One of the reasons that I normally publish on a Sunday is because on Sunday morning I usually have a 90 minute/2 hour window after walking my B4LF and before I go swimming to write this week’s issue. I’m very much a deadline kind of guy…and for most weeks it’s not a problem.
But.
You’ll be aware (I hope!) that I didn’t publish an issue last week. There were two reasons:
Something funky is going on with either Substack, or my interface with Substack. And that layouts all look weird when writing. What’s double weird: the funkiness is still there in normal browser windows, but in private browser window everything seems normal. So that threw me off my stride and I wasted at least an hour trying to work out what was happening.
The second reason is more important. I wrote something…80% finished….that I was going to finish and publish on Tuesday. But in my morning free writing session this thought came up: this is too valuable to give away for free on Substack.
That was followed by a thought/quote that I’ve had many times….don’t know the attribution and can’t be bothered to check it for this article:
If the product is free….you’re the product.
That also led my thoughts to this article from my buddy Andre:
And here’s one of the takeaways, based on writer George Saunders’s substack:
In Part 1 of this essay series, I mentioned that George Saunders is likely earning around $100K/mo from this Substack, so he is a fun real-life example.
$10,000/mo in Substack forever-fees is nontrivial, for sure.
So.
My next thoughts were:
Substack is not bringing you the results you wanted (to start building my audience of ‘1000 True Fans.’
Therefore writing for Substack is not leading you to your goals.
Therefore….it’s time to do something different.
You’ve been thinking about this for three months. Nothing’s really changed in that three months….now’s the time.
I wrote about problems with The Substack Model back in August last year:
Nothing’s changed with Substack. So it’s time to wind this down. There will be one more issue next week….but here’s how I’m pivoting away.
While there are a few outliers there are tens of thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of creators who are pumping out free content to build an audience. And spending most of their time pumping out content to promote their free content. (The pumping out part is super easy to do with AI too…..so the reader is bombarded with free content.)
I’m not interested in playing that game. I’d much rather focus on a small audience of people who’ve bought a book or something else and cater to them. Free stuff….not so much. (And one way I’ll be experimenting with promotion is using Twitter or X….short tweets are super easy to put together. And if they bomb….they’re like old newspapers and are gone and forgotten the next day.
At the top of my morning free writing entry for every day - because it’s copied from the previous day - is a list of non-fiction books I might write. That list is currently 25 ideas long….and two are in various stages of writing at the moment. I’d much rather write books for two reasons:
If someone buys my book…they are much likely to value the content (Because of the psychology of free vs paid) precisely because they paid money for it.
Even if sales are low (and for my Paul T Wolfe books, they are low) I don’t care. I learn enough from writing them that I’ve got value even if no-one ever reads it. And I’m taking the mindset of building my back list.
I want to write more fiction.
I’ve written plenty in the past. Never did get to the story of how my serial killer thriller was rejected with a piece of un-fucking believable advice on it that - had i followed through with it - might have meant the difference between being unpublished and securing an agent and a publishing deal. All my bruised stupid ego could see was the fact that it was rejected.
I couldn’t see that the novel was only kind of rejected (We all have regrets…not reading that letter properly for three years is one of the biggest of my life. Hey ho. On we go. But yeah….what a prick that guy was.)
Given the choice between writing and promoting free content….or getting back to writing fiction….that’s a total no-brainer.
So…
All of the issues are going to be removed from here and ported over to my deliberate-practice.com website….might take me a month…but it will happen. What I don’t yet know is whether I will continue writing this newsletter on my own site.
That’s a decision for the future.
If you pressed me for an answer right now…I’d say: probably. I still plan to write some non-fiction books on topics that we’ve explored in PTWS (and some topics I just never got around to)
So that’s it for this week. One of the questions I’ll try and answer in my morning free writing in the coming days is: What do I do with PTWS? Do I continue? Do I archive it? Do I pause it? What?
We’ll find out next week.
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.