I noticed mansplaining as well in the comments on one of your pieces about nobody lives off the grid. He called you “honey” and ended with insinuating you know very little due to your age. It was an absolutely stellar example of Boomer hubris and mansplaining. I myself am a boomer and find this type of attitude destructive and arrogant. It seemed very important to him to put you down and shame you. That’s a lot to tolerate. I don’t comment often, but read all your articles and some have been especially poignant and thought-provoking. I hate how mean our society has become.
Well said! I too am a boomer and my daughters, well into their thirties now with families of their own, have long said there is no man of my generation (including their father) who is not a mansplaining misogynist. Although I'm sure there are lovely men of our generation around, there sure a a lot of the MMs still out there!
“It was always like that.” Yes it has been, but with comments made at the touch of a hand, in the heat of the moment, one is subject to many more criticism and unconstructive, mean comments. Most People tend to restrain themselves more in a face to face interaction or when there are people involved that know them. Anonymous comments and interactions has made some people less accountable and less inhibited. I left FB because the comments on various posts were incredibly mean, thoughtless, and childish.
Last year -- almost exactly a year ago -- I had one piece on Medium earn $30K. I am extremely grateful for that, of course. I usually earn less than that all year, so it changed our lives and let us catch up on a lot of unmet needs. But it's been all downhill from there. The current leadership values tech and data science. The writers I love have pretty much all moved elsewhere, often to Substack. The CEO keeps saying people won't pay for writing like mine and others who are writing about politics, memoir, personal experience, etc. Oddly, people on Substack ARE paying for it, though.
I loved reading your work on Medium. It was a loss to the platform when you left.
Thank you. And congrats on the piece. The most I ever earned on a single post there was a small fraction of that, but I did well and it helped us a lot. People probably assumed I was living in a mansion, but they didn't understand that claps don't translate into cash the same way for everyone. I met dudes who made as much as me with less than half the traffic, but they jumped to the conclusion that I must be making more. It's a shame what Medium did. I agree, they have a bias against politics and personal writing, but it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. People wanted to read all of it, but the CEOs wanted a different brand. The only thing they were right about is that, yes, people do get pissed off and cancel when they encounter views they don't like. But reinforcing that has led to the current crisis, where readers are split between a dozen different platforms and have to choose which writers they support directly. They could've handled the dilemma differently.
I always assumed a top writer like you had many pieces earning that much. My piece (a comparison between American and Dutch sex education) was good but not better than any number of other pieces that made $50. I wake up now to find I’ve made about a dollar on some pieces the first day. So I’m just re-posting from Substack: I am not going to write original pieces for what they’re paying now.
We’d all be making better money back in the glory days of magazines.
I'm glad we're finally talking about this. The most I ever made from a single post was about $10,000. (Yeah, still a lot.) My second biggest was $9,000. The most well-received post I ever wrote, about the 4-hour workweek, got 32K claps and made $4,000.
I just got into a good writing routine and made a good second income by posting consistently, and most posts made at least a hundred dollars. So I guess a lot of people thought I was making $30,000-$40,000 every month? Nope. Someone might've been, but it wasn't me. I know one of the last times they announced the top earner, that person earned somewhere around $40,000 or $50,000 in a single month--just unreal. I'm pretty sure that was Darius or Tim.
I tried not to care about who was earning what, but I guess a lot of people hated me because they thought I was earning way more than I deserved.
Yep, I think Fitzgerald made $2,000 per short story in the 1920s. That's $32,000 in today's money. He published a helluva lot of short stories.
I'm not shy about discussing money -- I do it all the time on Untrickled.
I'm a big Vonnegut fan and he wrote about quitting his job with General Electric after selling I think two or three magazine pieces, figuring he had proven he could support his family like that. Unbelievable! Selling two or three pieces now will possibly make you enough to pay your rent.
