Thursday! 3-22: We're Building Right Here! (Newsletter News Again)

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A few newsletters ago, we kicked around the idea of my starting a creative community somewhere online — perhaps Discord, perhaps somewhere else. A bunch of you got quite excited about the idea, which made me quite excited too, until I found that none of the platforms I had scouted out were places I wanted to drive my stake. Things happened¹ and I stuck the whole community idea on a shelf so far back in my own mind that when I listed creative things I wanted to do, it didn’t even rate a mention. Oddly enough, none of you called me on it either, which showed me just how far back I had buried it²

But now. Well, let me say I’ve moved the idea from the back of the closet behind the old mud boots and the ancient wooden box carven with doughty protective sigils and bound with chains made of meteoric iron³ all the way into the living room, and it’s all Substack’s fault.

See, the founders of Substack have a singular vision for their company: they want to make money. Wait! I know what you’re thinking. Everyone who starts a company wants to make money, especially people who start tech companies. They’re famous for wanting to wring a gajillion dollars out of their idea, then run off giggling to their armored fortresses in the blighted cyberpunk wasteland of San Francisco! Ordinarily, I’d be with you, but these guys seem different to me. For one, they have a business model unlike nearly every other social media platform out there. Their idea — and let’s take Samuel L. Jackson’s advice in Jurassic Park right now — is not to treat writers and readers as “the product”, whose eyeballs must be reaped and sold to advertisers. You’re probably noticed that the only advertising you see around here is for Substack, Thursday!, and other newsletters. That’s on purpose. The founders of Substack want writers to get paid, because when writers get paid, Substack gets paid. Pretty simply, no?

Now, I’m not saying the Substackalites⁴ are brimming over with altruism for their fellow human beings. Ha. None of us are quite that noble. They are, however, all-in on a business model that can be beneficial for everyone involved. Writers like me attract clever and discerning readers like you to our newsletters. Maybe you download the app⁵ or maybe you poke around to see who else you might find here worth reading. Once writers build an audience with which they’re comfortable, they open up paid subscriptions⁶, from which Substack gets a percentage. The percentage isn’t bad, compared to other places like Patreon. The more writers build happy and engaged audiences who are willing to put a few bucks each month in the pockets of their favorite writers, the better off Substack does.

Honestly, even if I didn’t have a newsletter here, I’d love the idea. Why should a talented writer have to rattle a tip jar like a beggar, like we had to back in the olden days of blogging, just to make enough money to pay for internet hosting and maybe a nice dinner once in a while? Media companies have been making bank off of very good writers and you’ve been giving the money not to the creative people whose work you look for regularly, but to their bosses, who peeled a couple of greenbacks off the top for the “talent”. Well, Substack turns that all upside-down, and I’m here for it.

But wait! There’s more! Right now, there’s a new feature around here called Chat, which lets us start little chat spaces on a given topic right here in Thursday’s space on Substack. I, or even one of you (so far as I know), can start your own chat topic and we can all add to that conversation. For example, one of you might be having a particular creative difficulty — a question about exposition, let’s say. You can start your own chat to ask the question and other people can jump in and give their opinions or even share their own similar difficulties. At least, that’s how it looks like it’ll work. Heck, we could even do live chats around particular events if we wanted, or just create our own events⁷.

THEN Substack is adding something else to the mix — a feature called Notes. Think, of these as miniature newsletters, little blurbs where I can recommend a book or album or even ask a questions and have people from other newsletters come over and add their two cents. If Chat is just for us here, Notes is a way to (potentially) connect newsletter audiences to each other. I’ve read some early commentary that compares Notes to Twitter. I don’t think it’s set up quite that way, though if wouldn’t bug me one bit if this whole platform brought Twitter down. I’m no fan. Right now, though, don’t buy all the hype and competition. Substack is playing a much different game and I’ve decided I’m going in with them on it.

