When I started posting on this platform, I wasn’t thinking about subscribers, engagement, restacks, paid memberships, revenue, or building an audience.
I was thinking about writing. I had ideas I wanted to get out of my head, and Substack seemed like a good place to put them. Then, somewhere along the way, I noticed myself paying attention to things I had never said I cared about.
How many people had subscribed? Was anyone reading? Was the publication growing? Could this become something bigger? Those thoughts caught me off guard.
I did not think there was anything wrong with wanting those things. People have built audiences, businesses, and careers on different blogging platforms, and there is plenty to admire about that. What surprised me was that I had started wondering whether I was successful at writing by measures I had never intended to use.
I Thought I Already Knew What A Writer Was
I’ve been writing since junior high school: love poetry, personal thoughts, my disappointments, silly observations, heartbreaks. Things I was too embarrassed to say out loud, and ideas I didn’t quite know what to do with. I would write them down and put them somewhere, usually never to look at them again. But somewhere in the back of my head, there was this idea that someday I would become a writer.
Apparently, I thought there was some official moment when that would happen. A publisher, perhaps. Seeing my name on the cover of a book. Someone would decide that what I wrote was good enough. And then, the world would know that I had become a writer.
Then one day I watched a YouTube video of Seth Godin. His point was almost ridiculously simple. If you want to be a writer, write.
Something clicked. I didn’t need a publisher to make me a writer. I didn’t need a contract. I didn’t need someone to give me permission. I had been writing since I was 12; therefore, I am a writer.
What I find interesting now is that I never thought money was part of that equation. I didn’t believe I needed to earn money from writing to prove that I was serious about it. Writing was in itself enough. So why did that change? Or should I say, did that actually change?
When Did Writing Become Something I Had To Measure?
I’ve come across plenty of writing about how to grow subscribers, increase engagement, build an audience, convert free readers into paid subscribers, and turn a publication into a business. That makes sense. If someone wants to build a business around their writing, those are useful things to understand.
I like business. I like it so much that I paid a university a lot of money to teach me about it. I’ve had side hustles for years, and I would be perfectly happy if something I love doing eventually became financially successful. So monetization isn’t really the problem.
The more uncomfortable possibility is that I had started absorbing a definition of success simply because it was visible. Subscribers are visible. So are revenue, growth, engagement, and all the other markers that indicate the publication is growing.
Improvement in written communication, on the other hand, is harder to measure. Even the people writing about growth acknowledge that having the most followers or paid subscribers doesn’t necessarily mean someone is a better writer.
Coming to a deeper understanding of an idea after writing about it matters to me. So does discovering that something I believed wasn’t quite true, finding a better way to express an idea I’ve been trying to figure out for years, and inspiring someone to see an old idea through a different lens.
None of those things produce a number I can look at. Subscribers, engagement, and revenue do. And now I am certain that is where I started doubting myself. My abilities.
The Measurement Problem
There is something seductive about quantifying something. That gives us the feeling that we know where we stand. A publication with 100,000 subscribers is clearly bigger than one with 100. A writer earning $10,000 a month from subscriptions has achieved something that a writer earning nothing has not. Those statements are true as far as they go. But they answer a particular question.
I have an MBA and have spent years in the corporate world, so I have lived the importance of metrics and numbers. “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” is attributed to Peter Drucker, a legendary business consultant who authored 39 books, including some published posthumously. (By the way, Drucker never actually made such a pronouncement.)
The four core accounting reports are all about numbers, and they are basic first-semester B-school staples. Businesses live and die by those numbers. And I suspect that’s part of the reason this whole “grow and monetize” issue hits a nerve with me.
How large an audience I have and how much money my publication generates don’t necessarily answer the question I was originally asking: Is my writing getting somewhere? What I set out to do was never something I expected to measure in numbers.
I think I made a subtle mistake by allowing questions about audience and revenue to start answering the question about whether my writing was improving. It wasn’t a conscious decision and nobody told me that I should measure my writing that way. I simply spent enough time around reading about building an audiences and monetization that those measures became increasingly difficult to ignore.
Then I caught myself wondering whether my own work was successful. Because it wasn’t producing the kinds of visible results other people were getting. That was the moment I stopped and noticed what was happening. I noticed myself caring about something I had never consciously decided I cared about.
The Question I Keep Coming Back To
For years, I thought I needed an external event to become a writer.Then I learned that writing itself was the evidence.
Now I realize I made the same mistake in a different form. I unknowingly replaced the belief that someone else would give me permission to write with the belief that certain metrics would tell me whether I was succeeding as a writer. It seems obvious now, but I didn’t see it when it was taking shape in real time.
I remember seeing Stephen Covey, the author of the bestseller “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” on television years ago. He talked about maps. I don’t remember all the details, but the example stayed with me.
Imagine trying to find your way around a city you’ve never been to. Someone hands you a map. You try to follow it, but you aren’t getting where you want to go. You become frustrated. Maybe you start wondering what you’re doing wrong. Meanwhile, you can see other people using the same map and getting to their destination. They seem to know what they’re doing. You don’t.
But there is nothing wrong with the map. It is perfectly useful for what it was made for. The problem is, you are trying to get somewhere else. And I think that is what happened to me when I started to focus on metrics.
My audience is small, my engagement is on the low end, and there isn’t much revenue to brag about. But somewhere along the way, I started turning those facts about Assumption Inc. into a judgment about myself.
The numbers were telling me something about the publication, while I was unconsciously using them as a mirror, looking for a reflection of the writer I knew I was. That was a much bigger leap than I realized I was making.
How many things in our lives have we quietly turned from measurements to verdicts?