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.
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.