Hello and welcome back to The Overthinker’s Guide To Sex, a sex and relationships newsletter by journalist Franki Cookney.
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Overthinking Overthinkers'
It has been six months since I revived the newsletter and I wanted to do a bit of a review, look over the stats, the money, and ask what you make of it so far. As anyone who donated to my podcast crowdfunder, or signed up to my
newsletter knows, I do love a little behind-the-scenes review. But I also think it’s an important part of self-publishing. When you’re asking people to give you money directly, it’s only right to offer them transparency on how the thing is made, how it’s performing, and what your plans for it are.It’s also a chance to account for the work that’s gone into it. Once the finished project is out in the world, it’s easy to forget the blood, sweat, and tears that went into making it. This was something I definitely appreciated when I was writing the “How I Made It” newsletters for BAD SEX. At the time I was smarting a little bit from not having secured a nomination at the British Podcast Awards, and I found that documenting everything I’d done to make that series was a really powerful way of honouring how hard I’d worked and what I’d achieved.
So, yes. Big fan of a review. And, of course, the main thing I wanted to share with you is how much money I’ve made. Substack loves to shout about the fact that it has writers earning over six figures but it’s important to contextualise that. Emma Gannon, one of Substack UK’s big stars, has over 1000 paying subscribers, but it’s pertinent that she was already a best-selling author, Sunday Times columnist, and award-winning podcast host whose show had over 13 million downloads (for reference, mine has around 16k). Farrah Storr shared on Instagram last year that she was making almost $100,000 a year from her Substack newsletter, claiming that “it shows if you plug away, figure out what your readers want, lean on the audiences you have spent years building on other platforms and write or create for the sheer love of it, you WILL find your audience.” Which is probably true if you are the former editor of Elle, Cosmopolitan, and Women’s Health who now works for Substack. What about the rest of us though?
I’m not sharing either of these examples out of bitterness, only because I think it’s really important to distinguish the people who have created a successful newsletter off the back of an existing platform from the people who are starting from scratch. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you I’m the latter.