How it started vs How it’s going

The state of my Substack. Also, I have questions: you may have answers.

Dec 17, 2022

How it started and how it’s going

I started my Substack after deciding to move from a newsletter model attached to my website at sarbjohal.com

I had been writing intensely for over two years in some shape or form, including writing for my videos on YouTube (more about that later), Government comms work over the pandemic, two self-published books, Steady and The Little Book of Sleep, and a book with Penguin Random House New Zealand - Finding Calm.

I decided I had the time and energy to try to pursue writing full time. Check the graph below, as I walk you through what has happened, and three key inflections I’m paying attention to.

Total subscriber numbers at Noise Reduction (free + paid members combined) from when I started on March 24 to Dec 17, 2022

General observations

It’s been an encouraging upward trend generally, up until two months ago.

Things have gone somewhat downhill since then and I’m really not sure why - though I do have my suspicions.

I also note that the number of free subscribers signing up has completely dropped off a cliff in these past two months, and the number of times that my newsletter has been shared has dropped drastically. I wonder if there two are linked somehow.

Key events

Let’s look at the diagram above:

Here I did a big event, MC’ing a teaching union conference in person for 3 days in Christchurch and doing a keynote too. A lot of teachers at the event signed-up to my Substack here, and there was significant word-of-mouth referral to colleagues too. This was very encouraging.
Around this time, I went to the UK for the second time this year and stopped writing for three weeks. Looking back at this, I wish I written at least a bit during this time. But numbers continued to go up, even though I wasn’t writing? Why? I suspect that the Recommendations feature within Substack led to my Substack being recommended to readers of other Substacks and they joined as free subscribers without reading any of my content. This steady rise continued, with even a little spike at the end around October 20 when I started writing again by telling everyone that I had finally got Covid.
Since then, there has been a steady decline downwards, and this shows no sign of stopping, let alone reversing. I suspect that much of this has been people who came to my Substack through the Recommendations pathway who realise that, once they read my stuff, that they don’t really want to receive it, and so they leave. This is why I wish I’d continued writing - perhaps I wouldn’t be seeing quite so much churn now if they’d seen some of my writing earlier. Who knows though. It’s a very inexact science as far as I can see. I’m now back where I am before I left for that second trip to the UK. I hope the decline stops here. But it may not.

So, it started well, but things are finishing up on a somewhat discouraging note. Though my paid members continue to comment and engage (thank you), I get very little engagement from many others. This is just a thing, but it can feel like yelling into the void from the point of view of a writer from much of the time

More on paid members

On encouraging free subscribers to become paid members, Substack reckons:

We tend to see 5-10% of free subscribers convert to paying subscriptions, with 10% being a rate to aim for.

I have a conversion rate of just 3%. Though I’m incredibly grateful to everyone who has paid to support my writing (thank you, I see you), that’s just unsustainable for the amount of work I am putting into my Substack.

Should I change the name of my Substack?

Noise Reduction will be evolving next year. I guess it always will be. I’m not even sure it will stay being called Noise Reduction. I wonder if I should just make it my name: Sarb Johal. Or maybe even something a little silly and cheeky, like Sarbstack. What do you think?

Some changes I’m thinking about

Though I love writing here, I think I’m leaning too heavily on it. I’m planning to diversify and think about the value I’m providing. Here’s a provisional plan - more experiments will follow in time, once I figure them out.

Start writing and producing for YouTube again. This is what originally sharpened my writing and speaking skills and it was fun. I haven’t made a video for my Youtube channel for 11 months. I’ve even forgotten parts of my process for doing this. So I need to get back to this pretty soon. It also has a pretty good earning split between platform and content creation compared with other platforms. I’ve earned more doing YouTube than I have writing for Substack.
Start writing more short books like The Little Book of Sleep. This was always the plan but it got shelved when Penguin Random House approached me to write Finding Calm, and then when I started my Substack. Writing short books that serve a need is something I think I might be good at.
Write to serve my paid members on Substack. It’s unsustainable for me to continue to produce so much free content on my Substack, when I get relatively little engagement - not even comments or shares. So the free weekly Noise Reduction newsletter will likely be free once or twice a month from 2023 instead of once a week. The other weeks will be exclusively for paid members. I’ll also continue with Optimise for paid members, but less frequently.
A podcast I did with James Nokise and our amazing production team, called Eating Fried Chicken in the Shower won a Silver Award in the NZ PodCats Awards last week. I’d love to do more of this if the opportunity arises.

I’d love to get your thoughts on any of the above. I’m still sick and posting this from bed. I’m going to stick the radio on , draw the curtains and see if I can doze off. I’m hoping to feel better later. Keep your fingers crossed for me.

Notes to Selves by Sarb Johal

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