No, I Will Not Show You My Metrics

Doing the work vs talking about how hard it is to do the work

There has been much hand-wringing and spilled milking around the halls of Substack recently. Some people are distraught about the announcement of partnership with

The Free Press

and others are distraught about what they see as gen-u-wine hobnobbing and hat-tipping to the powers that be. I’m as curious as the next person and probably (to my shame) even more curious, so I tap the links like every other good little writer on Substack and I read the posts and reconsider my use of Notes and wonder whether the model is sustainable and familiarize myself with the actual Bari Weiss and not just what all the people say about Bari Weiss. But at the end of the day, I’m still going to be here.

Note to those who receive these missives as readers and not as fellow writers, this is going to be a Writer-to-Writer bit and if that doesn’t interest you, I don’t blame you at all. There are far more interesting and awful things happening in the world. Skip this. (Or, alternatively, share this piece with a writer you know:

Okay. Here’s what I’m going to say, then I’m going to say it longer, and then I’ll say it again one more time: There are no shortcuts to a successful writing life or writing as paid vocation except writing itself and for the long haul. Resist shortcuts and especially resist platform hopping hoping to find success in other methods. There is no other way to do than to simply do.

Every time a new “platform” (for the sake of clarity, I’m lumping all of social media, its various spin-offs, including Substack (although you can use Substack differently—ie. just as an email subscription mechanism) into one term platforms.) rises to the top or leaks out the side, all the makers and writers and content creators run over there to see if it might be the place for them. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t, sometimes it is for a time and then the luster wears off and then it isn’t. Sometimes it really is, even if it isn’t for everyone else—and then this takes some resilience to stay when everyone seems to be leaving.

As these offshoots happen, some makers bring with them the years of work they did before they came to this new platform—usually in the form of email address lists or faithful eyeballs.

Kevin Kelly

coined the phrase 1000 True Fans, and many people who’ve been chronically online for years sowing their work in the fields of online estate, bring their 1000 True Fans with them wherever they go (and why shouldn’t they? It shouldn’t be to their shame that they enter new platforms with old readers, in fact, it’s to their credit that people will follow them into new frontiers). Others, though, enter these new fields as newbies—and again, no shame here, we are all beginners at some point and some of us are chronic beginners—in the words of Saint Bendedict, “Always we begin again.”

We enter these places with the work—however much, however little—we have accomplished behind us. This is the one glory of aging. We get to bring it all with us, the wrinkles, the wisdom, the sags, the stories, the readers who won’t quit us. Hurrah!

And then the work of exploration begins. How do we use this platform? Do we like the way we use it? Do we need to change the way we use it? What is our ultimate aim of the platform? Do we feel we need to be in sync with the ways/modes/beliefs of everyone else who uses the platform or the ones who created the platform? Does it serve us? Does it serve those who read/follow/tolerate us? Do we like being here? Does it make us feel smarmy when we close it down? Does it make it easy for us to do the work we want to do?

These are the questions we must ask and answer, and no one else can ask them for us or live with the answers we find. Some people are going to find, as I have, that the noise of Twitter is too much and so leave. Or the echoes of Twitter I saw in Blue Sky were also too much and decide it’s not for me. Or muck around with Threads for a bit and see if it works for me. Or not even touch the halls of TikTok. Or stick around Instagram with regular long breaks when the noise gets deafening. Or find a home (for now) on Substack.

Composition 8 by Wassily Kandinsky, 1920s

I love Substack. I can give you fifty reasons I love Substack. One of which is that I don’t pay hoot nor holler to what its founders are Noting or Stacking. If I were to go to or stick around places merely because of its founders, well, I probably wouldn’t be an American right now… There is no perfect founder, there are just human people moving fast and sometimes breaking things or moving slow and sometimes getting left behind. No one has the perfect cadence and even if someone did, it wouldn’t be your perfect cadence so it would irk you somehow. Best to just learn that early and remember it often.

In the world of Substack (or any platform, or politics, or any institution), our work is much the same as it is in the world: Make beautiful, good, and true things. Don’t ignore injustice. Always be beginning again. Don’t be a know-it-all. When you get it wrong (actually wrong, not just the mob-thinks-you’re-wrong), apologize and do better next time. Work hard and keep working hard.

It’s the last one that I want to say more about. We’ve gotten it out of the way that there’s no perfect platform and we all have to decide for ourselves what’s the best place to hang out and do our work, but also there is that irritating little thing called work that must be talked about too.

