The Future of This Substack

To Chart a Course, You Need a Map. To Make a Map, I Need Your Help!

The following is a TSF free post. If you want access to our comment box & community, subscribers-only posts, The Friday Roundup, and the full post archives including this one, you can grab all of that for just $5 a month (or even less on an annual plan) by subscribing right here:

Writing is how I make my living, so if you like what you see here, please support my work by subscribing!

If you’ve already subscribed but would like to throw a tip in the jar, you can do that right here:

---

Gentle reader, I come to you today looking for some advice.

There is a poll at the bottom of this post I’d love for you to fill out. If you’re pressed for time, feel free to go right to it. If you have a minute, I’d first like to set the stage for why I’ve created it.

This little Substack of mine (I’m gonna let it shine!) has been growing, but the growth is incremental, at best.

As a writer, naturally, I’d like to spend most of my time doing the thing I’m best at: writing. But writing takes up great gobs of time, and if the time it takes isn’t compensated, then the activity becomes more of a liability than an asset. Right now, this ‘stack brings in just enough cash to make it a nice side hustle, but not enough that I can afford to give it the amount of time I do each week without taking away from other income-generating activity.

I find this state of affairs quite frustrating.

I used to make a respectable living as a writer — enough to support my large family. I had so much success, in fact, that I had little doubt that once I walked away from the first publication I founded, I could certainly do so again. After all, I had all this experience under my belt. I could apply what I learned from my last project and make this time even better. I had a track record of establishing a brand new publication with no advertising and bringing in hundreds of thousands of views in the first month. Our traffic was strong for the entire 7 years I was at the helm, and my articles (I wrote over a thousand) routinely got high view counts.

I thought I had it figured out, but I was wrong. Things have been very different this time around.

This is all a numbers game. To keep this thing viable, I need so many subscribers at such-and-such a price to bring in the kind of income that would justify me sitting here spending 40+ hours researching and writing at a sufficient pace to produce 2-3 posts a week. As it stands, the two businesses my wife is running are paying our bills, and because of that, I have to prioritize the tasks I can do related to those businesses, or alternatively, towards taking care of family-related stuff (shopping, cooking, keeping the toddler from crawling inside my wife’s body like a Tauntaun in a Hoth blizzard as she tries to work, etc.). We’ve just added homeschooling five kids to the list this month, because we’re insane, so now there’s even less time to go around. I have entire days when I don’t have the chance to even touch my keyboard to begin pecking out a post — let alone the headspace to come up with a topic and think it through.

It’s even harder to find time to work on my book.

I’m quite clearly doing something wrong. I can feel it. My wife keeps telling me I’m not done healing yet from the giant existential bomb that went off in my lap a couple years ago, and I know she’s right, but I don’t have time to sit around and mope. Life doesn’t chill out and wait for you to catch up, and my goal is to take the load bearing financial burden off of my better half again so that it’s not all on her. But writing/videos/podcasts (the content creation trifecta) is the thing I’m best at, and it’s not getting enough traction yet to move the needle.

I was talking to my pal

Hilary White

about it, and she says I haven’t found my subject yet, which means I haven’t found my audience yet either.

And I think she’s right.

My topics here vary as widely as my interests. Sometimes I write about science, or UFOs, or AI. Sometimes I write about politics, or cultural trends, or writing, or whatever I’m watching or reading. Other times, I write about religious deconstruction, the rawness of personal development and reinvention, and the process of working through hard personal issues. This last category always seems to get a lot of eyeballs and positive feedback. It’s also the most exhausting to write — sometimes I’m left feeling physically ill over how over-exposed I am when I’m done with a piece of that nature — and to make things worse, it feels tremendously self-indulgent to spill my guts on the internet for everyone to read. Too many instance of “I” in too many posts. Too many personal epiphanies I hope will connect.

I thought coming into this that I’d do a Joe Rogan-style model of talking about anything and everything that interests me. The niche (they always say you have to have a niche) was simply my personal curiosity. And writing about those had the potential to attract an audience of people with like-minded interests. I thought I’d do a podcast, too, but every time I think life is going to settle down enough that I can put one together consistently, some new wrinkle appears and the can gets kicked further down the road.

It’s been almost 3 years since I started writing here on a regular basis, and I’m recognizing that if I don’t change things up, I’m going to be stuck right where I am indefinitely. I can’t grow an audience that doesn’t know what to expect from me.

So that’s why I need to talk to all of you.

You’re probably not supposed to talk about this stuff with your audience, but I never do things the way other people do, so I’m not going to let it stop me.

I currently have 153 paid subscribers (thank you!) and just a hair under 2,000 free subscribers (you guys should TOTES subscribe! It’s only $5 a month!) and I’ve clearly hit a plateau. If I converted every free subscriber into a paid subscriber, I’d be in a position to put serious time and effort here. But that’s not how things work in the real world, so the only solution is to grow the universe of free subs and find ways to deliver enough value that a percentage of them are willing to spend $5 a month to keep it going.

I have been seriously considering, for some time now, splitting this Substack into two.

Why, you ask?

Well, I’ve noticed that a lot of folks who come here for the religion and culture and personal development stuff couldn’t care less about the tech and AI and UFO stuff. There seems to be a natural break between these audiences.

I could keep The Skojec File for topics like:

• Religion/Religious deconstruction

• Culture

• Politics

• Family-related topics

• Personal Development

• Reflections on art, beauty, the poignant experiences of life, etc.

And I could take my other, original Substack, Atomic Robot, out of mothballs, and re-tool it to cover:

• UFOs

• Tech

• AI

• Movies/Shows

• Books

• Writing about writing

• Gadgets

• Weird stories

• General nerdiness

This seems like a natural separation to me. It’s easier for me to write about things all in one place, but it may not be easier for all of you to get topics you aren’t really interested in all jumbled up with the ones you are.

Do you think this is a good idea?

The hard part of a split, of course, would be meeting the content demands of multiple pubs by myself. It’s a lot of writing if I try to keep up what I’m doing here times two.

But I’m not sure “a lot of writing” is even what you all are looking for. If you’re like me, you may be feeling content fatigue: too many things in your inbox you’d like to read, not enough time to read it all.

I subscribe to probably a dozen Substacks, and other things besides, and I can’t read everything I am actually interested in. (Forget about getting through all the books and podcasts I want to consume!)

What are you looking for in exchange for your $5 a month? 2 posts a month? 2 posts a week? 1 post a month and a group chat?

Should all the content be free, with paid subscriptions only for those who want to support the work? Do you find value in some of it being paywalled, for subscribers-only? Would you prefer that every single piece of content be exclusive to subscribers?

What would make a paid subscription worth it to you?

Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments — I’ll leave the box open to everyone today — but if you’d be so kind as to answer the questions on the following survey, it will help me to better understand your feedback so I can improve the Substack. Thank you!