I’m going to be fully transparent today in hopes that this information is useful to someone: on September 1, 2023, I removed the paywall from my paid Substack newsletter, as a pass/fail experiment: until the end of the year, everything would be free for everyone, and instead of granting greater/deeper access, paid subscriptions would simply be a means of supporting my work.

The experiment was a pass — it worked. By December 31, I was making more money than I had been making when the test period began, so I decided to adopt the model permanently (or at least as “permanent” as anything ever is with my newsletter, which is to say, until it doesn’t work anymore, or until I need to do something differently for whatever reason).

I can report that today, May 10, 2024, I am making $1,000 more than I was when I changed the pricing model.

To be clear, at that point last fall, I’d been writing my newsletter for 3 years, 3 months; I’d been offering paid subscriptions for about 2 years; I had (and still have) a pretty engaged, enthusiastic audience. I also lose paid subscribers just as often as I did before.

This model can work, and it also doesn’t work without, well, years of work.

But the good news is that the work is entirely under your control. You can’t force people to subscribe, you can’t entice them to stay subscribed if they don’t want to (you really can’t). But you can put in the time, effort, and energy. You can bring your passion. You can persist when you feel discouraged, disillusioned, jealous, envious, crabby, completely over it, or all of the above.

I have been very lucky. And I also believe, as my husband always says, that the harder you work, the luckier you get. Try things. Take risks. Don’t listen to advice that doesn’t fit you, or believe there’s only one way to do things here. We’re all making it up as we go along. Keep your head up, and keep going.