Celebrating One Year on Substack
The year in review and some questions for YOU!
This month marks a big milestone for me: one year on Substack, AKA my Substackiversy! 🥳 I launched my newsletter, Rebuilding With Jennifer Garam, last May. Since then, I’ve written an installment every week — 54 consecutive posts to be exact. And this is my 55th one.
I started blogging almost 20 years ago, in July 2006 on a platform called Blogspot. It me took a while this morning to dig up my first post on my first blog, but I eventually found it and you can read it here. (You have to scroll all the way to the bottom of the page because apparently this was before each post had its own unique URL.) Since then, I’ve had five different blogs, plus this newsletter, and I’ve never been this consistent, posting weekly for an entire year.
The thing that keeps me consistent is having a paywall and paid subscribers; without people investing in my work, I would definitely skip doing this some weeks. But because people have paid to receive this newsletter, I feel an obligation to provide consistent value.
Why the Paywall?
Following the lead my old boss, Shani Silver, a former journalist and content executive, podcaster, author, and Substack writer who now exclusively creates and produces her own content, I launched my newsletter with a paid subscription model from the beginning. Shani has built a business from subscription-based self-publishing and there are many things that appealed to me about this, such as:
✨ Bypassing gatekeepers. Pitching your work and getting countless rejections and non-responses is one of the most demoralizing parts of being a writer. With Substack, there are no gatekeepers — I just hit ‘Publish’ whenever I want to!
✨ Maintaining complete creative control. It can actually feel painful when you pour your heart and soul into writing something and an editor who doesn’t understand your vision and is overworked and rushed decimates it in five minutes, to the point that it doesn’t say what you want it to anymore or even feel true to you and your intentions. Here, I can control every last word and punctuation mark, and I never have to worry about an editor stripping away my voice or introducing careless errors.
✨ Earning a living. Since I first began blogging close to 20 years ago, I’ve put out a LOT of free content between all my different blogs, the free newsletter I used to send for years, and my various social media platforms. I started off doing this work out of love and passion, but there’s an unspoken promise that if you keep doing what you love, one day you’ll break through and it will lead to fortune — or at least being able to support yourself in a modest lifestyle. This hasn’t happened for me (yet!) and after years of free creating, it’s easy to get exhausted, disillusioned, and burnt out. I am not making a fortune, or close to it, from this newsletter, but being compensated for my work helps me feel valued and protects against burnout, instead of feeling like an unappreciated bottomless pit endlessly churning out free content.
Another reason I like having a paywall: I have spent the past 20 years being extremely vulnerable online and sharing my deepest fears, struggles, and insecurities. With a paywall, I can shield myself a little better — I usually put the paywall right before I start to get vulnerable. My vulnerabilities are now solely for paid subscribers who took deliberate action to view them, instead of for the whole entire internet to see while they’re mindlessly scrolling.
A Recap of My Most Popular Posts This Year
In honor of one year of creating content on Substack, here’s a look back at my most popular posts from this year in descending order, starting with the top most popular.
And now I’d love to hear from YOU!
As I reach this one-year point, I want to check in with YOU, my paid and free subscribers. Please take a few minutes to complete this brief survey I’ve crafted to get feedback to help me shape this next year of my newsletter. Thank you!