What Is My Writing Worth?
A question I’ve been asking myself ever since I was considering starting a Substack
Actually, the question of what I would like people to pay for my writing has really been with me ever since I started writing and dreaming of maybe one day becoming a published author like my hero, C.S. Lewis. But, by the time the internet rolled around, I had realized that I was nowhere near the level of Lewis, and felt that the internet was my best bet to join the public dialogue—the Agora of our day—by publishing my own work and making it freely available for anyone to read who might want to. After all, wasn’t that the ultimate goal of anyone desiring to join the discussion on the big ideas of their day: to get their ideas out there, read and/or heard in a way that might provoke more thoughtful discussion—and maybe even move the public dialogue towards some better approximation and/or understanding of the Truth?
I still hold to this basic ideal of discussion, but Substack has raised the very real possibility of getting paid for my writing again, which requires me, as a writer and a geek, to reengage with the question, since the next question after opening that can of worms (by enabling Substack subscriptions) is what do I think my writing is actually worth?
Given that I believe in freedom of speech which includes both the concepts of free as in beer and free as in freedom, and since I still see it as a privilege to be involved in public dialogue in any format, I’ve followed and will continue to follow the example of some of my favourite writers here (and elsewhere on the internet) who make most or all of their significant content freely available (in both senses), while providing little added bonus extras (fun but not significant in terms of the free exchange of art and ideas) to those who might want to throw a few dollars my way by becoming more modern crowd-sourced versions of the age-old practice of patronage. But that raises the question, how many dollars? What do I think my writing is worth, especially when I’m already committed to giving most of it away for free?
Here the model that most appeals to me is that of the periodical, which has a long history—in the form of newspapers, magazines, journals, etc.—of contributing to the public dialogue in a way that is designed to be affordable and therefore accessible, thereby allowing the art and ideas that are published therein to reach and thus influence as wide an audience as possible. However, Substack’s default minimum subscription level of $5/month or $50/year does not meet this bar, in my opinion: when subscriptions to collective works like newspapers are being sold for as low as $1/month, giving access at that rate to a whole array of writers and their ideas on a monthly or weekly basis, how can one justify charging five times that amount for the sporadic (and largely free) output of a single unknown writer?
And, having set my paid Substack subscription to the lowest possible price that I was aware of, I still feel like an imposter, a cad, every time someone comes along and subscribes to my Substack at that level: there are so many far greater writers out there who deserve your financial support far more than I do—by charging so much, I am inadvertently making it more difficult for the generous few who subscribe to my Substack to support some of these other writers too.
True, $5/month is not actually all that much when one considers the price of a coffee nowadays, and I am totally in support of writers who ask their readers (or open-source software developers who ask those who download their software) to “buy me a coffee”. It’s a reasonable ask. But, if I had my druthers (someone asked me what I meant by this delightful old idiom, which I’d love to revive—I believe it comes from “I’d rather” and simply means that if things were the way that I’d rather they were), I’d prefer those who support me still felt they were able to support other more talented writers and artists, along the lines of the affordable collective subscription model I described above that newspapers use. So, when I heard from Substack writer
that I could effectively reduce my subscription price to $1/month by setting my subscription fee to the lowest possible $5/month rate and then offering a permanent 80% discount, I finally knew what I thought my writing was worth. It might not be logical, and it’s certainly not anywhere near what I think really good writing is actually worth, but I somehow feel a lot better asking those who like my writing to throw $1/month my way than $5. And an internet funded by affordable micro-transactions sent to content creators one loves feels a whole lot less dystopian than the current reality of an internet funded by intrusive advertisements inserted by faceless global advertising companies that track your every move on the internet in order to better be able to make you want to buy stuff.Note that I have no objection to “whales” or more traditional patrons who have larger amounts of disposable income they’d like to throw my way (or to any more worthy content creator whose work they’d like to see more of)—and to facilitate that, I’ve raised my Substack “Founding plan price”, while also allowing for “Flexible foundation plan pricing”. I mostly really like what Substack is doing here, and I want to support it—as I say, an internet funded by affordable micro-transactions sent to content creators one loves seems like an ideal worth furthering—so I’m trying, by setting my subscription price closer to what I think my writing is worth to do what I can to make this noble ideal just a tiny bit more achievable.
On some level, this whole reflection is really just a “tempest in a teapot”. I currently have a grand total of two very generous voluntary subscribers (to whom I am very grateful, and about whose high-priced subscriptions I feel very guilty), and even if all my voluntary subscribers turn into paying subscribers (which is not my intention!), I’m not going to earn much of a living writing for $32USD a month! But, since the main point of this Substack is to “geek out” about and think about things like technology and how it impacts (and might better impact) our lives, it seemed to me appropriate both to bring my subscription pricing closer to what I think it is “worth” and to reflect on the process of doing so. And, in terms of the process of putting my thoughts to “paper”, it worked: besides assuaging my conscience regarding my too-high subscription costs (and, if you got this far, informing you what my subscription model and pricing actually is now), it got me thinking about the current funding model of the internet… and how we might, through reasonable subscription fees and/or voluntary patronage and through platforms that Substack that make such things possible, actually be able to work together to enact a model that makes the internet at least a little bit better.
This post is sponsored by an advertisement made by my younger (elementary-school aged) self: Fearioes!
This is some food for thoughts. In my case, I do not consider the subscription fees to my newsletters to reflect the value of my writing itself. In other words, they are not the prices of my paid-subscribers-only posts. From the way I see it, the fees convey the following message: if you like my work and want to support me financially, I believe this is how much you could afford. I 'sell' patronship, not bodies of text. Accordingly, I do not compare my prices to those of magazines or newspapers at all. We are selling totally different things.
I, too, have wrestled with this subject. I prefer free to the minimum, but folks, including myself, tend to consider free to be worthless. So, I took the minimum, but allowed access to nonpaying subscribers. It's too early to gage the results. So far I have no paid subscribers, but I have only published six post so far. I call my posts Toward a Christian Worldview, in which I am trying to gain a worldview that will never be complete, for my premise is that if you are searching for truth you must be willing to scrap whatever conclusions you reach when you find them untenable. So, the best I hope to do is settle on a few more or less permanent truths to keep yourself on track.
I suspect, judging from successful substacks, that folks like narrower views that are presented as concrete. That is what I hope to avoid, so I have to be resigned to never being successful. Certainty has gotten Christianity to the splintered shape we have been in for almost our whole existence.