Inside Baseball for Substackers and Cartoonists
5 Cartoons & the Beloved Bonsai Watch. 20 minute read.
People keep asking me about newsletters and I’ve heard from a handful of Substackers, frustrated by a decline in subscribers lately. A couple of creators surmised that today’s economy was to blame.1
Before I do a deep dive into that specific thought, I want to say there’s many who have nothing to complain about regarding Substack. That group includes me. I love doing this newsletter. I also know four at the top, Substackers on the Substack Mount Rushmore, who make this their primary income so that’s a whole other level, but we can all learn from that. Not that I put in the time and as readers know, I’m more likely to have a typo or run on thought. But I do want this to continue to grow—I saw this on a list recently for top humor newsletters. All encouraging.
On the top of that humor list was, and still is, Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac. I’m pretty sure I have already shared my Garrison Keillor stories with you and how we meet through my book Footnotes from the Worlds Greatest Bookstores (he wrote the Introduction as well). His Substack success comes, quite honestly, from being beloved and famously funny. The one takeaway is, his newsletter is exquisitely written. Never feels too long, a natural story-teller.
I first met Heather Cox Richardson, the history professor who writes Letters from an American, when we were stranded at the Miami Book Fair wiring for our Uber. At the time I was clueless about Substack and obvious to her newsletter, which I now read each day, and asked in hindsight, very silly questions. I remember her saying how well her Substack was doing, “beyond her wildest dreams.” She makes more profit than many print and online publications. Her husband is a lobster guy who doesn’t need to work anymore, but his business is crucial to their small Maine town.
Many newsletters I’m sent are definitely do it for the freedom it provides. I love that, too. To be as popular as the four Substacks I’m discussing, I think it needs more giving something to the reader that’s almost a commodity. The Substack Letters a service to millions of her readers who need to feel they can get the truth somewhere not filtered through bias lens. It’s a bonding place for people fed up. It’s group therapy.
