When You Should Consider Enabling Paid Subscriptions

You don't want to drive readers away but you also have to pay for groceries

Hello Everyone,

It’s a dreary 35 degrees here in Northern Wisconsin. It’s half raining, half snowing and all I want to do is curl up on the couch under a blanket. It has been one of those days where I can’t get anything going and I’ve tried everything:

• Pot of coffee

• Bacon and eggs

• Handful of chocolate

• Nap

• Another nap

So, I’m trying to scrounge out a little bit of productivity with this post. Hopefully it’s awesome so I can go back to bed.

Paid subscriptions

I wanted to take a few minutes to give you some insight into my thoughts on enabling paid subscriptions for this newsletter. Relax, I’m not going to do it yet, but I’ve been experiencing some solid growth lately so the idea has come back to mind.

Originally, I thought I’d wait until I had 1,000 subscribers, but

Kristina God

mentioned in her Newsletter that Substack recommends that you go paid right away. That makes sense because that’s how Substack generates revenue. It also means that once you’re paid, Substack does more to promote you.

Ah-ha! Getting internal promotion from the platform where your work appears is worth EVERYTHING. I know this because I’m a Boost nominator on Medium, and that has really become the engine that makes the platform work.

So, I figure that I’ll probably accelerate my schedule and enable subscriptions when I hit around 500 subscribers.

I want to make sure I offer value

Like always I’ll go into this with a plan and then do something completely different once the actual battle starts.

I have been hesitant to enable subscriptions because I want to make sure I am offering something of value. Over the last few weeks, it has been fun to see how much engagement I get on the kind of lighthearted stories that never got much traction on Medium. I like writing those, and I’ve also found it really fun to do the voiceovers.

I’ve also been doing my “how Medium works + general writing advice” posts on Mondays. Quite a few of you have sent me articles for feedback, and I enjoy doing that as well. I’m particularly happy to hear success stories when people get a Boost (Incidentally, my nomination area is in diversity/racism/culture, so it’s really not my place to nominate articles on business/finance/tech).

The only newsletter I subscribe to is Kristina’s and I see how much work she puts in. My main source of revenue comes through Medium, so I’ve only been dabbling with Substack, but it’s taking up more of my attention.

Pros and cons of Medium vs Substack

I appreciate the publications on Medium and the access to editors. I like to be challenged and expect I’m one of the few writers out there that prefers to get feedback (even if it comes in the form of a rejection).

Ultimately, a better piece of writing will make you more money and improve your skills. An editor that suggests you change a title could be the difference between a story making $50 and $500.

Medium and Substack are a lot more similar than you might think. Medium has:

• Publications

• Editors

• A membership payment model

Substack has:

• Notes

• Less pressure

• A subscriber model

What I mean by “less pressure” is that with Substack I can just open up the page and type a post directly into the interface. In Medium, I work on a doc file and subject myself to a couple rounds of revisions before submitting it to an editor (you do have the option of self-publishing on Medium, but I find it doesn’t work as well for me).

There are days when I appreciate the added challenge of writing to expectation, and there are days when I wake up and it’s 35 degrees and raining and I just want to curl up under a blanket on the couch.

Anyway, at this point it feels like I can continue my Substack newsletter by filling in the void days when I don’t have the needed energy to tackle Medium. It’s sort of like the days you go for a bike ride because you can’t get yourself worked up to go for a run (they both count as workouts).

What my subscriber tiers will probably look like

This seems kind of silly, but I expect that I’ll retain an unpaid tier where everything is available (unless this gets to be so much work that I can’t keep up). I’ve had a couple very kind readers reach out and ask how they can support me. So, I look at the subscription tiers as a sort of “fund Walter so he can keep writing” type thing.

Thank you!

I expect, I’ll do something like this (unless I find out there are rules against it… which there almost always are):

• Tier 1—$5 a month or $25 a year

• Tier 2—$10 a month or $50 a year

• Tier 3—$20 a month or $100 a year

That way you can choose to pay me ZERO (I still love you), $25, $50, $60, $100, $120, or $240 a year. To my mind there’s a nice symmetry there, but maybe nobody else sees it.

When I turned on my Ko-fi, I thought, “Yeah, right, nobody will ever use this.” Then this happened:

So, I guess we’ll see. It’s all a work in progress and we’re all making it up as we go along. Let me know what you think, particularly if you suggest I add a $1,000 a month tier.

I am excited about enabling subscriptions, but I’m more excited about seeing what happens if Substack starts promoting my articles. As always, leave your comments below: