Expect Anything Worthwhile to Take a Long Time
or Why I love to write and publish and read on @Substack and some advice - solicited - to writers just starting.
My Substack feed is swelling daily with essays and notes from new and newish writers who are making their way onto this platform, many with staggeringly good writing skills and wonderfully niche subjects to which they bring insights, humour, expertise and character. A culture of generous restacking by other writers and participants of the platform ensures a regular flow of novelty into my feed for which I am grateful. This morning for instance, a writer named Cosi (as in fan tutti) popped up in my feed courtesy of
, himself a superb and follow-worthy writer, if you don’t know him. Cosi writes a Substack entitled , in which she discusses all things Ancient Greece and is in her own words“I’m a classicist/ancient historian who focuses on visual culture 🏺 more broadly (and more accurately) I’m incredibly passionate about all things old and dusty and am desperate to revitalise these fields and share them in whatever way I can with as many people as possible.”
Her first piece, published two years ago entitled “Closing the Orgasm Gap” is both instructive and hilarious, dissecting the story of Tiresias of Thebes, a figure from Greek mythology of whom I had previously not heard a peep. Subscribing to Cosi is worth it just for the introduction to a cast of characters from Greek mythology of whom I was previously wholly ignorant. Here she is in full throttle:
Tiresias was a famous oracle from greek myth living near the ancient city of Thebes. His father, Everes, was a mortal citizen of Thebes but his mother, Chariclo, was a nymph, a semi-divine nature spirit, which marked him as special from birth. Tiresias became an oracle of Apollo, the god of music, art, and prophecy and could allegedly see into the future, lived a total of seven lifetimes, AND, now we’re getting to the important/juicy part, had lived as a woman for seven years. Tiresias’s psychic capabilities, ludicrously long life and his lived experience as both a man and a woman guaranteed he’d be a prominent figure in greek, and later roman, myth. He loomed large in the ancient imagination, copping a mention from three of the big-dog tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides.
According to the Bibliotheke of Pseudo-Apollodorus (a collection of myths compiled in 1st-2nd cent. AD), Tiresias was out for his daily walk (remember our government-permitted outdoor time??) when he stumbled across a pair of snakes getting into it and he thought the appropriate, reasonable thing to do was to hit them with a stick. This, for whatever reason, aggravated Hera, the goddess of marriage and childbirth, who turned him into a woman as a ~ ghastly ~ punishment. Tiresias seemingly didn't have the worst run of it, he actually became a priestess of Hera, married and a had a few kids. Later authors, such as Ptolemaeus Chennus, ran with this, recounting and describing Tiresias’s seven eventful years as a woman. Tiresias lived it up as a prostitute and as a mediator between the mortal world and the divine. After seven years Tiresias came across ANOTHER pair of mating snakes (because this is just how myth works) and according to most versions ignored them. Hera rewarded Tiresias for this display of restraint, transforming them back into a dude.
Tiresias is THEN called in to referee a divine squabble between Zeus & Hera, Tiresias’ credentials being based on a divinely mandated sex-change. Or two. Zeus, the king of the gods, claimed that women enjoy sex more than men, Hera emphatically disagreed (we can unpack this at a later date, Zeus I just wanna TALK).
Tiresias pronounces that it is in fact WOMEN who enjoy sex more than men.
~ from Cosi’s Odyssey “Closing the Orgasm Gap”
This is just the sort of writing I revel in on
and why I don’t really need to go anywhere else for news, entertainment, erudition and illumination. In most of the essay writers to whom I subscribe (188 regulars apparently and Lord knows how many one write stands) it is not unusual to get all those ingredients in one essay.I recently came across a letter published by a writer using the pseudonym
which piqued my interest for obvious reasons. The essay his note was promoting was a deconstruction of Socialism from a pure Misesian perspective, was a good read and a useful refresher. I have since read a few more of his essays and particularly enjoyed the most recent one onwhich I commend to you particularly in this time of neo-malthusian “we’re-all-doomed,-Captn'-Mainwairing” catastrophizing. This writer has only recently started publishing on Substack and still has very few followers which is par for the course if you are just kicking off a newsletter and are coming to the job without much fame from elsewhere. Having commented on his Socialism post, he felt compelled to write and thank me (a habit for which is there both time and exaggerated gratitude in those early days) and, intelligently, popped in a question as to what tips I might have in building an audience here. It is imho a really good habit for a tyro in any environment to ask people who have been around for a bit longer if they have any advice to give a newbie. Not that everyone does of course (have advice to give or want to) and with the caveat that a lot of advice is really bad and useful only as a guide for what not to do, but unless you ask you won’t get an answer, good, bad or indifferent and if you ask as a matter of habit you inevitably find that answers start to cluster and more importantly conversations evolve.
It was late in the evening on a Monday, two days before the next episode of Carl Hiassen’s Bad Monkey was due to drop, leaving me with the time and inclination to give my best shot at answering the question of how to build an engaged audience on this platform.
As Vince Vaughn’s character Andrew Yancy says to his ex partner
"If you’re too grouchy to answer the question, just say, 'I’m too grouchy to answer the question.' You don’t have to hit me with the head in the passenger seat."
(the series also contains the following exchange which I am putting in here because it has gone onto my top ten list of best film exchanges)
"On a scale from 1 to 10, how screwed am I?"
"A million."
