How Substack Fits Into The Business Model of the Professional Writer

Hello Friends,

One of the sections of my Substack newsletter is called “Empowering Progressive Writers.” The whole point of this section is to share my viewpoint on how marginalized voices can get their work seen.

To be completely honest, quite a bit of the writing advice you see in the media is complete nonsense. There are a lot of fake gurus who make a living pedaling a writing pyramid scheme. Essentially, they tell you to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps as they brag about making $100k a year and discuss their recent book deals.

In the end, the people who promote these schemes are the only ones who make any money.

Like all things, you'll find good advice mixed in with the shady stuff. Part of captivating an audience involves providing people with evidence as to why they should listen to you. This is why discussing your book deal or talking about the money you make on your articles is such a popular tactic. I've used both of those tactics myself on more than one occasion.

The difference is that the con artists tell you, “All you have to do is want it really, really bad and all good things will come to you.”

The people offering good advice say, “You'll work really, really hard. You'll make a TON of sacrifices. Even then, there's no guarantee that you'll succeed.”

Yeah, you make a lot more money if you tell people their dreams will come true. Lies are always more beautiful than the truth. However, if you listen to lies for too long, you'll end up wasting your life.

I think a good rule of thumb is that people should get some value from whatever they purchase, and that includes advice. Right now, the easiest way I can provide value is by offering suggestions to writers so that they can get their work Boosted on Medium. But even this is extremely difficult because even if my advice is implemented there's no guarantee that the story will get a Boost, and even if a story is Boosted, there's no guarantee it will make money.

The long and the short of it is that writers need to put a lot of hooks in the water, and they have to be prepared to invest a lot of time. You need to develop your own instinctive sense to reject anyone who is going to try to take advantage of you.

These days, my fraud detectors are so hardwired that the con artists rarely get through my firewalls. For example, I don't answer my phone anymore. I just wait for texts or voice mails. This prevents me from having to talk to people who are trying to trick me into giving up valuable information.

Whenever an advertisement comes on the television, I get up and leave the room. This happens as a form of involuntary response.

When I see an article titled, “How I Made 70 Gazillion Dollars Writing About My Feet” I scroll on by, and you should too.

Perhaps the biggest trick about working as a writer is not just getting paid, it's getting paid for writing the things that you actually want to say. It's relatively easy to get jobs where you sing the praises of some sort of product or service. It's a lot harder to get jobs where you're able to expose and dismantle the injustices of the world.

Nobody titles their article, “How I Made 70 Gazillion Dollars Normalizing America's Hate Ideology.” Somebody should write that article because there's a lot of that going on.

Building a positive writing business model that actually provides some amount of fair compensation is next to impossible. I've been doing this for a long time, and one of the things I've learned is that platforms always evolve. You've got to strike while the iron is hot. Change is inevitable, and your main sources of income will shift around like the tide.

You've got to establish yourself on multiple platforms and keep those accounts active in preparation for the inevitable movements.

I've gone from submitting to magazines, to monetizing a blog, to working as an editor, to content writing, to Medium, to Substack. I haven't added anything new in about six months, and that's longer than normal.

I first started using Medium as a way to place stories that were rejected from magazines. The whole trick to writing is to never accept failure. You write a story and submit it to the highest paying market. If it's rejected there, you submit it to a market that pays 20% less. When you've run out of markets, you might publish it on Medium only to find that it makes more than if it had been accepted to the first place you sent it.

Over the years, my focus has changed. I used to write 5-10 articles every month for publications outside of Medium. For the last year, writing for Medium has been my primary objective. For my first year of Substack, I was repurposing articles from Medium. Over the last six months, I've been writing a lot more articles with Substack specifically in mind.

I still believe all writers should aspire to write for paying markets and then trickle down their work when it gets rejected (even famous, well-established writers get their projects rejected… get used to it):

• Write for a high paying market

• Submit the story to various alternative markets

• Submit to publications on Medium

• Republish on Substack

The brilliant thing about Substack is that it offers a form of stability. On Medium, your earnings can fluctuate wildly. There might be some months where all your articles hit and you make thousands of dollars. There are other months where you can't seem to find the thread and you bring in peanuts.

That's going to happen even if you're doing everything perfectly! It's not you, it's the nature of the beast.

Substack offers a means for people to say, “Hey, I love what you do. Let me support you. This way you can still keep writing even if you go through a dry spell.”

The support of readers makes all the difference in the world. There have been times when I've written an article only to have it tank on Medium. I'd start to feel depressed, and then somebody would come along and give me a $100 tip on Ko-Fi with a message like, “Thanks for saying something that's been on my mind for a long time!”

When somebody does that, I know I've written something important even if the article didn't necessarily succeed on the platform of first publication. More than once, I've given those articles a second life on Substack and gained multiple paid subscribers.

When I first started this newsletter, I didn't think that anyone would want to sponsor my writing. I just left the pledge amount at the default setting, and when pledges started pouring in I was absolutely stunned. I keep all my work free, but I offer a variety of discount coupons so that people can support me at whatever level they can afford. The other thing to emphasize is that it's just as much a show of support to like, comment, and share as it is to become a paid subscriber. Whatever people can do to help is greatly appreciated. I hope as this continues, I'll be in a better position to return the favor somehow.

I’m a proponent for universal health care and public education, so if that gets established, we’ll all be doing better.

I started up my Ko-Fi because Medium introduced a tip feature a few years back. At first, there was a large button at the bottom of each article and I used to get a lot of tips. But today the tip button is smaller and readers don't seem to see it as often. Still, Ko-Fi is nice because appreciative readers can throw you $5 if you create something that resonates with them.

“It's so awesome you said that, here's $5!” (which really is the amount a coffee costs these days).

Ko-Fi is a great option for people who want to offer support but who don’t necessarily want to make a commitment to a reoccurring payment.

That’s completely understandable.

The bummer about all of this is that the people who are going to make 70 gazillion dollars a year are the ones who benefit from the unlimited funding available for those who promote hate speech. If you want to promote an ideology of decency, you're going to have to resign yourself to living in a mud hut in a swamp like Yoda.

The silver lining in all of this is that there is enough frustration with all the injustices of our society that people are willing to support writers who make progressive activism their objective. As more writers are emboldened by this kind of grass roots support, the more we'll get caught up in the momentum of positive social change.

Thanks for reading everyone! As always, leave your questions or comments below!

My CoSchedule referral link

Here’s my referral link to my preferred headline analyzer tool. If you sign up through this, it’s another way to support this newsletter (thank you).