So…what does that mean for you, my brilliant friend? Well, first, please notice that I called you “friend”, and not lightly. One of the pressures an artist faces is when they turn to their art to pay for some portion of their living. I admit I’ve already had a fraught relationship with money. I don’t like to ask for it, even though it is necessary. I’ve a tough time discerning my own value as an artist or even just as an employee. Still, there are bills to pay and, one day sooner rather than later, I’d like my art to make up a non-trivial portion of my living. The pressure comes when I ask for money and you give it to me. See, I am not building business relationships here. You are not customers to me. You’re not even potential patrons or “leads” or whatever the clever newsletter professionals call people who read newsletters. You are — and I’m not even kidding about this — potential friends. Some of you started out as friends, some of you have become friends over the past couple of years, and the rest of you? Well, you’re that interesting sort of friend that’s sprung up since the invention of the internet — the person we like, though we rarely talk to them and have never actually met them.

Here’s the deal. I’m turning on paid subscriptions. Thursday! will have three different options — a monthly option, a yearly option that will be a bit cheaper than the monthly option, and a BIG SUPPORT yearly option if you want to go bigger than the regular yearly option up to a maximum of what would normally be about $20 a month. You’ll see it and it won’t be hard to figure. So why ask for money? Because it’s necessary for my work as an artist. I certainly won’t starve if I never make a dime from my art but the more I can rely on my art for income the more I can work on it. I can make more of it, or at least I can make better, more practiced art. I can spend more time learning new stuff, or sending poems and stories out to publications that might love them. Thursday! isn’t transactional; it’s aspirational. It’s the first part of the stuff I would do if I could make art all the time.

That said, Substack has ways for me to do things other than a written newsletter. I can do an audio podcast (though not video yet, not so far as I can see, though I can embed YouTube videos, I think)⁸ and posts just for paid subscribers. I will do some of those as we go on and I figure out what I can do and what we want. For those of you who support me on Patreon, you can either stop that and subscribe here or you can just keep on going on Patreon and I'll set you up as a paid subscriber here⁹. I will say that Substack is less flexible about the amounts than Patreon. If you don't like what I have set up here, you can pick an amount yourself back on Patreon and we'll figure out the paid subscriber thing here. This is as new to me as I’m sure it is to you, but with a bit of patience and cleverness from all of us, we’ll do just fine.

In the meantime, the subscription option is right there for you, if you want to support me and Thursday! and whatever other mild shenanigans¹⁰ I get up to around here. In the meantime, I think this is where I'm going to start my creative community. I'm glad you are part of it and I invite you to settle in nicely and get to know the place. I figure, among us, we can make Thursday! special, for all of us.

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What I Wrote Last Week

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Fancy a story or poem? Read all you want at JimmieWrites.

Buy my picture book of poems about werewolves and atomic monsters!

Read “The Paper Swans of Ellendell” in Postcards from Mars!

ONE LAST THING! See the buttons down there? Click them and join in the shenanigans and tomfoolery. If you only want a little, click the heart. But if you click the comment button, you might find yourself adding real value to this crazy little community we’re building here, and wouldn’t that be grand?

1. We can call my Dad’s passing a “thing”, right? I don’t think he’d mind.

2. Like one of those things you stuck in the hallway closet a couple of years ago and completely forgot you owned until, for whatever reason, you had to clean out the whole thing, found it, and said “When did we get one of these?”

3. Full of valuable Pokémon cards. Yeah! That’s it. Pokémon cards.

4. What else would you call them? Substackers? That’s more what I might call you and I.

5. Which honestly isn’t a bad idea. The app isn’t a pain in the butt and let's you do just about everything except write a newsletter yourself.

6. HINT HINT AWOOGA AWOOGA!!

7. Like, heck, I don’t know…regular create-alongs maybe? I’m not sure if I could talk aloud during all of that, but it’s worth a look, isn’t it?

8. I’m still looking at all the options and learning, okay? There’s a lot going on around this place. These folks are serious!

9. I’m almost positive I can do that. We will figure it out.

10. Wait. Does that sound familiar? Hmmmmmmmm…