My biggest Substack✍🏼 lesson
+ my 🔝 posts, and your faves from 2024.
The biggest Substack lesson I learned this year is that frequency is the strongest audience builder and that the Substack ‘Notes’ app — not Twitter, not even close — is the best vehicle for scooping up new subscribers. How often to post is something, I suspect, every writer struggles with. I’d love to live in a world where you’re more generously rewarded for deeply reported, thoroughly vetted writing that undergoes multiple self-edits over severals days and even weeks. Posting home run material, maybe twice a month: Every Writer’s Fantasy. But reality is, you earn more subscribers and consistent views by posting more often, even if it means stream-of-consciousness riffs and day of reporting that’s still being sussed out and may turn out to be flawed or ahem, rushed a morning later. I learned this most vividly in the month of October when I experimented with posting nightly on the day-to-day election developments. This 23-night run from mid-October through Election Day generated my largest spike of subscribers and views — and the most consistent audience I’ve
maintained in my three years Substacking. Yes, the presidential election was the biggest story on the planet, so the medium was blessed with a good plot and an element of surprise for its ending. But there’s no getting around that as soon as I returned to my twice-a-week pace, subscriber growth slowed, views slipped. This presents me a conundrum going forward. Should I embark on another nightly flight in January in the run-up to Trump’s inauguration or is it better to take more time with the topics I’m selecting, the sentences I’m constructing, the interviews I’m casting about for. I’m trying to do both now, juggling one longer piece that I work on multiple times a week with a quicker post — like this one — which I finish in a few hours. You probably know that I have a full-time job as a political correspondent for McClatchy Newspapers that occupies much of my time and run a six-month policyshapers project for Washingtonian Mag that consumes many hours each week. The Substack is an experiment, a side hustle, a vehicle to explore and write in a way that conventional media won’t permit and poke at topics beyond politics. To write with more voice, sincerity and vulnerability. To write without guardrails, even if that means torpedoing conventional sentence structure. There’s no editor here. No one telling me no or stripping out a dicey quote or a spicy lede. Except the voices in my head. That’s the promise and excitement around Substack. I’m consistently impressed and intimidated by the incredible writing I stumble upon just thumbing through the Notes app. And for every flashy writer shouldering a big following who I *might* think is overrated, there are a handful of names with smaller followings than I who are appreciably more talented with the written word. Life is not fair.
As we close out the year, I just want to thank every one of you for subscribing. I see you and I’m hardly exaggerating when I say the email notification alerting me of new subscribers have become a true highlight of my day … and most importantly a reason to keep writing. For those of you choosing to pay, there’s nothing more rewarding than someone willing to fork over their money that could easily be spent elsewhere … You pay for my Starbucks’ Honey Almondmilk Flat white that powers me through cloudy afternoons and my evening Paper Plane cocktail to celebrate after scheduling a Substack. If you like what I’m doing and can share it with a friend or your network, I’d be forever grateful. If you’re a fellow Substack writer and can endorse my work with a recommendation on your page, well, we should share a cocktail at some point.
Before you ring in the New Year, here’s a quick recap of what you clicked on and spent time with most over the last year. You’ll notice it’s dominated by the election run-up and some takes and reporting that looks deficient in hindsight. It always makes one queasy when a high trafficked story shows its warts. But the clear winner was my post-debate analysis that I believe still stands the test of time, even though it didn’t reflect the outcome of the broader war. As much time as I spend on crafting headlines and experimenting with subheads and emojis, calculating if 1200 words is too long or 375 words is too short and weighing whether to post at 11 PM or 7 AM, I can tell you there’s always a surprise in the algorithm for what takes off. Happy New Year from Rio, you’ll see me in your inbox soon enough, unless you’re new here and are about to subscribe … »»»
(do it:)
This is helpful and encouraging. It is a struggle to balance a day job, family life, paid writing projects, a book project and the necessity of keeping up a social media presence. If one is committed to writing as art (in books) it is even harder. The daily practices that are rewarded with followers and eyeballs are not great for the quiet mind needed to produce great writing. IMHO. Or maybe I am just too used to having lived half my life before the internet exploded. Laugh. In any event, again this piece was very helpful and gave me ideas.
As someone who uses the written word to tell stories, communicate with policymakers and my membership - I appreciate your perspective and can really relate to your noodling on frequency. I enjoy your voice that comes through, David!