I joke that the first time I made a thousand bucks on a story (about coffee; essentially almost the same story as sex but about the European and American coffee-drinking styles) we splurged on an espresso maker but when I made the big money writing a piece about sex, we chose not to spend any of it on sex. :)
BTW: You absolutely DID deserve to be one of the top earners, if not THE top earner. I signed up for Medium because Shannon Ashley's hyper-honest writing hooked me, but as soon as I got there I started reading every single thing you wrote. Medium pushed away some very good writers. I used to wake up every morning, pick up my phone and read a dozen pieces before I even got out of bed. Not now.
Jess, this was fierce, honest, and beautifully defiant. Starting over isn’t a failure, it’s a reckoning, and you came out sharper. Thanks for reminding us what real writing looks like when it’s unchained.
Bravo. I do almost everything against "the book" here on Substack. I mix politics with... fiction, of all things, and random essays about whatever is on my mind, plus humor pieces. Almost every time I post, I lose a subscription because someone who subscribed for the politics didn't like that I posted a short story, and vice versa.
I have a small, but loyal, readership because the people who stick with me learn that it's easy enough to ignore what they don't want to read, and read the stuff that interests them. Or, better yet, they can filter out what they don't want to read in my subscriber settings. I also assume a certain level of intelligence in my readers – people who like to be intellectually challenged.
My approach goes against the "You must niche!" mantra we hear a lot about. If I want to write about the Goiter in Chief, I will. And if I want to write about the rules of Waffle House fighting according to Moses, I'll do that, too.
This is my long way of saying I agree, and I hope you keep writing what's on your mind. I don't know about others, but that's the stuff I pay the most attention to.
That's a great way to go about it. I'll have to take another look at the subscriber settings. I've wondered about doing something similar with my content since it covers a few different areas.
I just took a peek at your main page. Yeah, you have a bunch of sections, which is how Substack lets users choose stuff. There’s a little button for each section they can slide on and off. I have an explainer somewhere. If you need a link I can send it, but I bet you’ll figure it out as fast as you could read the explainer.
Medium became a joke. At an early point there were lots of interesting pieces on a wide range of topics. Jessica's among them.
Suddenly, content started to narrow. So much so that Medium leadership had to write a piece about how things were changing. Why write about it? Because it was obvious, and users were pissed off. Maybe management felt like "getting out in front of it" would help stem the subscribers running for the exits. Of course, what management wrote revealed nothing. Whatever cash they had was drying up and they saw no better way than to do what Facebook, Google, et al did: sell out their subscribers.
They didn't really have an original idea. Just unimaginative leadership with a mild spin on profiting from content creation.
Survived so far. :) I don't go to Medium very often these days, but when I do check in I see this happening: They're doing pretty well, but that's because (as you said) they embraced a template. Not only that, but I see them running a kind of pyramid scheme, where a lot of their subscribers are actually new writers who show up and start cranking out content in hopes they can be one of the few who make the mega money. They chased off all the real writers and journalists because we didn't align with their business model. I just hope this place doesn't turn into the same thing, although every platform certainly has its own set of problems.
There are a few people I follow over there because of their personal writing skills. They have had interesting events in their lives and can tell them well. Otherwise, not really. I <think> it was Jessica's writing that brought me to Substack.* There aren't too many writers of her caliber over there now.
I still have readers there who haven't migrated/tried Substack. I basically post there so that my content is still available for some of my oldest fans.
Interesting that you're writing about this now. It makes me think that something has happened in the background. Not that, that is anyone's business.
I've followed you around through all of your various platforms over the last three years and I will continue. I remember the infighting when you left Medium and wondered at my own longevity there. I'm thinking about that once again given everything that's going on.
I'm like Ms. Teheux, I write and post my video podcast once a week on my Substack page and copy it over to Medium for those folks who may like to read it or watch the video (not many video watchers). I also make it a point on my Medium articles to go into the settings to add the canonical pointer to my Substack page to let the algorithms know that it originated on Substack.
