My Proven Secrets to Growing Your Newsletter at a Snail's Pace and Making Absolutely Nothing From It

Special guest appearance by Al Roker

The last time we were all gathered here huddled around the campfire I was gushing with gooey praise for all of my newsletter-writing colleagues—no, my tribespeople, who were bringing their beautiful, fog-filtered views on life to the Substack platform.

This time I want to flip the coin and take a drive to the other side of this otherwise burgeoning metropolis. Just a quick jaunt off the beaten path over to the sleazy, red-neon-lined alleyways in this dark city.

Imagine if you will...

It's fast approaching midnight and you're feeling all hot and bothered in this concrete jungle. You loosen your tie and wipe the sweat from your brow, trying to avoid stepping in oil-slicked puddles or broken beer bottle glass when suddenly a slim figure in a tight red skirt materializes out of the shadows, obscured by a bellow of manhole steam and with a thick shade of rouge that reminds you of circus cotton candy.

Hey big boy, wanna take a walk with me? I'll show you how to get from 0 to 1000 subscribers before you can whisper the words "search engine optimization". You're gonna have a night you'll never forget. You'll be flipping that switch and going paid before you know it. Cross my heart and hope to die.

…Whew. Is it getting hot in here, or is it just me?

Welcome to the seedy world of Substackers Substacking about Substack, not to be confused with Mediums Mediuming about Medium, which was all the rage in the online writing community about four or five years ago. This is where you'll find the real good stuff, fresh off the cargo ship, smuggled in under a bed of coffee beans to throw off the scent of the dogs. Pure uncut product that will have you dancing in wild ecstasy with bubbling visions of paid subscribers throwing dollars at your feet as Lil Wayne's A Milli booms in the background and your publication drowns in a bottomless sea of restacks.

You see, for every genuinely beautiful and profound piece out there about the subtleties of self-discovery in middle age or the simple restorative magic of a walk in the forest, there's another one grabbing at that greedy, lustful core of your wrinkled little heart, promising massive subscriber gains or proven growth strategies that will get you PAID, fiendishly sucking the humanity out of this platform. These two halves combine to form an ugly, delicate, and somewhat menacing alliance. The universe has a funny way of rebalancing itself after every action, and the whole meta-segment of Substacks brokering out Substack growth strategies on Substack may be just another bizarre manifestation of that.

To put it another way, if this represents the meaningful, artistic, soul-nurturing side of the Substack Community:

Then this represents the cold, calculating, marketing-driven side:

And besides being born with blue skin, the thing that's really unsettling about these growth strategy substacks is just how much they lead us astray from the purpose of why we originally came here, to share and celebrate our creative voices and attempt to find and develop our audiences organically.

Sometimes I wonder if Substack’s eerily robust stats tab is the worst thing going for it. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve come across notes from otherwise respectable writers who get pulled in, all purple-tongued and sugar-high from obsessively drinking the stats Kool-Aid. You get one hit piece that launches your humble little newsletter into orbit, and then suddenly find yourself in a gooey, dewdrop web of adrenaline, hitting the refresh button every three minutes and stumbling around Substack notes in a cranked-up dopamine-fueled stupor, pounding your chest and declaring yourself champion while tapioca pudding slowly dribbles from your lips. At that point, we’re teetering precariously close to this place becoming Instagram for the literary crowd… a steady drip of that sweet, sweet brain nectar with every new sub as you sprawl yourself slack-jawed on the corner, forever chasing, but never quite reaching, that first high.

OK, maybe I’m embellishing a teeny bit but my point is, don't let the whole subscriber chase get in your head, man. That’s not the reason we’re here. Don’t ever lose sight that we’re writers dammit. Our words are poetry and we have bled for our art. We need to be up there sitting on grassy hilltops with our notebooks in our laps and tears in our eyes because life has wounded us in numerous ways and yet, against all odds, we have persevered.

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Ah… But try as I may to ignore them, it's pretty evident that these pieces on the whole newsletter marketing/self-promotion side of this platform are just too loud to ignore.

It’s been said that if you can't beat 'em, then boy, you best be joining 'em.

