The 60-day notice
A big transition is coming to my Substack.
It was June of last year when I stepped onto the playing field of Substack with a celebration of a momentous day.
My intent in doing so was to build up a subscriber base so that I knew my work would go to those who enjoyed it enough to take it to heart and hopefully share it among their friends. Obviously I had a website and tried hard to promote it through social media, but that didn’t seem to be working too well and it was getting to be too much of a hassle with constant reminders to update WordPress and server issues and fees. The bang wasn’t worth the buck.
Now I am about 10 months into this Substack experiment. While there’s still time, I’m going to assume for the sake of argument that I may not hit the subscriber number I was hoping for at this point, but to me that’s no reason to not move on to the next phase of the Substack experience - even if all it does initially is feed my subscription habit to other Substacks! (As of this writing, I subscribe to 21 Substacks and pay for three.) But what I’d really like to do with this subscription income is use it to promote my work. If you’re here and reading this, I figure that you think my work is worth promoting.
Right now on my eponymous Substack - the one you’re reading right now - I do about 8 to 12 posts a month, in three general buckets: a regular post each Wednesday and Saturday, a more or less religious-themed post on the occasional Sunday, and, every so often, a Monday Memory. My inclination for now would be to put about a third to half the posts on the free side and the rest on the paid side, perhaps with the more evergreen ones being free and topical as paid. I’m not going to box myself in and say the free ones will be Wednesday and the paid on Saturday, or anything like that. It will be a situation of if you want more of me, you’ll have to spare a little change, but I think lattes are almost more expensive than my words would be for a month.
(As for The Knothole, I’m leaving that free because that’s on a once-a-week schedule I’m comfortable with and not everyone who reads here is a baseball fan like I am.)
But as the subscription base grows, so do the possibilities. I have a Substacker I subscribe to who’s serializing his latest book as a Substack series, with a chapter or two a week. Wouldn’t that be worth a premium? I certainly could be inclined to think harder about doing another book with the right encouragement. And while I’m probably not the type to do a podcast, I remember when I did the radio interviews for my book that I enjoyed the long-form conversation so perhaps that’s an option as well down the road.
As I state in my mission statement of what my site is about, my job is to turn that rocky, thorny, and trod-upon soil into ground receptive to the missionary’s seed, just like in Matthew 13. Your support will help me to do my part in trying to repair the ragged condition of a land that could be fertile and blessed even more than it has been if we take the right steps to make it so.
Tomorrow I’m giving you an example of the type of topical thought pieces you could be investing in when I flip the switch and go with a paid subscription side.