Sunday Reader Letter, 9/29/24

A Meditation on why I write here

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

A Three Year Substack Journey

Evolution, community, and coffees

The Witness Chronicles wasn’t always about politics. In fact I started, like many Substacks, as a writer writing about writing. That made sense to me back then, as I have decades of experience writing in virtually every media and I knew there was an audience of those who want to write.

But two things led to where I find myself right now on Substack. First, there are simply too many writing newsletters here, to be honest. Second, when I added a section to my original newsletter The Grasshopper, so I could write about politics and the environment, I found myself gravitating to those topics.

I wanted to write, not write about writing. And I am both passionate about and scared of what is going on in American politics. It turns out there was a small market of similarly minded readers who liked my opinion/observation pieces about what is going on.

That’s my focus now, for obvious reasons, though I know I have to look beyond the election, which is only 38 days away as I write this. 38 action-packed days. Who knows what bonkers new thing will hit? I don’t.

I’ve written a number of books, mostly non-fiction how-to stuff back in the nineties. Since then I have written two novels and I’m going to serialize my first one in a new newsletter as soon as I work out the details of setting it up. I’ll let you know when it starts up.

That story is not political in any way. I wanted to capture the contemporary magic realism vibe I get from Haruki Murakami’s work with modern characters finding themselves in inexplicable situations. I think the book came out pretty well.

But I’ve been sitting on the manuscript, which has been thoroughly edited, had a few rewrites, and went through the reader process detailed in Stephen King’s On Writing, the single best resource for a new novelist. But I can’t get excited about traditional publishing because so many new books simply fall through the cracks and disappear.

But Substack offers a different kind of audience, that community thing everyone exclaims about when they come here. It’s a creator eco-system but it’s also a creative consumer eco-system, if that makes any sense.

My footprint here is relatively small with around 1300 subscribers, growing slowly but steadily, including a decent percentage of paying subscribers and those who donate via Buy Me A Coffee. Paid or not, you get all the content, another thing that evolved over time as I played with paywalling stuff but never felt right about it.

There is a concept called the Gift Economy in which gifting back and forth is how transactions are done. It’s a very optimistic/idealistic notion but it intrigues me. So I give my writing away and some supporters upgrade to paid or buy a few coffees.

It’s really gratifying, though it’s not paying the bills. I understand the frustration I see in the Notes thread by new writers trying to build a base. It explains the prevalence of advice articles on growing your letter, most of which offer only very basic advice.

My growth has mostly come from my Medium followers which I’ve been trying to bring over here so I can get away from Medium. The experience here on Substack suits me much better than the random algorithmic way Medium serves up our work.

I am determined to keep at this because it feels like it can grow into something that does pay the bills, while allowing me total freedom to write what I want, an extremely rare thing for professional writers. Another hundred paid subs would get me there or close enough but I know that will be a gradual thing, barring some unexpected event.

I’m writing this on a mild fall morning under a cloudy sky, the outer edge of what’s left of hurricane Helene, which I wrote about earlier today. I live in a part of the country which is feeling more and more blessed as we watch the expansive climate disasters around the country and the planet. Our weather has changed but not as drastically as other places. Our winters, for example, are much milder with less snow.

We live in a world where change is accelerated far beyond what I could imagine when I was younger. Just being able to sit here and write to a thousand potential readers daily and publish with a few clicks on an iPad is remarkable.

That ability to communicate across borders and ideologies is a double-edged sword. Much of what I write about in my political writing is debunking and attempting to explain so much in the news that is intentionally distorted, mostly by politicians.

I realize this post is pretty random but that is my state of mind on a somewhat dreamy fall day. Isn’t that what this season is all about?

Again, thanks for your support and readership. It’s incredibly important to me and other creators here.

Martin Edic

Your subscriptions, paid upgrades, and small donations, via Buy Me A Coffee, are the only compensation I get for my writing, beyond the satisfaction that some find value in it, which is a big deal. Please consider supporting my work. Thank you.