The joy of Substack

AT THE OCTOBER Branch Meeting we heard from our former branch secretary Alistair Dabbs, now chair of NUJ Paris Branch, about his experience building a following on Substack and the opportunities for remuneration that this offers.

Alistair Dabbs

Image © Pennie Quinton

Alistair began by telling us how just out of the blue, he got a message from Substack saying, “congratulations, you've hit a certain level of paid subscribers.” He said that he hadn't quite expected that as he hadn't really been paying attention.

“I'm very lazy. I was surprised at myself how pleased I was to get this message. I felt childish for feeling quite pleased. And then I did what everyone else does, which is tell everyone”. So when we heard we invited Alistair to share with us his experience of Substack to date. As a branch we have discussed on several previous occasions how Substack is an opportunity to get published.

Alistair explained that Substack is one of many newsletter platforms and is like doing a blog but is set up so it's easy to route it to people's emails. “It's nicely formatted. It's not unlike MailChimp, but with extras.”

‘I just carried on’

Alistair told us that he first went on Substack at the start of the Covid lockdown. “I'd been writing a weekly column, an opinion column of no great value for an IT website, for about 10 years, once a week. And of course, when the lockdowns came, they cancelled all freelance work. I had other work, so it wasn't a major problem, but I felt a bit sad that I couldn't do a weekly column because I'd built up a nice little readership.

“So, I just carried on every week on Substack and, as it happened, a whole bunch of people came over from the IT website and suddenly joined. So, they were happy to get it all for free as usual, and I carried on doing that for a couple of years.

“Eventually I just thought, I am a lazy person, I didn't want to keep doing it. unless someone gave me money like they used to on the websites that I'd written for.

“I thought, I'll start charging and see what happens. And if no one pays, then I'll give up. And if someone pays, well, I'll be obliged to keep going.

“I was quite surprised. If you know anything about traditional direct mail [marketing], a response rate of 2.5 per cent is good. I worked out that if I could get 2.5% of the people who were already subscribing to pay, I'd be okay. I was surprised to exceed that.”

Pricing your work

Alistair explained the importance of gauging in advance how much people might want to pay to read and that the journalist chooses the subscription price. They must then decide whether to charge annually or monthly. Alistair said that he chose the lowest amount that Substack would allow him to charge, since he understood his readers to be rather “cynical and sarcastic - so I couldn't really take the piss”.

He was surprised how many of his readers did subscribe. That meant he was committed to publishing for a year. He also noticed that almost weekly, more people signed up.

“It doesn't have to be a high price. Consider how many hundreds of pounds you want to be paid for a column. If you set an annual subscription rate of, say, £50 per year for your valuable newsletter and if six people subscribe every week... that's £300 a week. It’s worth it.

“You already have upfront money from people who subscribed in a big bunch when you started, and every week a small number of people also subscribe, sometimes for a month, sometimes for a year.

“I'm [now] earning what I earned before for writing, just this one thing every week.

“You don't have to have that many subscribers to receive those [Substack] congratulations. It's not like I've got thousands of people paying.

“What I write is of no consequence. It's partly fiction and partly, well... the occasional knob gag goes in.

“But if you were doing something serious that mattered, some proper investigative stuff, as I know some of you here do, you can put a value on it.

“Just think: there are some people out there saying, 'yeah, £70 a year.' and if five people every week pay that as new subscribers, suddenly it becomes a thing. You can't live on it, but it's one channel for a freelance.

“I am happily just adding this nice little trickle of money, which is comparable to what I was being paid by the website to do this weekly thing for 10 years.

“If I wasn't so lazy I could probably push the boat out a bit more. There are things you can do to maintain and grow the subscriptions. Every time someone subscribes you're supposed to do is send them a personal message of thanks, for example. I really ought to do that.”

Branch member Paddy French, who had just joined Substack, told us how he had produced almost a column a week and said the most views he's had were for a post about Luke Akehurst, a Labour Party National Executive member and now MP, which got 781 views. Paddy mentioned that he gained 248 subscribers, 15 paid, in six months and that he finds Substack an effective medium.”

Branch questions

Question: How much does Alistair earn from his Substack column?

“After the first week, a couple of grand came in. I can't live on £2000 a year, but what surprised me, as I said, was the weekly income afterwards, the trickle of new people coming in.

“There are some people earning five figures and more on Substack. But they're usually not on their own, they're in proper teams and they're spreading their content across..., they used to call it 'pillars', didn't they?

Question: Photographer members asked how they could use Substack. As a photography portfolio? What about putting up illustrated articles?

Alistair said he was a big fan of good old-fashioned reportage, “and of Charlie Hebdo where it's drawn rather than photographed” and he wondered whether it's time to revive that tradition in Britain.

Question: What is the obligation for the annual fee if you already have the subscription?

“You just tell everyone what they're going to get. So, if you want to do it once a month, do it once a month. If you want to, do one every hour. If you don't deliver what you promised, then people might complain to Substack, and they might freeze your account and then everyone gets their money back.

“There is a system within Substack that allows you to stop the whole thing: there's a button you can click to get off this bus. It cancels everything. And people who have paid get a proportion of their money back, based on the point at which you stopped.”