For the majority of us in the Fiction Community here on Substack (or anywhere that a group of people writing fiction gather), I am sure these are obvious. But there are those select few who are either blind, naive, or worse, too self-absorbed to get out of their own way. If you are sitting there thinking âWell, she sure as HELL ainât talkinâ âbout meâŚâ chances are, I am! Take this list with as much salty sarcasm as you can. Tell me to go to hell or even better, say less and Walk Away Renee. I just had a few things I wanted to get off my chest about you, so Iâm getting it off my chest. Thatâs it. Be chill! đ
ONE
Complain about lack of engagement when your last post/email is nearly a month old (or more) and your posts before them are all over the place. Consistency is vital and important to build trust between you and your audience. They look to see that the time they spend on your work is worth it. Meaning, why would they waste their time engaging with someone who canât be bothered to be consistent with their content? And no, this does not include the person who states their fiction will be once a month or once every quarter. The key is being consistent in whatever expectation you set. And being inconsistent all the time is not an excuse to continue that trend. So, stop complaining, and get to work putting content out consistently. Also, you may not be aware of this fact, but your subscribers owe you nothing! Shocking, I know! But you are not entitled to Likes or Comments because you decided to put content out today. Itâs a silly complaint to make and one that can easily see a decline in whatever audience you have.
TWO
Demanding money for a future promise with no results to back it up. Sure, we all have to start somewhere. We are all asking for paid subscribers and starting at zero. But asking for paid subscribers on the promise of a serial you havenât written or monthly short stories and your backlog is zero, or worse, you have a backlog but itâs clear from the dates that you were not consistent on their releases, ever. In this business you have to prove your reliability. Money is not something to joke about. If you want it then what have you done to prove youâre a good investment? Have you only ever released one short story in the month since you started your newsletter? Have you sent monthly emails on different days and times or skipped a few in the last year? And yes, you can totally start off by putting your work behind a paywall. Thatâs not the issue. The issue, as mentioned already, comes back to consistency and showing that you actually are keeping your promise of delivering fiction. If you claim to be passionate about storytelling but you donât have much fiction to show, how can you expect an audience to buy into that?
THREE
Belittle and demean any aspect of the thing you claim to be a champion for. Listen, I donât like romance. Itâs a genre Iâm not rushing to read. But Iâm not gonna get on a soap box about it. Then again, just because I donât like it doesnât mean I feel it should never be written, ever. Youâre allowed to not like an aspect of fiction and choose, for yourself, not to read it or write it. Do you boo-boo. But short stories, micro-fiction, novels, novellas, poetry, are all valid forms of fiction. Just like being a âpantserâ or âplotterâ are terms that some people like to use. Iâm not one of them, or if hard pressed Iâll say Iâm a âplantser.â Itâs okay if someone refuses to use an outline or if someone else canât work without one. Itâs okay if someone wants to share a story they know isnât 100% polished to their audience. Itâs not for you to question their fiction choices. 1st person, 2nd person, 3rd person limited or omniscient are all acceptable forms of storytelling. You know why? Cause they exist and there are examples of their use in all forms of fiction from way way back in the day, to today. There is no right or wrong route to take in fiction. You are not the police with some form of credentials (college degree or experience) that makes you the judge of what is right and good. Are there grammar rules? Sure. But if youâre not asked for it, donât give it. Let the writer have their freedom to write what they want how they want. And if you donât like it, you know what you can do? DONâT READ IT! Ha! Funny how easily you can do that, isnât it?
FOUR
Talk about numbers like itâs going out of style. Whether itâs your lack of subscribers or your abundance of subscribers. Whether itâs about your lack of paid subs or the thousands you have, thereby proving the awesomeness that the rest of us clearly arenât acknowledging to your liking. Donât talk about it. Be about it! Have you ever heard the saying, âbefore you talk the talk you gotta walk the walk?â Well, in short, it means sometimes you can speak volumes just by what youâre doing. But if all youâre doing is talking about the numbers you have, the numbers you want, the numbers you deserve, and donât have anything to back that up, your words fall on deaf ears. Maybe you think youâre âfaking it till you make itâ but thatâs not how it looks from the receiving end. The receiver of your persistent ânumber pimpingâ (as I like to call it) is fatigued. And when you fatigue a person, the next inevitable step they take is to silence you, till youâre literally shouting into the void. Donât be that person who is willingly walking into the void. Especially, when the solution to this pimp problem is so damn easy!
