So you’re a millennial female autist substacking about your special interest

My friend is starting a Substack. She asked me if I had any advice “as an experienced writer.”

First of all, flattery will get you everywhere with me. As a writer, I’m sure you can do better than “experienced.”

Beyond that, I’d say:

1. Pick a lane

2. Get attention

3. Give people a reason to pay you

I’m sure you can dope out why picking a lane is useful for finding your readers.

Despite knowing this (I worked full-time doing online marketing for orgs and brands for most of my career while writing Sex and the State on the side) I long resisted a lane. Truth be told, it’s still difficult for me to summarize what I’m doing here.

I’ll say “I write a newsletter about gender and politics.” Which is true, if broad. If I’m feeling frisky, I’ll add that it’s neither firmly left nor right. I know that sounds like I’m a crypto right-wing nutjob. Some would say that’s exactly who I am. If the person somehow seems to actually want to know more, I might talk about how I write personal essays that also incorporate current events and academic research. Then, I gently wake them.

I’m not ready to say I wish I’d picked a lane sooner. I think it was good for me and fun to write so broadly for so long. But I have zero regrets and do suspect I might have more readers now if I had done it earlier.

Creativity really does thrive under constraint. I’ve had a much easier time deciding what to write about and, weirdly, fewer instances where I just can’t think of one thing I’m really excited to say, since narrowing it down even just that much. When I picked “gender and politics” as my niche, I figured it wouldn’t really preclude any topic I would have otherwise wanted to write about because gender fucks up impacts almost everything in our culture. The only thing I’ve found at all hard to directly relate to gender has been some stuff I’ve wanted to write about myself. For example, as far as I can tell, gender has little to do with my decision to experiment with California sobriety for a year.

In those cases, I just write my diary entries and let gender play its minor role.

Now let’s talk about the really hard part.

If you want people to actually read your scribblings, you’re going to need to get their attention.

Here are a few strategies, along with their pros and cons.

1. Advertising

Paying directly for attention has at least five advantages over all the other strategies:

1. Fastest

2. Easiest

3. Most quantifiable

4. Fewest, and easiest to predict, risks and downsides

5. Easiest to leverage for other strategies

Now, I’ve never really done this. When I had money, finding new subscribers wasn’t a priority. When it became a priority, I no longer had money. Also, my newsletter is called Sex and the State. And I (used to, less so these days) write pretty graphically about sex.

But I think it’s worth considering if you have some money, mostly due to the fifth advantage. You can set up a few ad campaigns and deduce pretty quickly which messages, platforms, and audiences convert best. Then, you can take what you learned through advertising and apply those lessons to your other, non-paid efforts. For instance…

2. Attention farming

If you can’t or don’t want to pay platforms to get your writing in front of people, then you're going to need to recruit people to do that for you.

The easiest, cheapest, most surefire way to do that is to post rage-bait.

This is the Andrew Tate/Secret Lives of Mormon Wives/Red Scare/literally pick an “influencer” strategy. If you make people mad, they will talk about you. When people talk about you, they are inadvertently marketing you to their friends, family, and followers for free. It doesn’t matter whether what they’re saying is flattering or unflattering, agreeing or disagreeing, correct or incorrect. The important part is that they’re using your content to signal their ingroup status.