Audience

thinking about growth

published on 6.07.24


The question (edited for emphasis):

I had a question for you, and would love any insight if you have a minute. Thinking through my exposure to your work, I first started reading you on substack, and then found your website and other work. In that sense substack was a successful platform for acquiring a new reader. As I've been starting to write more consistently, I've been thinking through how to start building a list of people I can connect with directly, send my writing to monthly, etc. Substack has always been at the top of my list just because of how many different writers I actively read on there. However, my worry is that the bulk of the readers don't leave the platform (opposite of my natural reaction), which could limit engagement to other types of work. So I've been wondering if I should lean towards a simpler email provider (mailchimp, beehiiv), and keep housing writing primarily on my website, vs bisecting an audience across platforms but having greater potential reach. Since you were one of the main people who led me to start writing essays and posting on Twitter, I was really curious your thoughts on platforms and distributing your work. Would you recommend substack if you were to start all over?

Hey Ron, thanks again for the interesting question... first the usual disclaimer that I am very much in the middle of puzzling with the same game and not someone who has cracked this and is enjoying a wonderfully large audience. With that said...

Why worry about an audience or growing your readership at all? That is something I ask myself a lot, because I think it is easy to adopt popular targets without analyzing them carefully, and popularity is especially easy to aim for without wondering if it is what you really want. Here are the answers I've come up with for myself, and I am sure you'll have your own ideas about this too:

I tried to think of another bullet point and honestly couldn't think of anything that didn't feel gross. The one potential non-gross additional thing an audience affords us is influence, the ability to positively change things in the direction we think is best and make a meaningful (and lasting) impression with our ideas. But I think that is contained in connection if you use influence for good purposes (let me know if you think this should be its own bullet point). Curious if you can think of anything I missed that is a good reason to want more people engaging with your work.

Testing the first sidenote ever! What happens when you add a sidenote instead of a footnote? It can live in the margin, right to the right of the content it refers to. It can be long or short because it wraps. Nice!

But those two answers I've come up with are why I want to grow my audience. So here is how I think about doing that:

So I think posting on Substack is the right current move and still post everything on your personal site too. I currently post the exact same posts on my Substack as my OG blog and have different readers and different engagement on each. For what it's worth, the only people whose writing I directly seek out outside of Substack are: Robin Sloan, Craig Mod, Kevin Kelly, Maggie Appleton, Matt Webb, and James Somers. And for those folks I miss a lot because they aren't constantly in my inbox so I have to remember to go check on their stuff (someone make a better RSS reader please). Email (and the Substack platform) is just so good for getting your work to the people who (at one point at least) wanted to support it. But I think your intuition of wanting to retain your own relationship with people by having stuff on your own site is good so I'd do both if I were you (I am doing both myself).

Collected reading on this topic