I do my best to maintain Inbox Zero. At least once or twice a day, I like to process my emails and take action on each one of them. Though this can be onerous at times, it ensures I stay on top of my correspondence. As I went through this process the other morning, I realized that Substack has become one of my biggest challenges.
It’s a good challenge, of course. Many great writers have migrated from blogs to Substack and it is a joy to subscribe to a lot of them—over 50 at last count. Yet each Substack sends an email with each update and this often means I receive 10 or even 12 a day. I often don’t have time to read them in the moment, so they tend to pile up. Thankfully, I managed to find a workaround for dealing with the problem.1
But this raises an issue I have been meaning to suggest to those who use Substack. The Substack model is built around offering both free and paid content. Most writers offer some of their articles for free while they offer the rest (and often the best) exclusively to paid subscribers. I have never been on the writing end of the service so cannot speak to the model’s effectiveness, but I assume it works well enough.
This is what I want to ask Christian writers who use Substack: Do people support you in order to receive exclusive content or do they support you because they appreciate you and the content you write? In other words, does putting the paywall in place necessarily increase reach, impact, and/or monetization? And is it possible that Christian readers think differently about this than non-Christian ones?
I can only speak to my experience of blogging, but I have always done my utmost to provide all my content to everyone for free. As far as possible, I have avoided putting a paywall between writing and readers. Meanwhile, I have trusted that some people will be willing to support the work I do both because they appreciate it personally and because they are glad to make it available to others. These people are not drawn by exclusivity but by kindness and charity. They are, after all, Christians who are accustomed to generosity and who set aside a portion of their income for just such purposes.
From the very beginning, this model has proven effective. I’ll grant that my blog grew up at a different time, in a different context, and through a different medium, but I can at least attest it’s possible to monetize using a model that does not depend upon paywalling exclusive or premium content.
In fact, I wonder if it’s possible that a paywall may actually hinder the reach of your writing. I say that because putting it behind a paywall makes it more difficult to share. Once again, speaking personally, I love to share Substack content, but cannot and will not share content that is behind a paywall. I assume the same is true of others as well. It’s tough to share an article and tell others, “But you can only read the first few paragraphs.” Not only that, but exclusive content means nothing to me as I subscribe to Substacks. I love to support writers, not get past a paywall.
So that’s what I would like to ask the Substackers to consider. I don’t recommend you immediately change anything simply because I said so, but I do recommend you at least think about whether the paywall model is really the most effective.
- I use ReadWise’s Reader app which provides the option to add content via a forwarding email address. I created a filter in Gmail to forward all emails from Substack to that forwarding address which then forwards them to Reader while skipping my email inbox. ↩