Whenever I see people fussing about the algorithms (I fuss too!) or bristling about the founders or frustrated that other people (who have been doing the work longer) are seeing what appears to be instantaneous success on new platforms, I think to myself: friends, the work is hard and the way is long, but there’s no shortcut to consistently creating good work over the long haul than doing good work over the long haul. And a very important caveat that I would add is the long haul is often in one place or one platform—even if everyone else is moving on to something cooler or newer or shinier.

A farmer doesn’t abandon a newly cleared and tilled field after the first year of little yield. No, they keep adding to and amending the soil with nutrients, they plant cover crops, they rotate crops, they intermingle crops, but they don’t abandon the field. They stay in the field. They sow in the field. They care for the field, and eventually, the field produces a banner harvest. And maybe after that, the farmer can move to another field, using the lessons they’ve learned and the proceeds from the former field’s harvest, to do better in the next field. But a practice of constantly trying new fields and then leaving them (for an array of reasons) for new fields, is not going to ever serve the farmer, and really, can we even call a person who does that a farmer? I’d say no.

Composition 8 by Wassily Kandinsky, 1920s

Same with writing. If that’s what you know you’re called to do from the tips of your toes to the top of your cerebrum, then you’ve got to just find the place or platform that works best for you, that answers the questions you’ve asked in a way you can live with, and then you’ve just got to do the work. The platform, with all its bells and whistles, all its promises of success and stories of superstardom, with its paths from A to B to fanfare and confetti—the platform is only doing two things: it’s using you and you’re using it. Choose to use it, amend it or add to it if you must, but use it and ignore the ways it’s using you. You don’t own any of the shit you posted on that platform ten years ago or even two years ago, so at this point, who cares? Think of it as practice. Drip. Drip. Drip into the abyss.¹ But you’re getting better. You’re becoming the writer you’ve always dreamed you could be. You have 100 true fans, 500, now 1000. A thousand real, live, human people who come to read what you have to say and don’t give a single whit about how they’re reading your words, only that they’re reading your words.

Guys, that’s magic.

That’s also just a lot of hard work.

That’s a lot of not complaining about who owns the spaces and what their politics are and all the other minutia (Some of it very important minutia like our politics and religion, philosophy and ideals, which you can, spoiler alert, write about!) of these rich billionaires who don’t give a rat’s ass about you and your thoughts about politics and religion, philosophy and ideals. You know who does care about that though? And who keeps showing up at the same field, year after year after year, to watch you wade through it all and write about it as you do? Your readers.

Your readers! My readers! YOU!

Why are you here reading this? Because you’re one of mine. One of my 1000 True Fans. And I’ve work really, freaking hard for 23 years to get here. And if you looked at my email list, you’d say, “Really, 23 years and 14k is all you’ve got?” And I’d say, “Are you kidding me? Look at these names! Look at these people! They’ve been here since 2007 and 2010 and 2019 and 2021, and they keep coming back. I don’t care one bit that the growth is slow and I’ll never show you my growth metrics on Substack (or any other platform) because those are just numbers. But this name? And this one? And that one? That’s a reader. That’s a person. And they don’t care where they come to get cozy with me and read my words. They’re here for the long-haul.”

Composition 8 by Wassily Kandinsky, 1920s

Okay. I told you I’d tell you, then I’d tell you longer, and then I’d tell you again. Here it is again: You’ve got to just do the work and stop talking about doing the work. Sometimes it’s fun to talk shop (last night over Hibachi take-out Nate and I talked shop with

Shawn Smucker

and

Maile Silva

—two writers who are freaking doing it and bought a bookshop² to do more of it!), but usually that’s better done in person with people who are also doing the work. But here? On this platform or that platform or the other platform? Just do the work. Sometimes you might need breaks³ but if it’s answered your questions in a way you can live with for now, keep at it.

It’s your field. Sow it. It’s glorious and gross, lowly and lonely, but good and good for you, all the way through. None of the work you do in this field will be wasted, although it may become indecipherable from the work around it, or seem to disappear into an abyss. But none of it is gone, not truly, because the work it did in you is here to stay. Someday you’re going to be the writer trying out a new platform with the fruit of staying in one place long enough and doing the work in that place for the long haul. But you’ve got to just do the work. No one, not a tech bro, fellow writer, billionaire, or anyone else, is going to do it for you.

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1. I’ve been writing online consistently since 2001. Ask me about the abyss.

2.

Nooks

Bookstore

3. I’m on a break from Instagram right now because the noise there was getting deafening.