"You don’t think I’d understand that ten is bad?"
A caveat here: I don’t think for one moment that I have done anything like a good job of creating an audience or a focus during my time publishing this newsletter. Pitchfork Papers started, as so many others were, in late March 2020 when we were uselessly incarcerated at the start of a global effort forced on us by idiots and malfeasants of many stripes to do by decree what Gompertz curve would have (and largely by that time had) done by itself. I have low technical skills (and less technical patience: this would be me with most equipment:
and tend not to use even a fraction of the options and features available to everyone on this platform. Pitchfork Papers has attracted 5,064 subscribers to date since launching here in March 2022. I do almost nothing actively to promote the letter, but what I do do can be summarised in the following nine points, which are mostly, I think common sense. This is an expanded version of my answer to
.1. Consistency in publishing: I try to publish every Friday at around 12:30pm and stuck to that schedule rigorously until this year when the wheels came off my routine. I think that was the single most important driver. Persistence wins out over genius and/or intelligence every time.
David Senra in his outstanding podcast series “Founders” quotes the Y-Incubator founder Paul Graham and tells this story in
It turns out it's much more important to be determined than smart. If you imagine this hypothetical person that is 100 out of 100 for smart and 100 out of 100 for determination, and then you start taking away determination, it doesn't take very long until you have this ineffectual but brilliant person. Whereas if you take someone who is super determined and you take away smartness, eventually, you get a guy who owns a lot of taxi medallions or a trash hauling business, but he's still rich." ~ Paul Graham
2. Be clear in your positioning and your voice. Know what you stand for and what you represent. Have or develop a strong, stable but flexible sense of self. The stronger your voice the stronger will be your attraction to the right readership for you; This is perhaps the most difficult one to judge yourself. I started publishing because I needed to write and I needed to write in order to figure out what I was thinking and I was thinking a lot and not all of it made sense. There is a saying that you can’t the read the label from inside the jar, so communicating in writing and then guaging the reaction to it and observing how you react to the reaction is hugely valuable in crafting your voice and expressing your truth.
3. Reply, respond and engage. I have found my welcome letter (which needs updating now) to be a great way of engaging and establishing a relationship. Respond to comments, write notes, comment helpfully on other’s writing you admire, delight in other’s success and good writing, follow generously and endorse those you think worth endorsing. Be an active and positive force for good in the Substack community;
4. Find at least one other medium (LinkedIn, X, Instagram etc) to promote your writing and essays as you publish them - use the other channel as a funnel;
I used to use Xitter and am still there but don’t actively use the platform anymore. I think that has to do with the fact that every other Tweet and message was from Elon Musk himself and I quickly began to find that tedious, oh, and because Elon actively sabotaged links to Substack, which elicited a GFY response from me. I find LinkedIn tedious and the comments on otherwise well crafted essays asinine in the extreme. So I am no longer following my own advice on this. However a mitigating environmental change is that with the launch of Notes, Substack now has its own Twitter-esque environment but without - for the most part - the ugliness and trollery. Anyway, I can’t be arsed to do too much own trumpet blowing. What I do will have to do.
5. Go paid with a low subscription price for your basic offer as soon as you have established your voice, confidence and writing persona. It will help you gain traction and Substack does more for paying substackers than simply free ones;
I think the last statement is true, but as
6. Invest in a great About page - The more people can get to know the person behind the brand the better. I publish under Pitchfork Papers but anyone can discover who I am and most of my readers especially the early and engaged ones came through my work relationships and via my https://goodandprosper.com website (which is relaunching next week - finally.)
7. Advertise your Substack and encourage people to subscribe everywhere : in your email signature, on your website, on your business card, on your social media accounts, on your car licence plate if you can…when you meet people ask them to subscribe and customize a Blinq app card that they can scan with their smartphone that takes them straight to your subscription page - works wonders;
8. Personally my biggest boosts have come from podcast interviews or repostings. I am lucky to have a few friends with powerful audiences and reaches -
and his wonderful State of the Markets podcast, Grant Williams, and Jay Martin spring immediately to mind - who have been generous in their support and interested in my writing and perspective. I don’t know how to advise anyone to duplicate those as they have always been unsolicited and always come as a surprise, but I guess it helps to have powerful and generous friends who encourage you. I think their help and support is what makes helping others where I can an imperative.9. Otherwise don’t obsess about numbers and enjoy the process. I started with a list of 17 people in March of 2020 and spent a year building up to about 150. I had about 400 when I switched to
from Mailchimp in 2021 having cleaned my email list of about 50% of the names when I moved. I saw a quick growth to over 1,000 in the first half year and have been growing steadily since then to over 5,000 now. Honestly I don’t really care about the numbers - the individual interactions are the most valuable part and the joy of learning to improve my craft and the growing dedication to my writing as such. If I dropped to 100 subscribers again it would not make an iota of difference to how I think about or commit to the process.It is possibly hackneyed advice but building a writing habit and an engaged readership is only possible if you love the process, don’t put a date on when it will be successful (however you define it) and persevere. As Debbie Millman put it “Expect anything worthwhile to take a long time.”
Thank you, Sir Steven. Wonderfully insightful and practical. My wheels also fell off a year ago.... time to start again.
From a Reader and not a Writer….
Absolutely Brilliant.
Beautifully articulated and very instructive and endearing.
Keep the Faith and Keep Going!
Brian