Essay: Why I Turned on (Entirely Optional) Paid Subscriptions for my Memoir
How to support other independent writers on Substack
If you are brand new to They Keep Telling Me I Should Write My Memoir, thank you so much for joining us here. I have over thirty new subscribers this week! I hope you received your welcome email and will take the time to dip in to some previous posts, especially the early ones that set the context for this period in my 30ʻs and now - about to enter my 40ʻs. And to those of you who have been with me for a while - I adore you! This is a standalone essay, and then the journey will resume next week.
Oh shoots. If you were looking forward to hearing more about 1996 and my extraordinary 40th birthday adventure (which is what I had originally written to publish today), you will have to wait another week for it. Thank you for your patience.
Somehow sometime early this week I hit 100 subscribers for They Keep Telling Me I Should Write My Memoir. Substack sent me a congratulatory email, with a link to a page full of helpful tips and strategies for growing my subscriber base. At the end of that list was a prompt to turn on paid subscriptions.
And I thought, “Now why would I want to do that?”
If you know me and my overactive brain, it wonʻt surprise you that I gnawed on that question for about 48 hours until it was chewed to tiny shreds, finally sat down at the keyboard to work through it in words I could look at, and then started this post to explain why I decided to do exactly that.
So here is where I am at - statistically - after writing on Substack for nine months. A typical weekly post has had between 140 and 200 readers, many of them non-subscribers clicking through from social media, or perhaps after liking a comment I made on another Substack writerʻs newsletter. Up until now I have not charged for a subscription, which I thought of as really just a way for regular readers to receive the weekly installments by email for reading at their convenience. Turns out, many of those receiving the weekly emails donʻt seem to open them. Or so I learn from my dashboard that tells me that typically 30-40% donʻt open the email.
Let me reframe that. In the world of direct email, an open rate of 60-70% is killing it. The tech gurus at Hawaii Life canʻt believe the monthly newsletter containing the four blog posts I wrote that month has over 1,000 subscribers and consistently gets a little over 50% open rate. My open rate on Substack is 10-20 points higher!
Kind of creepy that I even know that, isnʻt it? Donʻt worry, I am not checking to see whether or not you individually are reading what I write. I do love it when you call or text or email or comment or buy me a bottle of Sancerre, because that is where our real connection and meaning making occur. But speaking of creepy, it is almost more creepy to think the majority of readers are judging me in silence. I know you continue to read so I must be doing something, if not right, at least occasionally interesting enough that you persist.
Now back to the question of monetizing my creative output.
I did not start writing here because I need the money, or because I wanted to see if I could have a late life career as a writer. I have said for many years that my post-retirement goals were having time to ʻrite and ride. But the fact is, as I explained in my very first post last Thanksgiving, there were stories in me that were getting increasingly insistent about being told. Those stories did not care whether or not I had time; the demanded I make time.
And oddly, once I thought about it, I realized the second largest source of my current real estate income stream, right after repeat/referral business from past clients and people in my sphere of influence, would be the 500+ blog posts I have written on Hawaii Life over the past fourteen years. You could say I already make a living as a writer. Those posts are free. And thatʻs what had me confused about offering subscriptions - plus I donʻt need the money.
Mostly I write on my real estate blog because I want to educate, to be of service, to maybe even change minds or lives in some small way on a really good day. And that is true here too. I started on Substack as a reader. My gateway drug, as I suspect for many who subscribe or read authors on Substack, was Culture Study by Anne Helen Peterson (people in the know seem to just refer to her simply as AHP). I had mentioned to a younger friend that I wanted to read more from younger/millennial writers to understand how they are pushing the envelope on social issues. They suggested Culture Study.
Then AHP led me to An Irritable Metis in which Chris La Tray shares often irritable insights and just as often observations about his day and moments in the natural world that still my overactive mind for a blissful moment. And he helps me be more mindful in my interactions with indigenous Hawaiʻi.
It just kept snowballing from there. You can find some of my other reading recommendations here. More than just providing provocative reading (including the Substack newsletters and currently four of the books in progress by my bedside and two more on my Kindle), many of these authors regularly engage an entire community of readers in thoughtful dialogue. I do not know where else I could find that. Itʻs priceless. At least well worth the $702 per year I currently pay for subscriptions.
So here is what really changed my mind. An author whose books I already enjoyed, Toby Neal, turned out to have a Substack. Her memoir about growing up local haole on Kauai is a book I recommend to people who tell me they are having a hard time as a newcomer. But my not-so-secret not-so-guilty pleasure would be her crime mysteries set in Hawaiʻi, written as only someone who grew up here could write them. Like seriously Iʻm so obsessed that when I started the Paradise Crime Mystery series where fictional Detective Lei Teixera was stationed here on the Big Island, I would drive around Hilo staring into cop cars on the chance I might catch a glimpse of her.
This prolific author turned out to be a generous reader and supporter of my own fledgling efforts at memoir, and recently she happened to mention in response to comments on a post that she spends $200/month in subscriptions to support other writers. It is a business expense, she explained, but thatʻs not the reason she does it.
And that clicked with me. I too want to support independent writers and the platform that supports them. So I decided to turn on paid subscriptions and for now every dollar of your subscription will get recycled through the system in support of the terrific writers here. A wash on my tax return. A gold star on my karmic record.
And no content is going behind the firewall. Meaning if you subscribe for free, or choose not to subscribe at all, you can still read absolutely everything I write.
Of course if I get to 10,000 paid subscriptions I might decide not every dollar is going to other writers. There is that barn on the property waiting to be made into teaching, gathering and guest space….
Mahalo for considering an upgrade to paid.
And please feel free to share this post and my recommendations!
That barn looks like the perfect she shed! :) Love that you're living out your passion and gifting!
Thank you for the uplifting words! Turns out I needed them today. 🙏🏻 and I celebrate this milestone with you! 🌈🌴🌈🌴