The Future of This Substack
To Chart a Course, You Need a Map. To Make a Map, I Need Your Help!
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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!
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.
Here's my take:
1) you really like the second group of stuff. Like, a LOT. For you, that's the stuff. It's fun, it's fascinating, it's got a lot going on in the world about it that's worth your attention. It cheers you up and energises you. it draws you out of yourself and gets your imagination (fiction!) revving. And there's never going to be a ceiling. There's no end to that stuff. It's always going to interest you (because it always has) and will always draw a crowd of others like you.
2) you have a totally different emotional/spiritual reaction to the other stuff. It's way less fun, way more painful. It's difficult and fraught and tends to drive you into yourself. Now, if Substack were therapy, that might be a price worth paying for spiritual growth/psychological and emotional healing. But it's not. It's a blog full of 2000 strangers.
The thing Substack has shown us is that there really is an audience out there for absolutely anything, and it can be a living if you're applying yourself to it with reasonable diligence. And putting extra work in really brings a lot of rewards because really there isn't a ceiling in terms of the size of audience if it's a niche/interest that's out there in the world.
So, in fact, you don't need to take a poll; you need to decide what you actually want to get out of this thing. Do you want the (in my opinion dubious) benefits of a self-revelatory business of talking about stuff that, frankly, brings you down? And I think the selfie blogs have a way lower ceiling for audience growth; there's only so much of that stuff anyone is interested in. Eventually it gets old. Unless you're the one offering the therapy, I think the range is too limited.
Also, when you've actually finished healing, all that stuff gets to be a lot less interesting. I was having a conversation with a friend the other night over dinner, and she said to her daughter who was with us, "Hilary's the world's biggest Beatles fan." (It's not true. I'm very rational about them...) And I immediately and without hesitation said, "That's only because I'm not mad at my mother anymore." She was the one who brought the Beatles into my life, and I was raised with them as the soundtrack of my earliest life. Unfortunately that meant that my rage at my mother was kind of transferred onto their music, so I couldn't like it. It was at exactly the moment I said it to my friend that I realised it was true: a lifetime of anger had somehow evaporated. And that was exactly why the Beatles' music no longer generated those ancient negative feelings. And I think it's why I'm able to be so laser focused on what I'm doing, and put so much energy into it. Why it is interesting enough for me now that I have to force myself to stop working every day at 8pm and take one day off a week. When my mental energy was taken up with dealing with all that guddawful childhood/teenage years stuff there wasn't very much juice left for anything else. And it was more appealing to talk about myself, my brain and my personal difficulties. Now all that stuff is just ... well... kind of old news. And other stuff is WAY more fun and engaging.
So, I think the idea of talking about The Stuff for a living might end up being a pretty big miscalculation. To recap: You don't really like it. You like the other stuff way more. It doesn't have the high audience ceiling that the other way more fun stuff does, and you'll probably not be able to maintain people's interest long-term. You don't really want a reputation as the guy who talks about his problems in public; you want a reputation for being the guy who's big into and able to make interesting a lot of stuff that really is massively relevant to the general culture. And you won't ever grow out of it and get bored as your mental, emotional and spiritual health improves. In fact, the opposite; the more betterer you feel the more fun it will become.