Celebrating One Year of Indignity
GOOD MORNING! One year ago today, we delivered Indignity Vol. 1, No. 1. If you were with us in the beginning, thank you for sticking with us all this while. If you joined us sometime afterward, for one of the 114 other emails since then, thank you for that, too.
How are we doing? When we commenced our current dealings with Substack, with the backing of a one-year Substack Pro grant, we told the people at the platform "we guarantee content." Between those 115 regular emails, our intermittent Orioles Minute audiocast, and our still-recently introduced Wordle Postgame Report, we have delivered on that promise.
Have we turned that reliable (if erratically scheduled) delivery of reading (and sometimes listening) material into the sort of robust and ever-accelerating audience and revenue growth that would prove the value of the individual micro-entrepreneur business model of publishing, on which the newsletter revolution has depended? No. We have not.
Our graphs for subscriber numbers and annualized revenue are both, gratifyingly, steady upward slopes from left to right over time. We operate under the belief that if we keep publishing things we're interested in publishing, more and more readers will keep finding them. The shape of the graph says that belief is correct. The absolute numbers on the Y axis say—
Ah. Yes. Well. Despite the generosity of our benefactors at Substack in supporting our efforts for a year, as part of their effort to promote their platform, we are not sure that the underlying premise—that creative and ambitious people can independently write and publish their own work, while simultaneously marketing that work, also independently—has turned out to be all that sound, or generalizable. There's a reason even tiny, scrappy media startups tend to hire a business person early on.
We would say this leaves Indignity at a crossroads, but "crossroads" implies that we are looking at various roads leading this way or that way. It's more of one paved road that as of tomorrow suddenly turns into gravel, and the gravel on closer inspection turns out to be railway ballast, and somewhere in the distance off to the left, down—oh, hey, these are tracks, aren't they?—is the bright little headlight of an oncoming freight train labeled "THE MORTGAGE."
And yet! We are having a lot of fun writing Indignity for you. Now that our obligation to Substack is expiring, leaving us free agents, we are looking for other ways to keep on having that fun. Maybe one of you, our loyal readers, will feel the impulse to voluntarily increase your personal subscription payment by a factor of a few hundred. Maybe some other funding arrangement will pan out. Maybe a large and prosperous legacy publication will decide it wants to add Indignity to its stable of voices. If you can think of a good one, please let us know. Stranger things have happened!
But right now we're having a little birthday party. We're happy we've been able to share with you the post about the new bird, and the one about the Biblical meteor airburst, and the one about the appalling habits of orcas, and all the ones about The Worst Thing We Read This Week, and all the other ones besides those. From our least-read email, about the late Washington Post opinion editor Fred Hiatt and his section's enthusiasm for war in Iraq, to our most-read ones, about Mary H.K. Choi's apple reviews and about the mainstream enthusiasm for Great Replacement Theory, we have been eager to try out ideas and see if they find readers.
If you've enjoyed any of our items, please try sharing them with your friends or even with strangers, and encourage your friends and strangers to share them with their friends and strangers. Maybe despite the past results and our own limitations, we can make those upward-going lines on the graph go up much more sharply, like the global-warming graphs, only the opposite, both importance-wise and catastrophe-wise. Maybe in the end, none of us will be strangers to anyone else, ever again.
We thank you again for reading through this year. We thank Josh Benson, our pal and our Substack-funded editor, for editing us, and we thank the folks at Substack for underwriting these 12 months. In honor of your ongoing support, and in honor of Substack's less-ongoing support, we present to you a special Getty Images photo gallery, downloaded before our Getty Images privileges get sharply curtailed on Thursday. The theme is INDIGNITY.
This has been the inaugural INDIGNITY gettyimages IMAGE DUMP, thank you for a year of your interest, and/or a year of your support, and/or a year of your reading, or at least looking at the pictures!
CORRESPONDENCE DEP'T.
