2 Years Here!

& five fresh tips on going next-level with your Substack

*Friends, allow me to interrupt your weekday with a quick post out of sync with my regular schedule, in celebration of two years on this platform as of today! Happy VDay Eve to me and this Edge|wise endeavor! In honor of that, I’ll share the love by way of a few behind-the-scenes tips for any fellow Substackers who like that sort of thing. I’ll return to my “usual” (i.e. weird) weekly essay sometime this weekend, so stay tuned.*

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On February 13, 2023 I started here with my first post, asserting a public commitment to rekindling a regular writing practice in a major midlife/momster reboot of my brain/creativity. One year in I had earned 316 subscribers and $5,400 actual and unexpected dollars. Back then I thought I knew some things, so I shared my Ten Tips on how to “hack your ‘Stack,” including some useful nuggets on monetizing, marketing, and other matters if you want to check it out:

Now, with my view from the far side of year two, I’m here to report: I’ve reached my current goal of 500 subscribers just the other day (though I’ll explain below why my subscriber count immediately shrank right after) and have amassed a grand sum of ~$11,500 earnings from my unflinching habit of writing one intensive essay each week. While I’m not going to be rich from this pursuit, exploring my own brain and following connections to whatever floats my boat has become my favorite side gig, and it’s super satisfying.

Now that I’m older and wiser (meaning, I’d admit I know even less), I’ll offer not 10 but just a smaller list of 5 fresh tips on going next-level with your Substack:

1. CHANGE

For the first chunk of my time here, I was operating under the title of Home|body, which was a nice initial organizing principle for my humble, self-effacing self with the pitch “introvert’s outreach | midlife climate-crises | art-ifact & fiction.” But as I progressed, I’ve lately felt the need to shed and refine that into something edgier and more exciting. It was time for this Home|body to emerge from her shell and venture out. I became Edge|wise, haunting the border between sage and strange, subtext: Can I get a word in? (But I’m not gonna ask). I am following my own best tendencies and leaning into my attraction to oft-dark topics that strike my warped fancy, exploring the murky underworlds that interest me most (and hopefully the readers follow). The good part of changing your title on Substack is that no URLs have to change; I can morph again should I so choose at any time.

The About page is the main place to define and redefine myself and my purpose here, perhaps the most important starting point we have. As I’ve progressed, I’ve streamlined my vision here often as I further hone in on who I am and what I’m about, which brings me to tip number 2.

2. SIMPLIFY

As I tried to find my best path through this space, I had all kinds of tools and tricks to help me with that at first, and perhaps I overdid it. I put up maps, and charts, and explainers on how to navigate my homepage this way or that. I had so many tags and sectioned pages, it got to the point where I had to sort them on a spreadsheet. Then I realized this was all getting over-complicated, and if I couldn’t find my way around my own space, then certainly my readers wouldn’t either. So I cut the maps and refined the tags. I changed the main name as I mentioned to something that now better suited me, and shortened the About page to be more enticing. I found that way more interesting than me defining myself would be borrowing the words from respected others. I highlighted quotes from readers who commented on or recommended my work. My favorite one lately came from a name-brand dude, and the formatting looks like this:

What folks are saying about Edge|wise

From one lunatic to another, I love this!

_Will Dowd, The Lunar Dispatch; writer, artist, and cartoonist for The Boston Globe

And so on with others who tickle my craggy heart with their kind words. Yay for the shared lunacy and actually being noticed once in a while in this space so dense with genius and kindness! Celebrate your successes and share them!

From dozens of tags I originally had attached to each essay, I edited down to a core handful. (This is how I organize the homepage by topic “below the fold,” which I find fun and handy). These tags now remain limited to: Animal | Artifact | Criminal | Cybersickness | Ecoanxiety | Fiction | Freak | Isolation | Mental | Pattern | SleepyHollow | Space | Substack | Women | Words

Rather than try to list the endless topics I write about (which really can be anything), why not just loosely shoehorn into categories above (one per post) and generally say I ride this line between wise and weird. Perfect. I’m exploring and learning here as I go. Check in later when maybe I’ve boiled this down to three.

