April 5, 2023: A Year on Substack!

Daily Diary, Day 946: A year ago I started this substack newsletter, and a month later, my monthly promotional newsletter, and my, how time has flown.

In this end-of-year review I can say that I am entirely satisfied with how both of these newsletters have succeeded in achieving the goals I had for creating them.

Before I joined subtack, my attempts to communicate with fans of my writing had been divided between Facebook posts, blog posts on my website, and a monthly newsletter that I put out using mailchimp. I was finding this division increasingly inefficient and costly in terms of time and money. Consequently, I had three goals for consolidating my methods of communication onto substack.

·      The first goal was to ensure that I wouldn’t be dependent on the Facebook algorithms, or paying Facebook to boost posts, to ensure my followers had a chance to actually see my daily posts.

·      The second goal was to consolidate the promotional posts that I had been doing through my website blog and through the mailchimp newsletter.

·      Finally, I hoped that this consolidation would free up more time for writing.

Regarding the first goal, unlike on Facebook where I am fortunate if 1% of my followers even see my posts in their newsfeeds, I can see that most of those people who have subscribed to my Aging Author’s Daily Diversions newsletter actually receive them, and over a third of these subscribers open them on any given day.

While some people have stuck with Facebook, where I duplicate my substack posts (which takes about a minute of my time) I was pleased that within a month of starting the new substack newsletter, I had 231 followers, and I have recently reached just short of 400 subscribers. Some of these subscribers have clearly shifted from facebook to substack, and others came over from my website, most of them making the shift in the first couple of weeks last April when I was busy posting everywhere about my shift.

However, at this point, fifty percent of my subscribers have found my newsletter through substack itself (which is working hard to develop “discoverability” tools.)  This tells me that by being on substack I’m actually expanding my readership, which is an unintended but delightful consequence of the switch.

For the second goal of consolidating my website and mailchimp promotional posts, this has also been successful. In this second newsletter, Mary Louisa Locke’s Monthy Promotional Newsletter, I not only seem to have kept almost all of my prior audiences (meaning that I didn’t suddenly have a lot of my former subscribers, unsubscribe when I imported them to substack), but my open rate is considerably higher now.

I was fortunate if a third of my audience opened the website blog posts or the mailchimp newsletters (and I was paying to send those newsletters), but my open rate for my substack newsletter, which has slightly over 3000 subscribers, is consistently over 50%.

Finally, the fact that in the year since I started working on substack I’ve completed and published a 40,000 word novella and have written and I am about to publish a science fiction novel of over 100,000 words, is testament to the fact that the shift has been good for my writing productivity.

So, this is a very heart-felt thank to all of you who followed me over to substack, or have joined me recently on my journey. This includes all the other substack authors I have also been discovering here as well.

As for the next year, well, at my age I am pretty content if I can just hold my own against the ravages of time, so I do hope to keep those of you who have been good enough to subscribe. However, what keeps me young (at least at heart) is to keep moving forward and learning new things. So in a later post I plan on considering some new goals for my daily newsletter, and hope you will all stick with me during the coming year.

But now it’s time to get back to editing that novel!  

Photo by Kelly Common on Unsplash