Screw Medium. Most of my current Medium readers there are AI bots from south west Asia or the middle east anyway.
I am pretty sure that I will not be renewing Medium by next year. I will have to remember to redirect any Medium readers to my Substack page when I do leave though. There are a small handful that I would hate to lose.
I have always been of the viewpoint that we should be able to write what we want, when we want. If subscribers don't like something and drop out, they were never real fans to begin with. I recently started a chat thread asking if anyone at Substack would like to read any of my short fictional stories and I never got an answer. So I suspect that my Substack viewership is also predicated on my political views rather than any storytelling talents I may have.
I have a handful of fiction writers on Substack that I subscribe to because I like their fictional stories but I notice that they don't have a large fan base. Substack is also a somewhat niche platform that favors independent news journalists and political commentators. There are a lot of writers there that write all manner of things though. I think the key to having a large fan base is to write consistently about the same thing over and over again. If you're a political commentator, stay with it and they will find you. If you're a doomer, keep writing about that and they will find you, and so on. There are some pretty well known TV journalists and newspaper reporters who write on Substack now.
I watch a little Brian Taylor Cohen on YouTube. He is consistent and comments and interviews about the same thing every week. I noticed that about a lot of the individual video podcasters and writers on Substack and YouTube. They have figured out that if they want a large fan base that can make them money, they write and comment a lot about the same things over and over. I never planned to turn my musings into a business to make a lot of money.
The hard part is keeping those fans coming back over and over again. When I ran my own service repair business, one of the biggest lessons I learned early on was, that if you want to stay in business for the long haul, you have to appeal to customers to make them repeat customers. Repeat customers are the bread and butter of any money making enterprise, not catering to a bunch of one-time charlies.
My problem with creating a fan base, is that I like to write whatever I happen to fancy at the time. If I want to write or comment about politics once a week, so be it. If I want to write a fictional story and post it, I want to be able to do that without prejudice. Unfortunately, in this digital age, people are fickle. They subscribe to read in a certain niche and when you fall outside of that, or write/comment about something they don't like, they freak out and dump you like a hot potato.
I've been sitting on the fence for a bit now on whether to repost some revised fictional short stories I wrote a couple of years ago that no one liked. You've helped me jump off the fence today and go ahead and post them again. If any of my subscribers don't like it, too bad. Let them leave. They aren't paying me any money anyway.
Which brings me back to the main lesson about all of this. Stick to what makes you happy. Write about what you want, when you want as ultimately, you have to make yourself happy first so you can write the quality content that makes you feel good about it. If you only write content to make your fickle fans happy, you will feel used and abused eventually. Like you did when you were writing for Medium. Be consistent and happy. Those of us who remain loyal customers will keep supporting you. Just remember, write for the repeat customers, not the fickle one and done readers. They're a dime a dozen. You're value comes from those of us who keep coming back every week to read and learn more.
There have been some rumblings about Substack that make me a little nervous about what kind of content they're privileging now. Of course, I have no plans to write anything criticizing any more platforms. Been down that road. It's a dead end. That's always been an issue, but Anne Helen Petersen and some others have talked about it with renewed urgency. Between that and defunding PBS, NPR, and the Colbert cancellation, it's been a bit of a trigger point and it reminded me of my experiences at Medium, and I realized I never really wrote anything that bookended it, so it felt good to do that. Plus, yeah, it's been a pretty rough few weeks with people trashing the very kind of writers they say they want to support. Like many other things, it often feels like a lot of people "on our side" just can't help themselves. Finally, I've tried to tamp this, but it does bother me to see such a sudden outpouring of support for a rich dude who got silenced, when this has been happening to so many of us for years now, even longer for others, and sometimes these same people throwing roses at Colbert were the exact same people who silenced dissent in their own ranks. I know there's only so much we can do about it, and we just have to press on with our calling. Thanks for being here.
