Editorial Notes

Things are getting bumpy, but I remain committed to my writing here

shark chasing donald trump

It is time to have a chin-wag on my editorial schedule here. A while ago, I posted about how my work life has changed, that I was being strong-armed into managing a team, and that my work/life balance has taken a turn for the worse.

I know have 4 direct employees, and another one on loan. But that is just the start. A recent reorganization has increased our group’s responsibilities exponentially, and you can probably guess that means I will have more responsibility.

Woo hoo. Alas, this will make it difficult to file newsletters during the normal work week. Oh sure, I will steal some time cycles during the week when an itch needs to be scratched. But the pace of on topic current events driven posts will be rarer during the week.

This makes me sad. I run this as a place to do quick response to the fuckery that is politics.

More notes:

I currently have 832 subscribers. I am absolutely humbled that there are that many people out there who want to read me. Every time I start a new post, I think about the more than 800 souls who will read it, and I worry that what I write will not be good enough. That it will turn some people off, and they will leave.

Then I crack my knuckles and do my usual stream of consciousness writing.

Once I hit 100 subscribers, I started getting nudges from Substack to connect my newsletter to Stripe so I can start making money from my writing. They give all sorts of hints, how to build suspense, use previews to manipulate readers into switching to paid, and case studies from massive newsletters that are generating millions of dollars in earnings per year.

But I will never flip that switch.

Why? Let me tell you the reasons.

First, I make plenty of money. Enough that a residual stream from Substack would likely just fuck up my annual tax filing. I don’t need that headache. And how much can I realistically make?

Let’s see, 832 subscribers, and assume that a high end of 10% subscribe (that is pretty high, I would guess more like 3% is more realistic). That would mean 83 paying subscribers. The most common monthly revenue is $5, so that is $415 a month. Substack skims their 10% off the top, so that’s about $375 a month “take home”. Multiply by 12, and it would be a princely sum of $4,500 per annum. At my current salary packet (base, bonus, and stock) that is a tad less than 2% of my current pay. Odds are that it will lead me to paying most of that $4,500 in extra taxes.

Second, the skeevy fuckers that own and run Substack are unethical scum, who are perfectly happy to promote and welcome the most abhorrent of he antismites and white nationalist twat waffles, glad to take their ten percent off the top. It is why people I respect like Platformer, Ed Zitron, and Molly White moved to different platforms.

But me? Well, I did move my professional blog to Ghost, but I keep Sweaty here. The way I figure it, as long as I am not charging for my writing, and growing my audience, I am eating up their resources. Their servers, and their email provider (Mailgun) are not free to operate, and I gleefully slurp those resources, using their image generator, and sent out the blasts, all eating into their operating revenue.

It is my own self defiance, and I am glad to take advantage of their generosity. I will tolerate the shit-takes and the incongruencies of the leaders of Substack (really Hamish McKenzie is a shitbird and should learn to shut the fuck up. He is even less charming than Elon Musk).

Final thoughts

I am still in awe that anybody, let alone more than 800 of you, read what I write. I enjoy your comments and interactions, and I even am glad that my posts on music seem to resonate. It is not just the politics and shitposting that keeps people reading.