3. DESIGN

On the simplify front, the visual aesthetic of this space matters to me. I am honestly repulsed by pages that have a colored background and AI graphics that seem busy, cheap, and amateurish. Also, it’s just hard to read if you have a black background with white text or anything contrary to the typical white page. Purple? Green? Ouch, my aching eyes!

Wikimedia Commons is my friend for public domain images, or if lacking the right image, I try to go find or make my own. Take an original picture or doodle something! Let your chosen container here reflect your writing style and your theme. Red is my highlight color as it is my favorite power color (just the right shade of my rage), balanced with a clean palette of grays, blacks, navy—same as my actual wardrobe and my house. Matchy matchy. But also simple. When you decorate don’t over do it. Make this your own space that speaks about you and your values. And never forget to have fun.

Part of my reboot recently involved turning my solid black K logo (for the K of my first name Krista, and the K in my DBA name, Sleepy Hollow, inK.) into a new version of itself with more depth and play—and trees:

My logo branched out

4. CLEAN

It was my goal of late to hit 500 subscribers, as I mentioned, but then immediately to reduce that. Now why the heck would I want to do that? Well, when I first started here, I pulled in a short-list of former “subscribers” from my old barely-active days on Tumblr. That first boost comforted me that I wasn’t completely shouting into the void from day one, but I wasn’t convinced that many of these folks were real, or still alive. Along the way, I downloaded my subscriber list and wrote to everyone from my actual Gmail to test what actually happened with some of these old addresses. I kept track of those that bounced, the emails no longer active. I arbitrarily decided that once I hit 500, I could “tolerate” some cutting to only the real folks. It felt great, if scary, to go in at my 500-peak, take in the view quickly, and immediately descend. But it wasn’t as severe as I thought it would be, like a trim that keeps your hair healthy. Of the dozens of emails that bounced in my Gmail test, not all of them were actually dead here. (You can see the activity of each subscriber when you review each name from the Subscriber tab of your dashboard.) I deleted the folks that never opened an email, or who may have started that way but then became known as “dropped email,” which means the address no longer works and the platform gave up trying.

I’m hopeful that reducing my count now (by just 30 deadbeats), will mean the overall algorithm decides to treat me more favorably. Maybe this detox juice cleanse will slightly raise my open rate and engagement overall. I’ll have a greater density of better readers, and that has to be preferable over just more of them. I don’t really have a next-level subscriber number goal as I would rather focus less on such stuff and more on doing the real work of producing writing like a maniac whose life depends on this (because it does).

5. GIVE

This bold act of launching your finest, fiercest words into the universe is incredibly generous—which is not to suggest you should do this for free (I recommend turning on the paid option from the outset and giving the people the option to reward you if they wish; you deserve it!). I have found this Substack medium to be the best possible platform for bravely sharing, an amazing community gathering place, my new favorite (reasonable, rational) social media for solid, smart, sensitive people. Writers and readers arm in arm.

There’s a good karmic equation at work here. If you give, you will receive, but hopefully that’s not why everyone gives. They just do. Go out and participate and praise widely. Be pure and never secretly self-marketing with your intentions, which will only come across as ingenuine. “Like” other people’s posts and notes. Comment often. Restack other notable quotes and writers. Engage in the limitless conversation. Follow your favorites, subscribe, and if you fall in love: recommend. Go one step further when you become obsessed and recommend with a blurb. (If you have a kind review for me while you’re at, you’re amazing).

With the added side forum of Notes—the lounge here of Substack, if you will—we are now less isolated in our silos in the dark and better able to find each other through more casual interactions. The more I’m there liking and commenting, the more I can locate my “people” and they can find me. The powerful voices that rise up and resonate most. The wild warriors who move you. You need fuel in order to keep doing this hard work of writing, and this place steeped in people of prose can be so inspiring and invigorating. Don’t have a mentor? You can find one. Have further questions? Happy to help, as others have done for me.

I’m thrilled to have you on this ongoing journey with me. Cheers to keeping the conversation—the giving and growing—going. I’m so grateful.