So I'm tossing my hat into the ring. Here's my shitty advice on how I was able to grow my newsletter from 0 to 20 subscribers in the span of nine months. I promise you that if you follow these tips to the letter you too will experience agonizingly slow growth, spend hours a week of your valuable time writing into the void, and watch your most heartfelt work get slapped by humanity’s cold indifference and forever stomped into the pavement of this road to big-baller success on Substack.

• When you have 0 subscribers write as if you have 0 subscribers

  When I first decided to publish this newsletter I heeded the advice of others. When you have zero subscribers, write as if you have an audience of thousands. I did that, and you know what? My writing suffered from it. It was boring, stuffy, calculated, and overly safe. It's only when I dropped all pretense and started writing like no one was reading that sparks started flying and things began to come alive around here. I locked my frontal lobe away in the trunk and began publishing these stupid ravings with no social filter, like an old man screaming at a bowl of oatmeal, and that's when I finally got comfortable, punched the cat off of the couch, swung my filthy ProWings up on the coffee table, and stuffed my fingers under my belt, Al Bundy style.

  I can't promise you that anyone will read your stuff once you take this bold, artistic leap, in fact, they probably won't. The system is stacked against you and you've already lost. But dammit, at least you'll be maintaining a sense of integrity.

• Commit to regularly publishing at least once a week, and then abandon it immediately

  Come on, you have a day job. You gotta put food on the table bro, you don't got time for that shit.

• Develop a niche, and then mercilessly burn it to the ground

  Yes, MidThoughts is a newsletter geared towards self-discovery in middle age. But with one quick skim through this issue, you'd never guess that. Once in a while you just need to get something off your chest, readership be damned. Sometimes a guy might have some pretty strong opinions about American Ninja II: The Confrontation, and I ain't gonna let something as silly as audience alienation stand in the way of that.

• Have absolutely no clue about the platform you’re writing on

  Utilize Substack’s chat and survey features to drive readership and encourage engagement.

  Substack doesn’t have chat and survey features, you dumbass.

• Set yourself apart from the pack Completely alienate yourself from the rest of the community

  Liberally sprinkle your writing with obscure references to 80’s straight-to-video action films and long-forgotten Saturday morning cartoons (Think somewhere between Snorks and Captain N the Game Master for a good idea of where to start here).

  

  The goal here is to intentionally club yourself in the knees, Tonya Harding style and make sure that nobody wants to suffer the embarrassment or risk the credibility hit of a possible future collaboration with you. Position your writing in such a way that even a mere restack of your work would be deemed far too risky a move for even the most established of writers here, and could instantly topple their reputations. You want to make sure you do this as early on in your Substack journey as possible, before any hint of success, to completely eliminate any chance of your work getting any type of traction on the platform. When you see your subscriber count stall out somewhere in the neighborhood of 10-20 over the course of about six months, you’ll know that you’re on the right track.

Clearly, I'm having a little fun with some of these. And despite my mental inertia endlessly pulling my words into the realm of pure cynicism and hypocrisy, please know that I’m joking about that last point in particular. In actuality, this is probably the least toxic, most supportive gathering of like-minded people on the internet, and since engaging with the community regularly, I've experienced nothing but good, wholesome, beachy vibes. Any community of intellectuals tolerant enough to entertain a grown-ass man commanding the mental residence of a giggly kindergartener with a mouthful of Pop Rocks is a community that I'm proud to call myself a part of.

OK, I promise that the next issue of this newsletter will have nothing to do with either writing or Substack and contain actual Stuff instead. It's not lost on me that by publishing this nonsense, I'm only contributing to the problem. I consider myself an environmentalist and the last thing I want to do is recklessly aim my can of Aqua-Net up into the heavens like some kind of lunatic Captain Planet villain and further contribute to the widening hole of content about writing in the Substack ozone layer.

No sir, I have principles.

Besides, writing about writing has been done to death. And after Stephen King wrote On Writing I don't think much else needs to be written (oh God) on the subject.

So Imma' leave it at that. See you back here in a couple of weeks with some actual substance.