How My Wonderful Readers Made Me a Bestseller and What's Coming Up in December

A sincere THANK YOU to everyone who reads, shares, and sponsors this newsletter—I APPRECIATE YOU ALL!!!

Hello My Dear Friends!

There’s lots, lots, lots going on right now so let me get right into it! First of all, I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday! Thanksgiving was always my favorite holiday growing up because there was no pressure (because I wasn’t cooking). I like how it’s just sitting around and eating and you don’t have to worry about trying to get somebody a present they’ll appreciate.

I’ve done a couple articles recently about the hard holidays that I had to endure growing up. This year in particular, I think it’s very important for all of us to learn how to expel toxicity from our lives. I’ve had to remind myself that my kids are at home, the future is uncertain, and I MUST enjoy the precious fleeting time we have together.

I’m also grateful to all of you who read this newsletter because on Thanksgiving day you made me a Substack bestseller! That means I reached 100 paid subscribers. I truly appreciate that because it helps me keep going!

Oddly, when Substack sent me the email with the graphic, they didn’t list “I’d Rather Be Writing” as the publication. Instead, they sent a graphic that listed

Kristina God

’s publication. I’m a big fan of Kristina and I consider her a friend. I wonder what’s going on internally with Substack that makes them confuse my newsletter for hers.

I tried to send them an email about it, but I kept getting directed to a chat bot. This is exactly the kind of problem that those chat bots are ill equipped to handle because they’re programmed to anticipate problems and prompt you accordingly. However, if Substack could anticipate that it would sometimes put the wrong name of a publication on a marketing graphic, they’d FIX it rather than have you go chat with a bot about it.

But that’s a relatively minor complaint and I appreciate the opportunity to mention Kristina! She’s been a great help to me.

Your sponsorships keep me going. Between Medium and Substack I make about as much as a first year teacher in Wisconsin, but without the benefits. If it wasn’t for my wife, I wouldn’t be able to keep doing this. She’s gone from being a classroom assistant to a teacher, and now she’s just finished her Master’s degree. My job is to be there and support her, which I happily do. Her professional stability provides stability for our whole family.

Here’s my November on Medium in review:

For the last few months, my Substack has been on the rise and my Medium has been on the decline. I still made more on Medium than I did on Substack for November of 2024, but it’s very close. However, November was a weird month. Ever since America decided to pick cruelty as a national ideology for the next four years, I’ve been in a heartbroken state of shock.

I only had one story Boosted in November, but I really wasn’t writing Boostable stories. These last few weeks have been more about processing our current and future reality. I expect that things will get back to normal on Medium soon, or they’ll settle in to whatever is a “new” sort of normal.

I still believe that Medium is the best place for writers to start out if they haven’t yet built a platform. The internal distribution mechanism of Medium is both powerful and convenient. Yes, you have to write to the expectation of the platform, but that provides good motivation to practice and improve your writing skills.

You get paid on Medium through the partner program, you can learn more about that here.

Essentially you sign up for a Medium account and connect it to your bank account through Stripe. If that makes you uncomfortable, go and talk to your bank about Stripe to verify that it’s a legitimate platform. We don’t take sufficient advantage of the experts and professionals in our vicinity. Your bank doesn’t want to see you defrauded.

These days Medium is looking for quality, engaging work that is rooted in some sort of verifiable academic concept. My advice is to spend a little bit of time on Google Scholar if you’re going to write for Medium. You need to have strong and respected sources.

Straight storytelling doesn’t really work on Medium. That’s why I’ve been very appreciative of Substack’s podcasting feature. I’ve been trying to offer an episode a day, and I’ve been really pleased with the results:

I’ve been mixing up my podcast with a variety of content. I started by simply posting the voice overs from articles from over a year ago. I figure if those articles were published when I only had 100 subscribers, most of you haven’t heard them.

I’ve also been experimenting with extemporaneous recordings, though I’ve only published one of those. Most of the time, I do a recording when I’m out walking the dog, generate a transcript, fix it for mistakes, and then read off the transcript like it’s a script. That helps create a cleaner recording that doesn’t have pauses while I collect my thoughts.

If I’m posting a voice over that previously appeared as an article, I link to the original article. If it’s one of my audio only offerings, you can click on the transcript link that’s next to the share button:

However, there are a couple problems with this. One is that the transcript link doesn’t seem to appear on the phone app. Two is that it’s not a particularly “clean” transcript (there are grammatical errors and the occasional incorrect word).

Once again I find myself at that intersection point between quality and time. I realized long ago that if I try to make everything perfect, I’ll never get anything done. That’s why I try to limit myself to one or two read throughs when I do my voice overs. If I make a mistake I press on, because when I find myself stopping and starting again, the mistakes tend to get worse instead of better.

I have a lot of stories that I want to tell, and once I am able to release a solid audio version of an article, I’m ready to leave it for a while. Perhaps when I get to 10,000 followers, I’ll do the reverse of my previous process and begin to release my recordings as articles for my new audience.

I always find an article gets better when I revisit it later. For now, I’m scrambling a little to offer an article and an audio recording every day. As I refine my process, I think it will become more comfortable. Remember, if you’re getting too much from me, you can go into the settings and unsubscribe from sections without unsubscribing from my whole newsletter:

What to expect in December

I haven’t given up the fight, but I want to focus on mental health this month. To be honest, I’m absolutely terrified about what’s going to happen over the next four years. We’re an immigrant family, and that makes us the target of hate, quite frankly, in the United States.

It’s unfair and it’s not right, but that’s the way it is. The Republicans hate my family because they see immigrants as less than human… and try as I might I have a hard time getting organizations like the media or churches to denounce this attitude.

But I don’t want to dwell on that for the next month. I recognize that I’ll be fighting for human rights for the rest of my life. It’s a marathon, not a sprint, and for December I need to appreciate that I have a healthy, happy family. I like to celebrate winter and the coming Solstice. I like to put up pretty lights and eat cookies and create watercolor paintings.

So that’s what I’m going to do.

I’m sure every now and then something political is going to sneak in… something that I have to comment on. But for the most part I want to tell you stories about how you can be happy, and how you can become more empowered to help your fellow human beings. The way I approach these things always starts with writing, but writing is about building a community.

I wouldn’t say I’m really a writer with a “huge platform” but I’m making nice progress in that direction. Everything good that’s come to me from writing has involved helping others, so I’ll continue to do that.

Again, thanks for being a part of my community and for making me a Substack bestseller! My newsletter will remain free, but if you can comfortably make a contribution (at any level) I really appreciate it!

Try to enjoy this holiday season with your loved ones!

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