Colbert will land on his feet next year with some kind of sweetheart deal. We've seen this before. As for the rest of us, we keep plugging along doing our thing. It's like anything else in life. Some people with great talent get lucky. The rest of us watch in envy from the muddy trenches asking why can't that be us. I used to be like that but not anymore.
I dabble in the media sphere for myself and no one else. It helps me sleep better at night. I will never chase subscribers. Don't get me wrong, I won't chase them away or dismiss them. At least not on purpose. But I won't go out of my way to solicit them. I have also set up a donations option for anyone who might be inclined on my website and I have a small advertisement in my weekly podcasts that lets folks know this. But other than that, I leave it alone.
If someone were to be generous and set up a paid subscription to my Substack page, I would offer a hearty thank you. So far, I only have one. I had a couple of others but they took off after I stopped reading stories with the sound effects late last year.
I had to stop as it was becoming too much to handle and the extra podcast was stressful to make every week without anyone helping me.
Meanwhile, I am sprucing up the grammar and word flow to some old stories and I will be posting them on my Substack page, with a note to my favorite fiction writers to take a look. Maybe I will find a better following from the writers outside of the U.S. For that, I owe you a thank you for nudging me to do that.
Hang in there. We all have ups and downs in life. You'll weather this one as well. If you do hear any more about Substack censoring, please let us know. That could be a game changer if that proves out.
I like your writing - and your courage, Jessica. The problem with social media is that it is mediated by some of the dumbest people on the planet. Anyone who has to click an article on 'how to be a billionaire' is clearly never going to be one.
And even billionaires, while smart at some things, are horribly ignorant when it comes to issues like sustainability, biology, ecology, human health, ethics etc. They are most unsuitable and unqualified as leaders of society. Greed tends to be their main motivator.
I rarely comment but I read every one of your posts and will continue to subscribe. I love your voice and the heart I feel coming thru. Thank you for persisting.
I’ve followed you everywhere because your writing is amazing and never ceases to enlighten me. It’s the real deal of truth seeking which I believe is one of the most powerful forms of love you can put out into the world. It matters because it allows us to live in truth when much of the rest of the world has rejected any of us who try to live with the painful truths.
If you take requests I’d love to hear more about your thoughts on this topic:
“toxic discourse that punishes anyone who dares to say something that goes against the dogma on either side of politics.”
I think whatever the comments we are within society and in writing you stick your head above the parapet . Society will
always be a mixed bag , a variety of. It’s potent and creative , potency will always work both ways “ poison - remedy “ . Unfortunately trolls as well as good supporters come out of the torrent of life .
I’m no writer , if I did write anything I think my ignorance would emerge clearly , I’m an Osteopath I do that pretty ok , yet even here my efficacy is a different kind of “ click bait “ ( forgive the pun ) . In all honesty I don’t like everything you write but most of it I think is well written and thought provoking , and I respect you as a writer who does the background work . Everything has its expiry point and maybe substack will corrupt its own success eventually . Variety , change , difference and nuance it’s all here in the river of life and expressed in many ways . I hope you can continue to make a reasonable living from your work and a hussle doesn’t become a hassle
I just discovered you a couple of weeks ago and I love your writing and authenticity. So count me as a new fan who looks forward to everything you write. I have written a little and only have a small sense of how hard it is. Keep going!!!! Thank you.
I noticed mansplaining as well in the comments on one of your pieces about nobody lives off the grid. He called you “honey” and ended with insinuating you know very little due to your age. It was an absolutely stellar example of Boomer hubris and mansplaining. I myself am a boomer and find this type of attitude destructive and arrogant. It seemed very important to him to put you down and shame you. That’s a lot to tolerate. I don’t comment often, but read all your articles and some have been especially poignant and thought-provoking. I hate how mean our society has become.
I'm glad other people notice. Yeah, it's a lot to deal with. It's a bit revealing, isn't it?
