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Yoshi Matsumoto's avatar

Hello Steve. I appreciate your honesty here. You're a good writer and when you started 1P5 you gave voice to a lot of people with similar concerns and intellectual struggles. That's why you found such an audience so quickly, in my opinion. You happened upon a voiceless, struggling group and gave them an outlet.

To achieve similar success, you'll need to find a similar vein. Disaffected religious people, as you noted, generate the most eyeballs, because that is also, currently, a fairly voiceless group looking for someone to give them an outlet. Probably, that's your best bet monetarily.

The other stuff maybe too broad to build a "brand" out of. On UFOs, you can make that work also if you are willing to take up the "woo" side of aliens. The Nuts and Bolts, "is there a craft is there not a craft in the sky" thing can get dull very quickly. You might find some purchase in the vein of connecting the UFO experience to the religious one, look into abduction stories and contact experiences for that if you desire. Lots of overlap with the religious there.

Good luck!

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Deely's avatar

This isn’t really an option on the survey, so I’m just going to post it as a comment.

And please take all of this with a huge grain of salt, since we don’t know each other in real life. I’m only commenting because your loss of faith sounds EXACTLY like my own and you specifically asked for opinions.

I think you should write about the stuff you like to write about a couple of times per month (or whatever feels best for you) and have maybe one free post per month about the religious stuff and one paid post per month that’s more personal. Anything more than that on those two topics is probably too much personal exposure (and I say this as someone who has found your writing about your loss of faith deeply helpful, since it made me feel so much less alone), but it seems like that’s something that is important enough to you that you probably shouldn’t stop writing about it completely. But it seems to me that it’s wise to start shifting away from religion being such a large part of your public identity. Otherwise you’re just going to end up as the “anti-Trad” guy permanently.

And if it seems like it’s gonna be a lot to manage two substacks, don’t. Just have one, but give people the option to subscribe to the specific “series” they are interested in.

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