I have been writing online in some form for almost exactly twenty years. My anniversary as a writer of online articles is about a month away. Over those decades, I have written articles, eBooks, newsletters, fiction, translations, and, most of all, a modestly successful blog that has run for more than a decade. For its first ten years, I wrote that blog five to seven days per week.
So far, none of the various forms of online writing I’ve produced has gained a mass readership. My blog came closest. In its heyday, before the collapse of blogging in the face of social media, I had 100,000 monthly readers, though most were fans of certain History Channel series looking to read reviews of recent episodes. Even that number pales before the reach of social media. Just one tweet I made last month had 400,000 readers over three days. It makes blogging to a vastly reduced audience of a few hundred regular readers seem like screaming into the void.
I am therefore going to try an experiment. For a bit I am going to see if cross-posting some of my content here can expose it to readers who might not otherwise find my blog. For the time being, most of the content published via my Substack newsletter will be free, as it is on my blog. After a month or two, I will reevaluate whether this platform has promise for growing a larger audience, or whether it is simply a blog with a price tag.
You will see the kind of content I have written for many years, but in a different format, delivered straight to your inbox.