Well said! I too am a boomer and my daughters, well into their thirties now with families of their own, have long said there is no man of my generation (including their father) who is not a mansplaining misogynist. Although I'm sure there are lovely men of our generation around, there sure a a lot of the MMs still out there!
Read above comment Slyvia Plath it was always like that.
Boo Hoo Ted Hughes
It was always like that.”
Oops posted too soon.
“It was always like that.” Yes it has been, but with comments made at the touch of a hand, in the heat of the moment, one is subject to many more criticism and unconstructive, mean comments. Most People tend to restrain themselves more in a face to face interaction or when there are people involved that know them. Anonymous comments and interactions has made some people less accountable and less inhibited. I left FB because the comments on various posts were incredibly mean, thoughtless, and childish.
Last year -- almost exactly a year ago -- I had one piece on Medium earn $30K. I am extremely grateful for that, of course. I usually earn less than that all year, so it changed our lives and let us catch up on a lot of unmet needs. But it's been all downhill from there. The current leadership values tech and data science. The writers I love have pretty much all moved elsewhere, often to Substack. The CEO keeps saying people won't pay for writing like mine and others who are writing about politics, memoir, personal experience, etc. Oddly, people on Substack ARE paying for it, though.
I loved reading your work on Medium. It was a loss to the platform when you left.
Thank you. And congrats on the piece. The most I ever earned on a single post there was a small fraction of that, but I did well and it helped us a lot. People probably assumed I was living in a mansion, but they didn't understand that claps don't translate into cash the same way for everyone. I met dudes who made as much as me with less than half the traffic, but they jumped to the conclusion that I must be making more. It's a shame what Medium did. I agree, they have a bias against politics and personal writing, but it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. People wanted to read all of it, but the CEOs wanted a different brand. The only thing they were right about is that, yes, people do get pissed off and cancel when they encounter views they don't like. But reinforcing that has led to the current crisis, where readers are split between a dozen different platforms and have to choose which writers they support directly. They could've handled the dilemma differently.
I always assumed a top writer like you had many pieces earning that much. My piece (a comparison between American and Dutch sex education) was good but not better than any number of other pieces that made $50. I wake up now to find I’ve made about a dollar on some pieces the first day. So I’m just re-posting from Substack: I am not going to write original pieces for what they’re paying now.
We’d all be making better money back in the glory days of magazines.
I'm glad we're finally talking about this. The most I ever made from a single post was about $10,000. (Yeah, still a lot.) My second biggest was $9,000. The most well-received post I ever wrote, about the 4-hour workweek, got 32K claps and made $4,000.
I just got into a good writing routine and made a good second income by posting consistently, and most posts made at least a hundred dollars. So I guess a lot of people thought I was making $30,000-$40,000 every month? Nope. Someone might've been, but it wasn't me. I know one of the last times they announced the top earner, that person earned somewhere around $40,000 or $50,000 in a single month--just unreal. I'm pretty sure that was Darius or Tim.
I tried not to care about who was earning what, but I guess a lot of people hated me because they thought I was earning way more than I deserved.
Yep, I think Fitzgerald made $2,000 per short story in the 1920s. That's $32,000 in today's money. He published a helluva lot of short stories.
Those were the days...
P.S. - read your piece on sex, it was great.
Thank you!
I'm not shy about discussing money -- I do it all the time on Untrickled.
I'm a big Vonnegut fan and he wrote about quitting his job with General Electric after selling I think two or three magazine pieces, figuring he had proven he could support his family like that. Unbelievable! Selling two or three pieces now will possibly make you enough to pay your rent.
I joke that the first time I made a thousand bucks on a story (about coffee; essentially almost the same story as sex but about the European and American coffee-drinking styles) we splurged on an espresso maker but when I made the big money writing a piece about sex, we chose not to spend any of it on sex. :)
BTW: You absolutely DID deserve to be one of the top earners, if not THE top earner. I signed up for Medium because Shannon Ashley's hyper-honest writing hooked me, but as soon as I got there I started reading every single thing you wrote. Medium pushed away some very good writers. I used to wake up every morning, pick up my phone and read a dozen pieces before I even got out of bed. Not now.
