Why Me? Why Now?

I'm a hypocrite. Either that or I'm allowed to change my mind.

For years, I’ve railed against Substack.

It killed me to watch extremely talented writers who I either knew personally or by byline begging for $5 a month. These were people who were once paid $5 a word (if they were lucky) but at the very least something and now they were, bag in hand, asking strangers for money.

Me with Richard, years before I gave him the worst business advice he could get

My friend Richard Rushfield, who started one of Substack’s greatest success stories, The Ankler, took me to lunch over six years ago to ask me what I thought about his idea of starting a paid newsletter about the entertainment business.

I told him it was a terrible idea—that I could barely get subscribers to open my free newsletter, that everyone felt oversubscribed, that he should finish his Diet Coke and sandwich and forget this idea altogether.

Shows you what I know.

Despite Richard’s success, I remained a Substack non-believer.

Despite the fact that I have several Substacks I religiously read, I remained a Substack non-believer.

So what’s changed?

Well, I (famously) (in my head) thought Instagram was a fad—or at least “not for me.” I was such an early adopter of Twitter that I was actually mentioned in the original Wikipedia entry about it. And when everyone jumped on the Instagram bandwagon, I uttered snobby sentences like, “I’m a words person, I’ll remain on the words platform, thankyouverymuch.”

And then, well, people I knew marched ahead on Instagram and now have hundreds of thousands of followers. They then took those followers and launched podcasts and books that became terribly successful.

Plus, I’m incredibly vain. An opportunity to post photos of myself? What the hell had I been thinking, missing that opportunity?

So I jumped on the bandwagon too late to really do anything that exciting with it (I am occasionally pitched an opportunity to sponsor a clothing line, by which they mean recommend it and take 10% of whatever anyone purchases with my code). I’ve definitely lamented the fact that I didn’t get the importance of Instagram early on.

I’m not saying I was entirely wrong about Substack. It still does depress me to see talented people putting out their hands for a few dollars.

But I’ve also grown incredibly weary of a subsection of the subscribers on the newsletter list I maintained for about a decade. There are nearly 5000 of them, I’ve written them probably close to 1000 newsletters over the years and with the rarest of rare exceptions, they’ve never become clients or customers. More than half of them don’t even open it.

I get that—it’s normal. I have a 35% open rate usually, which is supposedly good. And look, I subscribe to a lot of newsletters that I don’t open.

But you know what newsletters I always open? The Substacks. The ones I pay for. Even if I’m paying $5 a month, I value them in a way I don’t value the freebies. In the same way that I’d rather sell 100 copies of a book to 100 people whose lives will change and who may become clients than 10,000 copies to people who will forget the book the next day, I’d rather have 500, or maybe even five, active readers who are the successful demographic I want to speak to.

(You can say, “Wow, that’s cold—you’re only writing people to get them to buy? You only want to write for successful people?” And I can say, “While of course I want anyone to be able to use the information I share, I’ve also been a professional writer for 30 years. It is entirely logical that I wouldn’t want to do my chosen profession as volunteer work.” [I would sound defensive, yes.])

But it’s not just that those subscribers didn’t hire my company. While some of them are utterly lovely (I am probably talking about you if you’re a subscriber to my former list because you had the good sense to jump over here), some absolutely sucked. They would respond to my emails about working with me to say that my company charged too much or they would email me their books, telling me that if I read them, I’d want to publish them for free. (Meanwhile, some of our publishing packages cost 1/100th of the going rate.)

But the most fascinating discovery I made about my newsletter list was a year or so ago, when I decided I wanted to email just former clients. This was a group of roughly 50 people who had collectively paid my company millions of dollars.

Only two of them were already on my email list.

That’s when I realized that all this nonsense that marketers fed us, and still feed us, about how your newsletter list can be your net worth and you need to deliver content for free because if it’s good, they’ll want to buy from you and how you need to establish trust to get a customer is, in my experience, complete bullshit.

The people who hired my company trusted me without reading my weekly missives and the people who read my weekly missives for the most part didn’t open them, opened them and ignored them or opened them, followed what I suggested and never hired my company.

It’s not about money, though—not entirely. It’s the fact that non action-takers bother me. Success is anyone’s for the taking and the people I know who try, or who claim to try and don’t succeed, are just too scared to do what it takes. Their fear or delusion supercedes their ambition. They believe that the world should come along and pay them to publish. And they blame the world or their age or God or me for charging too much.

I’ve complained to other entrepreneurs about the subscribers who write me that my services are too expensive, and my friends always say the same thing: “Oh, you just have the wrong subscribers on your list.” Like getting the “right” list is easy!

I guess this is sort of my attempt to get the right list. Or at least to say goodbye to the decidedly wrong people from the other one.

Oh, also my friend talked about how she’s been “going unhinged” a little in her writing lately—which, to her, meant she’d stopped sugar coating reality out of fear of pissing people off.

Unhinged sounded nice—but extreme. I’m a mom now and my unhinged days are (hopefully) behind me. Unfiltered seemed a shade less dramatic.

And so I’ll be going unfiltered on everything I’ve learned from my decades in media—including who to stop listening to, why your bios may be terribly written, when to use paid media and when not to, what hitting the NYT bestseller list and TEDx stage actually does for your career (instead of what people say it does), how everyone is lying about their speaking fees and more.

Please drop the filter with me and let’s do this.