State of the Blog (IV)

Hello friends! The blog is doing well. Several days ago, I hit 3,000 subscribers. This is up from about 400 subscribers in December of last year.

In a recent post, I attempted to make the point that it’s very hard to convince people to read a novel (at least the sort of novel that I write), because people only want to read high-brow novels if they think the novel is good, and they only think it’s good if they’ve seen it mentioned elsewhere and widely-reviewed. A high-brow substack doesn’t face this problem. People just click through, and if they like the voice, they’ll subscribe.

That's why it's much easier to grow a newsletter than to sell copies of your novel. To me that doesn't make newsletters worse, it makes them better. The same eyeballs, acquired with much less effort.