Jessica, this was fire and scripture.
You didn’t just write a post. You carved a path for every writer buried by algorithms, bullies, and burnout.
You named the real cost. Being honest. Being smart. Being a woman who won’t shrink.
Thank you for breaking the rules, bleeding on the page, and still showing up.
This is why we stay.
It definitely felt like a reaffirmation in hard times. Thanks for your smart comments.
I found you on medium. Followed you here. You are a great writer
Thank you.
Jess, this was fierce, honest, and beautifully defiant. Starting over isn’t a failure, it’s a reckoning, and you came out sharper. Thanks for reminding us what real writing looks like when it’s unchained.
Reading your realistic analysis feels like raking the rocks meditatively in a Zen garden: a sanctuary of sanity while chaos rages over the hills
That's how I feel when I'm reading and writing as well.
Bravo. I do almost everything against "the book" here on Substack. I mix politics with... fiction, of all things, and random essays about whatever is on my mind, plus humor pieces. Almost every time I post, I lose a subscription because someone who subscribed for the politics didn't like that I posted a short story, and vice versa.
I have a small, but loyal, readership because the people who stick with me learn that it's easy enough to ignore what they don't want to read, and read the stuff that interests them. Or, better yet, they can filter out what they don't want to read in my subscriber settings. I also assume a certain level of intelligence in my readers – people who like to be intellectually challenged.
My approach goes against the "You must niche!" mantra we hear a lot about. If I want to write about the Goiter in Chief, I will. And if I want to write about the rules of Waffle House fighting according to Moses, I'll do that, too.
This is my long way of saying I agree, and I hope you keep writing what's on your mind. I don't know about others, but that's the stuff I pay the most attention to.
That's a great way to go about it. I'll have to take another look at the subscriber settings. I've wondered about doing something similar with my content since it covers a few different areas.
I just took a peek at your main page. Yeah, you have a bunch of sections, which is how Substack lets users choose stuff. There’s a little button for each section they can slide on and off. I have an explainer somewhere. If you need a link I can send it, but I bet you’ll figure it out as fast as you could read the explainer.
Medium became a joke. At an early point there were lots of interesting pieces on a wide range of topics. Jessica's among them.
Suddenly, content started to narrow. So much so that Medium leadership had to write a piece about how things were changing. Why write about it? Because it was obvious, and users were pissed off. Maybe management felt like "getting out in front of it" would help stem the subscribers running for the exits. Of course, what management wrote revealed nothing. Whatever cash they had was drying up and they saw no better way than to do what Facebook, Google, et al did: sell out their subscribers.
They didn't really have an original idea. Just unimaginative leadership with a mild spin on profiting from content creation.
Glad you survived that, Jessica.
Survived so far. :) I don't go to Medium very often these days, but when I do check in I see this happening: They're doing pretty well, but that's because (as you said) they embraced a template. Not only that, but I see them running a kind of pyramid scheme, where a lot of their subscribers are actually new writers who show up and start cranking out content in hopes they can be one of the few who make the mega money. They chased off all the real writers and journalists because we didn't align with their business model. I just hope this place doesn't turn into the same thing, although every platform certainly has its own set of problems.
There are a few people I follow over there because of their personal writing skills. They have had interesting events in their lives and can tell them well. Otherwise, not really. I <think> it was Jessica's writing that brought me to Substack.* There aren't too many writers of her caliber over there now.
*If so, thanks.
I still have readers there who haven't migrated/tried Substack. I basically post there so that my content is still available for some of my oldest fans.
Interesting that you're writing about this now. It makes me think that something has happened in the background. Not that, that is anyone's business.
I've followed you around through all of your various platforms over the last three years and I will continue. I remember the infighting when you left Medium and wondered at my own longevity there. I'm thinking about that once again given everything that's going on.