FIVE
Start a new âmoney making schemeâ every week without following through (or being consistent) on one of them for, I donât know, a year or more? Okay, okay, I know this might be hitting a little close to home cause I do have [insert shameless plugs of my other Substacks here] The Serial Hour Podcast, MicroZine, and Top in Fiction all started this year. But, and however, NONE of them are asking for money. ALL of them were created with the honest and true intentions of helping the fiction community. No shady, underhanded fine-print where you gotta pay-to-play. Iâm not trying to take money out the hands of those who are trying to make it same as me. I say Iâm out here on these streets trying to help my fellow fiction writer and doing it on my time, on my dime, expecting nothing in return. See, Iâm not talking the talk, Iâm just walking the walk. Does that mean I donât like money, want money, need money? Of course I like it, want it and need it. Thatâs why my personal Substack and my personal fiction, that Iâve got a backlog of three years worth to fall back on as proof for all the world to see, is mostly behind a paywall. I donât expect everyone to be a paid subscriber before I will give them the information I am promising. Iâm not out here building four houses of straw that a gust of wind can knock down. Iâm building foundations brick-by-brick with help and support from those who see my truth and my contributions. They add a brick, I add two. Simple. Iâm not saying you gotta be a goody-two-shoes like me. But you donât gotta be so obvious and desperate with your actions being all âmoney firstâ and substance, way way way way, (never?) laterâŚ
ONE SOLUTION
Iâm all about solutions, so Iâm gonna offer up ONE in case youâre interested:
Take ONE FULL YEAR (thatâs 12 months) and give freely. Not because I told you to or because youâre trying to âprove me wrongâ but because you genuinely like the fiction community and you like writing fiction. And when I say âgiveâ I mean give us your fiction. Donât paywall it or anything. Just write fiction and share it. Regularly. Donât be a skimp! And if after that year you want to paywall it all, I donât care. But take the year to just focus on that thing you claim to love so much, and participate with the rest of us in the fiction community by contributing your own fiction to it. You never know, you might find you like it more and want to do more within it than you realize. Plus, your imagination will thank you for it! I guarantee it!
MMM, I'm going to be the fly in the ointment here. I post every week. I have people telling me in the comments that I'm writing "high art" (I mean, somebody actually said that.) I have republished pieces that came from magazine acceptances, and I have used notes and chat to spread the word. I've been here a year, and my followers are very steadily increasing. I don't have a paid tier yet but my subscribers are going up little by little, almost to 100. The problem is that in the last few weeks, my open rate is going down. It's going to affect the stack ranking of this awful, awful platform. I mean, I'm not a hamster on a wheel, and I'm not a machine. So, IDK. Don't know how to fix the problem of the damn open rate. A lot of people just come to Substack and look for me there. They have inboxes full of emails they never open. Why am I penalized for this?
Excellent piece, as usual Erica. I stand meekly to the side when I stand beside you, because I've only got the one Substack, and I fell like a real slacker. Sure, it's definitely divided into two separate parts, FREE and PAID, but the thing people don't know, is that the FREE part is the one that matters most to me. That's the one where I put my novellas and novelettes up. The one where I read them out, because now I enjoy reading them out. I believe in consistency. I believe in scheduled releases. The only reason I even have a paid site, is because three friends paid me two days after I started this. I felt I had to give them something, so I tried to write a serial novel because I didn't know what else to do. I mean, how's that work? Now I've got 31 paid subscribers, and four or five of those are comped. (In Canada, I'm pretty sure we spell that compt, but we won't go there.)
I believe Substack is the best thing that could have happened to me. I might not get rich being here -- okay, I definitely won't get rich here -- but I'm leaving something behind. And it's a big part of who I am. And that's important to me, because if I've learned anything, it's that time goes by way too quickly. I have a page from my desk calendar on the wall with a push pin through it, telling me the date of my workplace accident (as if I don't know when that was) and it says 2022. January. In three months, it'll be three years. That's time going fast. And if I've got 20 years left...? Well, I'd better get to work.