Reflections on Four Years of Counter Craft
And thoughts on making a newsletter work for your artistic practice
Recently, I realized I was coming up on the four-year anniversary of this newsletter. It seemed like a time to reflect on how Counter Craft has grown and gather thoughts about the evolving literary ecosystem, the splintering of social media, and other such topics. OTOH, my least favorite aspect of Substack is the constant stream of “hustle” posts claiming to offer “hacks” and “tips” on “monetizing” your “brand.” If you’re looking for pro-tips and growth hacks, this post probably won’t be useful. Nevertheless, I do have some thoughts on making a newsletter work for you as an author—for your own thinking, writing, and artistic practice. I’ll put those at the end.
What Was I Trying to Do Here?
I’ll start with a confession: I hate newsletters. No, that’s not quite right. I hate emails. There is little I desire more in life than fewer damn emails. So, I find the popularity of email newsletters somewhat baffling. You guys want more inbox clutter? Even now, I read Substacks in my browser or on the app and never in email. Yet I love blogs. I love getting a writer’s varied thoughts without the constraints of form, “beat,” or style. A long-form personal essay followed by a typo-laden rant followed by a short post on a beloved but obscure artist (or maybe video game or historical topic or… well, anything). Blogs, in their heyday, allowed writers the freedom to discuss whatever they wanted to discuss, and gave readers a sense of constant unexpected discovery—the thing that made the early internet so exciting. The blog, despite the awful name, remains the purest form of internet writing for me. When I started Counter Craft, I thought (and still think) of it as a blog.
I wrote my first Counter Craft posts in February of 2021. We were still in quasi-lockdown, and I was looking for something to do. (I also was hoping to get some of that Substack guaranteed $$$ that was being thrown around at the time to lure writers to the platform. That did not materialize. [Sad trombone sound].) But there were other motivations. I could see how quickly social media was devolving, even before the dismantling of Twitter. I’d seen Facebook and others tweak algorithms and destroy media models built around shares and clicks. Hell, as an older millennial I’d lived through the decline of a dozen platforms (Friendster, Orkut, MySpace, etc.) and so a newsletter was a place to build up a readership outside of the whims of billionaire-owned social media platforms. Even if a newsletter platform fails, you can import your posts to another site in a way that doesn’t really work for one’s archive of tweets or FB status updates.
Lastly, let me be honest. I hoped it would help me sell a few books. (Have I mentioned you can preorder my forthcoming weird-autofiction-science-fiction-satire novel Metallic Realms?!?)
Those were the motivations. My plan? It was loose. My about page—which I’m realizing I’ve never updated—said: This is a newsletter for me to write about fiction craft, publishing stuff, weird books, and other literary sundries. But mostly I’m planning to make it a craft blog in which I can better articulate—to myself as much as anyone else—thoughts about fiction writing. (See, I even called it a blog.) Beyond this vague scope, I decided I’d focus on long posts. Here my love of blogging clashed with my hatred of emails. If I’m going to email you a newsletter, then I want it to be worth your time. So, my posts would be full articles and complete essays emailed once a week. That was the general idea.
And, that’s really what Counter Craft has done.
How It’s Going Over Here
Over four years, I’ve published on a pretty consistent basis—really the only newsletter “best practice” I follow—writing about the craft of fiction, weird books, publishing demystification, as well as interviewing authors about their process and indulging in the occasional manifesto/rant. These have appeared roughly weekly, for a total of 179 pieces. Given that my posts tend to be on the longer side, I’ve probably published north of half-a-million words on Counter Craft. That’s… a lot. Ten short novels, even. Or a couple tomes. A part of me wonders if I’ve lost a novel or two from my bibliography by writing this newsletter, though the more honest part of me knows that I waste so much time online that I probably would’ve just written ten novels worth of tweets instead.
Growth has been a steady upwards slope. My subscribers—aka all of you stunning / intellectually rigorous / athletic / ergonomic / well-respected / life-of-the-party / brainy, buff, and beautiful people—have grown month-by-month until Counter Craft has passed 15,000 subscribers.
Truly, thank you all.
Counter Craft has even reached the point where I get pitches from publicists and articles are linked by much larger websites. I didn’t have any Substack backing nor have I spent any marketing dollars. Just typed words into a portal, which people have found and enjoyed. It really means more than I can say.
It is also an example of what newsletters can do. There is an audience for niche subjects that mainstream magazine eschew. There may even be more of an audience here for certain things, such as discussion of small press books in translation, than there is anywhere else. I’m not singling myself out here. There are many other literary newsletters here and elsewhere covering similar topics that have more followers than I do. Newsletters increasingly drive conversations in areas, like literature, that the mainstream media ignores. I’m not saying this is entirely a good thing. (I will talk about downsides below). But it is also undeniably true. And growing truer each day…
Newsletters and the Literary Ecosystem
Looking at my posts from last few months, Counter Craft articles tend to get views in the 10k to 30k range. (My most read ever got over 100k.) An average of 15k reads is not, perhaps, a gigantic number. But it is a good amount for things like interviews with small press authors, reviews of translated literature, or articles on surrealist fiction. (I used to be the editor-in-chief of a large literary website, so know those numbers are hard to get on a consistent basis.) The reach is further than these stats indicate. Creative writing professors have told me they use Counter Craft articles in their creative writing classes. I’ve had my posts republished in other magazines—my most viral one was revised and published on Slate—and this week I got the follwoing nice note about how a 2024 article of mine was being shared around Tumblr.