I'm like Ms. Teheux, I write and post my video podcast once a week on my Substack page and copy it over to Medium for those folks who may like to read it or watch the video (not many video watchers). I also make it a point on my Medium articles to go into the settings to add the canonical pointer to my Substack page to let the algorithms know that it originated on Substack.
Screw Medium. Most of my current Medium readers there are AI bots from south west Asia or the middle east anyway.
I am pretty sure that I will not be renewing Medium by next year. I will have to remember to redirect any Medium readers to my Substack page when I do leave though. There are a small handful that I would hate to lose.
I have always been of the viewpoint that we should be able to write what we want, when we want. If subscribers don't like something and drop out, they were never real fans to begin with. I recently started a chat thread asking if anyone at Substack would like to read any of my short fictional stories and I never got an answer. So I suspect that my Substack viewership is also predicated on my political views rather than any storytelling talents I may have.
I have a handful of fiction writers on Substack that I subscribe to because I like their fictional stories but I notice that they don't have a large fan base. Substack is also a somewhat niche platform that favors independent news journalists and political commentators. There are a lot of writers there that write all manner of things though. I think the key to having a large fan base is to write consistently about the same thing over and over again. If you're a political commentator, stay with it and they will find you. If you're a doomer, keep writing about that and they will find you, and so on. There are some pretty well known TV journalists and newspaper reporters who write on Substack now.
I watch a little Brian Taylor Cohen on YouTube. He is consistent and comments and interviews about the same thing every week. I noticed that about a lot of the individual video podcasters and writers on Substack and YouTube. They have figured out that if they want a large fan base that can make them money, they write and comment a lot about the same things over and over. I never planned to turn my musings into a business to make a lot of money.
The hard part is keeping those fans coming back over and over again. When I ran my own service repair business, one of the biggest lessons I learned early on was, that if you want to stay in business for the long haul, you have to appeal to customers to make them repeat customers. Repeat customers are the bread and butter of any money making enterprise, not catering to a bunch of one-time charlies.
My problem with creating a fan base, is that I like to write whatever I happen to fancy at the time. If I want to write or comment about politics once a week, so be it. If I want to write a fictional story and post it, I want to be able to do that without prejudice. Unfortunately, in this digital age, people are fickle. They subscribe to read in a certain niche and when you fall outside of that, or write/comment about something they don't like, they freak out and dump you like a hot potato.
I've been sitting on the fence for a bit now on whether to repost some revised fictional short stories I wrote a couple of years ago that no one liked. You've helped me jump off the fence today and go ahead and post them again. If any of my subscribers don't like it, too bad. Let them leave. They aren't paying me any money anyway.
Which brings me back to the main lesson about all of this. Stick to what makes you happy. Write about what you want, when you want as ultimately, you have to make yourself happy first so you can write the quality content that makes you feel good about it. If you only write content to make your fickle fans happy, you will feel used and abused eventually. Like you did when you were writing for Medium. Be consistent and happy. Those of us who remain loyal customers will keep supporting you. Just remember, write for the repeat customers, not the fickle one and done readers. They're a dime a dozen. You're value comes from those of us who keep coming back every week to read and learn more.
There have been some rumblings about Substack that make me a little nervous about what kind of content they're privileging now. Of course, I have no plans to write anything criticizing any more platforms. Been down that road. It's a dead end. That's always been an issue, but Anne Helen Petersen and some others have talked about it with renewed urgency. Between that and defunding PBS, NPR, and the Colbert cancellation, it's been a bit of a trigger point and it reminded me of my experiences at Medium, and I realized I never really wrote anything that bookended it, so it felt good to do that. Plus, yeah, it's been a pretty rough few weeks with people trashing the very kind of writers they say they want to support. Like many other things, it often feels like a lot of people "on our side" just can't help themselves. Finally, I've tried to tamp this, but it does bother me to see such a sudden outpouring of support for a rich dude who got silenced, when this has been happening to so many of us for years now, even longer for others, and sometimes these same people throwing roses at Colbert were the exact same people who silenced dissent in their own ranks. I know there's only so much we can do about it, and we just have to press on with our calling. Thanks for being here.
