How I Grew My Substack from Zero to 40K Annual Income in Just 12 Months

Part One of Two: Where I Started, What I've Done, What Worked Best & What Didn't Work (& tomorrow, the more philosophical "Eleven Urgent & Possibly Helpful Things I've Learned Along the Way")

The short story is, I worked hard. As Summer Brennan

said in A Writer's Notebook last week, in a beautiful and deeply wise post about writing and the creative life and success on and off Substack:

Here’s the important thing, even though it can be hard to hear: no writer, no book, no essay or post, is entitled to be read. No one is entitled to success in their writing, and notable success in writing always takes a lot of work. No exceptions.

This is the guiding principle of my artistic life. I call it “investment without attachment,” which means, we do the work consistently and well, tirelessly, doggedly. And we focus on that—the work, and the quality of the work, because that’s what we can control—not the outcome of the work.

But it turns out that story, the longer story of how I’ve applied the principle of hard work on Substack, is longer than I expected, especially once I wove in the questions you all shared with me yesterday. So long, in fact, that this post is too long for email, so if the newsletter is truncated in your email, you might need to click on "View entire message" in order to see the entire post in your email app. By the time I was finished feverishly writing last night, I had more than 10 pages in a Word doc! So, I’ve been trimming it down and am sending it out over two days, Part One today and Part Two tomorrow. If you find typos, I can only sigh at this point.

Today, I bring you a careful review of the concrete specifics, including:

• Where I was when I started Writing in the Dark last December

• What I’ve done since then to build the newsletter

• What’s worked best

• What hasn’t worked

Tomorrow, I’ll send out the more philosophical and artistic assessment, which embroiders the threads of my brightest thoughts on the eleven urgent & possibly helpful things I’ve learned along the way (and, yes, I chose the number eleven because my first “popular” and a little-bit-viral Substack post was my Eleven Urgent & Possibly Helpful Things I’ve Learned from Reading Thousands of Manuscripts, which I published last December; it was picked up by Brevity and shared quite a bit on X/Twitter and is still my most popular post of all time, a year later. So, eleven lessons it is!). Today’s post, meanwhile, is a truthful, open, and transparent account of making an income on Substack as an artist (specifically, a literary writer and teacher), including what has worked and what hasn’t.

Disclaimer (in case you missed it in yesterday’s teaser): Audience size and/or income are not the end all be all and in some cases just don’t matter. There are a million ways to use Substack, a million reasons to write, and a million paths from which to approach writing, including for self-expression and plain old fun.

I happen to be a professional writer. I’ve been publishing since my early twenties and have worked in writing or writing adjacent jobs, including teaching, my entire adult life. At twenty-two, as a brand-new mom, I was a stringer for the Chisago County Press, earning twenty bucks a story for covering the city council and school board—and, yes, I had to attend the meetings. I’ve written hundreds of magazine articles and essays and about a dozen small-time books as a ghostwriter. I’ve written scads of state and federal grants and even more internet “content” (thank god those days are over!). I’ve written a children’s picture book and several educational books. I’ve worked for a cumulative total of about a decade as an editor at magazines. More recently, I’ve been employed as a writer and writing instructor at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, where I teach Writing for Public Health and facilitate narrative health workshops. And I finally busted out with my own literary debut—a memoir, The Part That Burns—in 2021 at the age of 53. I should add that I’ve also been teaching creative writing for more than a decade, and that, despite being a college dropout, I managed, in 2015, to get myself into an MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts, and came away with an MFA in fiction in 2017.

It’s no surprise that I approached my Substack as part of my career and my identity as a professional writer and writing teacher. Unless I am volunteering or doing something as part of the free promotional work most writers do, I am generally paid at least a little for my writing and teaching by the venues where I work. So, I approached Substack with the same expectation. But that’s not the only way. There are many ways; I chose what felt right for me.