods.com to discuss. This extremely mercenary perspective on my life will probably pass, so feel free to exploit me now.)