Colbert will land on his feet next year with some kind of sweetheart deal. We've seen this before. As for the rest of us, we keep plugging along doing our thing. It's like anything else in life. Some people with great talent get lucky. The rest of us watch in envy from the muddy trenches asking why can't that be us. I used to be like that but not anymore.
I dabble in the media sphere for myself and no one else. It helps me sleep better at night. I will never chase subscribers. Don't get me wrong, I won't chase them away or dismiss them. At least not on purpose. But I won't go out of my way to solicit them. I have also set up a donations option for anyone who might be inclined on my website and I have a small advertisement in my weekly podcasts that lets folks know this. But other than that, I leave it alone.
If someone were to be generous and set up a paid subscription to my Substack page, I would offer a hearty thank you. So far, I only have one. I had a couple of others but they took off after I stopped reading stories with the sound effects late last year.
I had to stop as it was becoming too much to handle and the extra podcast was stressful to make every week without anyone helping me.
Meanwhile, I am sprucing up the grammar and word flow to some old stories and I will be posting them on my Substack page, with a note to my favorite fiction writers to take a look. Maybe I will find a better following from the writers outside of the U.S. For that, I owe you a thank you for nudging me to do that.
Hang in there. We all have ups and downs in life. You'll weather this one as well. If you do hear any more about Substack censoring, please let us know. That could be a game changer if that proves out.
Great piece. Reminds me of something I jst posted here in the last day or two...
"Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken" - Oscar Wilde
I like your writing - and your courage, Jessica. The problem with social media is that it is mediated by some of the dumbest people on the planet. Anyone who has to click an article on 'how to be a billionaire' is clearly never going to be one.
And even billionaires, while smart at some things, are horribly ignorant when it comes to issues like sustainability, biology, ecology, human health, ethics etc. They are most unsuitable and unqualified as leaders of society. Greed tends to be their main motivator.
I rarely comment but I read every one of your posts and will continue to subscribe. I love your voice and the heart I feel coming thru. Thank you for persisting.
I’ve followed you everywhere because your writing is amazing and never ceases to enlighten me. It’s the real deal of truth seeking which I believe is one of the most powerful forms of love you can put out into the world. It matters because it allows us to live in truth when much of the rest of the world has rejected any of us who try to live with the painful truths.
If you take requests I’d love to hear more about your thoughts on this topic:
“toxic discourse that punishes anyone who dares to say something that goes against the dogma on either side of politics.”
Thank you!
I think whatever the comments we are within society and in writing you stick your head above the parapet . Society will
always be a mixed bag , a variety of. It’s potent and creative , potency will always work both ways “ poison - remedy “ . Unfortunately trolls as well as good supporters come out of the torrent of life .
I’m no writer , if I did write anything I think my ignorance would emerge clearly , I’m an Osteopath I do that pretty ok , yet even here my efficacy is a different kind of “ click bait “ ( forgive the pun ) . In all honesty I don’t like everything you write but most of it I think is well written and thought provoking , and I respect you as a writer who does the background work . Everything has its expiry point and maybe substack will corrupt its own success eventually . Variety , change , difference and nuance it’s all here in the river of life and expressed in many ways . I hope you can continue to make a reasonable living from your work and a hussle doesn’t become a hassle
I just discovered you a couple of weeks ago and I love your writing and authenticity. So count me as a new fan who looks forward to everything you write. I have written a little and only have a small sense of how hard it is. Keep going!!!! Thank you.
Maybe Matt Drudge will take a liking to you like his darling Matt Labash .
He also writes in the first person but everyone thinks he is a true guy !