Subject: Thanks for the baseball posts
In a year where my own home team is showing itself as an antivaxxy moneygrabby bummer, it's nice to read good baseball writing in the backyard, with the grill going and a Stan Musial-themed beer.
—Drew, onetime Cards fan
Subject: Re: OK, what's this Sopranos show about
loved this one. I am, I think, Robert Iler/AJ's exact age, and while I'm not Italian, and Princeton is a bit different than like Passaic or Paterson or wherever Tony is supposed to live, the show's evocation of its particular time and place is even more remarkable watching it two decades later. The Soprano house especially -- how many of those strange over-large McMansions did I play Tekken 2 in as a middle-schooler? Down to Tony's cheesy, top-of-the-line home theater room with the popcorn machine and Godfather poster.
—Max Read
[Previously in Max Read]
WE ENCOURAGE YOU to correspond with us! indignity@indignity.net.
CUSTOMER SERVICE DEP'T.
A Year in Canceled Subscriptions: Collected messages from Indignity's feedback form for people who unsubscribe.
• Too many public posts. It just felt like there wasn’t enough added value to a paid subscription, above what is sent for free.
• Signed up for a trial to read one article.
• Too many subscriptions
• Substack's embrace of reactionaries is vile, and I'm happy to cost them money via free subscriptions, but I'm not going to help them fund hate speech.
• Star Wars...
• Fat finger error
INDIGNITY is a general-interest publication for a discerning and self-selected audience. It could be YOU.
Indignity Vol. 2, No. 64: Happy Indigniversary!
Happy birthday! It's been a pleasure to read you here for (most of) the past year.
As I've mentioned here before, as far as I'm concerned, the worst thing about every kind of creative work is that you have to "market" it, that is, you have to bring it to the attention of enough people who sufficiently appreciate what you do that they provide you with the means to keep doing it. That's an endless and tedious chore, especially if, like me and apparently you, the intersection of things you like or find interesting with things large numbers of other people like or find interesting is small.
I suspect the writer-as-micropreneur thing is unlikely to be commercially successful for intelligent and honest writers. Most of the people I've heard of who (claim to) make piles of money from their blogs or newsletters or whatever appear to be charlatans hawking various forms of snake oil. (There's always a multitude of fools eager to be parted from their money for snake oil. Hence "movement conservatism".)
Instead of going it alone, you may need to band together with other intelligent, honest, and snarky writers. Gawker in its heyday was, I gather, a modestly successful business, and its murder by Peter Thiel left a Gawker-shaped hole in the web that still hasn't been filled. (The site currently known as Gawker is, let's just say, a long way from the site that once employed you, Hamilton Nolan, and Ken Layne, among others.) Maybe you and some carefully selected colleagues could fill it.
Such a site wouldn't necessarily have to be ad-supported, either. (For a number of reasons, I'd advise against it.) Defector seems to be doing at least okay with subscription support. You must be at least acquainted with some of those people. I'd suggest talking with them to find out how well they really are doing and how they're doing it.
(By the way, Defector features some excellent writers, such as David Roth, who once observed that Donald Trump is "an aspirational brand to the worst people in the United States". Unfortunately, I find sports, in the main, deadly dull, so Defector's framing or premise or whatever doesn't work for me. It fills the Deadspin-shaped hole in the web, not the Gawker-shaped hole.)
In the end, in order to survive in this wonderland of late capitalism or whatever we're calling it, almost everyone whose creative work I appreciate has to cobble together a living. A few of them just work like crazy (e.g., bands that tour almost incessantly, because live gigs are where they can make the most money). More of them get paid for teaching (e.g., most academics, some of whom, like Albert Einstein, would rather not teach). And some of them simply have day jobs (e.g., Charles Ives was an insurance executive). It's lousy, but for most of us, there's nothing better.
Substack's embrace of reactionaries *is* vile, and it would be nice if you could find a better platform, but as long as you're here, I'll support you here.