Digital & audience · Less obvious
Paid newsletters and subscriptions
A letter, a regular cadence, and readers who pay to keep receiving it.
Substack, Ghost, Patreon-as-letter, a list you host yourself: the paid newsletter is a column with a door on it. People subscribe because you are useful, or funny, or further into a subject than they are. The archive is a product. The relationship is the asset. Unlike a book, it has to keep arriving.
- Typical pay
- A few hundred dedicated paying readers at a modest monthly price is a part-time income. A few thousand is a job. Free subscribers are the funnel, not the living.
- Ceiling
- Uncapped
- Speed
- First money in months
- Effort
- A job in itself
- Needs
- Needs an audience
How it works
- 01
You publish on a regular schedule, with a free tier that proves the value and a paid tier that goes further.
- 02
The platform (or your own stack) takes a cut and handles the cards, the failed payments, the guilt-inducing dunning emails.
- 03
You may add community, AMAs, or serial fiction. The letter is still the product.
How to start
- 01
Write twenty free issues before you put a lock on anything. You are building the habit, not a paywall.
- 02
Be specific. 'Notes on writing' is a crowded street. 'A working writer on contracts' is a shop.
- 03
Ask people to pay only when you would pay, in their shoes.
Watch out
- 01
A weekly letter is 52 deadlines a year. That is a columnist's life. Budget the hours like a job, because it is one.
- 02
Platforms can throttle your reach to your own list. Own an export of the emails.
- 03
Serialising a novel behind a paywall can work. It can also strand a book that wanted to be a book.
A newsletter is an old form — the letter of news — with a better till. I like it when the writer already has something to report: a beat, a craft, a corner of history. I like it less when it is a second Twitter with an invoice attached.