Again, I’m not the only one doing this. Other fiction and writing newsletters, on Substack and elsewhere, get even more views. Newsletters have a strange and impressive reach. Increasingly, editors and publicists tell me that Substack (and newsletters in general) is where they want coverage. Newsletters sell books. And they sell the kind of books that don’t sell on, say, BookTok.
And I expect this importance to only grow as social media splinters. The online cultural conversation in general (and literary conversation specifically) has shifted over the years. First on message boards then to blogs to websites to social media. Social media has reigned for a while, but over the last decade those companies have increasingly shot themselves in the foot in this regard. The biggest social media sites—e.g., Twitter/X and Facebook—increasingly suppress outside links, making them useless for authors and other creative people, while cluttering up the platforms with spam, bots, and AI slop. Today, Twitter may be where you go to rage debate politics and Facebook may be where you go to see what acquaintances have birthdays. But they are no longer where you go to discover new authors or build a career as an emerging artist.
Many people I know are intentionally moving to closed-off discussion forums, like Discords or Slacks. For the public-facing internet, newsletters seem like a central piece of the next stage. If a young writer asked me what to do to build a “platform,” the newsletter is the obvious choice right now. If not a newsletter, perhaps a conceptually similar Patreon. Maybe if you love being on camera, TikTok. Otherwise… what else is there?
Writing the Age of Media Chaos
The answer used to magazines and newspapers. That was where a writer built up “clips” and a reputation. Maybe you’d write criticism or maybe personal essays or journalism or whatever fit your skills and interests. Journals were the place you honed your skills. And, honestly, those were good days. Magazines are good. Newspapers are good. Working with editors is, yes, good. They are good for writers, whose work improves, and good for readers, who get better-written and better-researched pieces from a broader set of voices.
I still love magazines. And I still work with editors and publish in journals. Yet I do so less and less each year. That’s thanks in large part to you lovely subscribers. But it is also because, from a freelance writer’s point of view, the whole system has fallen apart. Obviously, the decline of magazines and newspapers has been widely discussed elsewhere. More informed people than me have written about the decline of newspapers and glossy magazines, the failure to make websites as profitable as print, and so on. I won’t bore you repeating it all.
But speaking from the perspective of a long-time freelancer, it is increasingly hard to make it work—especially in an area like literature. Hell, it seems like 50% of the journals I used to freelance for, back when freelancing was most of my income, no longer even have book sections if the magazine still exists at all. Even back then, book reviews and literary coverage were a hard sell. Maybe more accurately a poor pay. The big venues, like The New York Times, pay a fair wage for a book review. Some smaller places with good funding do too. But most magazines and websites—including some very big ones—are paying between $50 and $150 for anything book related. You can’t live on that. Especially when so much of your available time is spent pitching, following up, following up with payroll, etc. This is not to blame editors (who themselves are normally underpaid) or publishers (who were undermined by powerful tech companies more than their own mistakes). It just is what it is. There’s so much free content out there in so many mediums and on so many platforms that it is hard to justify paying for many subscriptions. Online ads have never caught up to print rates. Even if the readers are there, the funds aren’t.
Financially and hypothetically, I might’ve made more money publishing these 179 Counter Craft posts as freelance pieces. I have not pushed monetization hard. I publish everything for free initially and only paywall select older posts. (Although as the years go by, that paywall archive is growing quite large and so hopefully a worthwhile deal.) I deeply appreciate the paid subscribers I do have, and the more I have the more time I can devote to this. So [waving arms in panic] please don’t let this paragraph discourage you from subscribing! But my point is just that while devoting my time to newsletter may not have hypothetically paid me as much as freelancing, the reality is also that if I’d pitched these pieces the majority—including many of my most popular posts—would have been passed on by every editor. Most paying journals would think there wasn’t a readership for a craft post on horror fiction or an interview with a small-press translator or a rant about surrealism.
Indeed, I pitched a version of this newsletter as a column idea to a couple magazines. They all passed.
I don’t even think they were wrong to pass. What works here, and in most of the newsletters I love, isn’t something that can be recreated in magazine. The sharing of obscure obsessions, sloppy but personality filled essays, meandering asides that lead to disjointed but interesting places, the zero turnaround time, and general freedom of the newsletter is just a different thing. It is, to bring in some circularity—should I write a craft essay on circularity?—like the good old blog. Risen again.
Finally, A Bit of Advice for Authors
I don’t think I have a lot of hacks and tips to offer to someone who is looking to monetize a newsletter. (I think you should monetize if you can! We all have to figure out how to pay our bills. I just haven’t focused on it while having a full-time job.) But if you’re looking to start a newsletter as a creative writer, here are a few simple suggestions for making the newsletter work for you and your artistic practice.
Publish consistently
This is good “growth” advice, because readers unsubscribe when volume is low. But even more so it is good writing advice. It helps your craft. You will become a sharper, nimbler, and quicker writer if you stick to a schedule. It forces you to come up with ideas and execute them consistently. Skills that very much transfer to novels, poems, and any other writing you do. It doesn’t have to be rigid, like posting exactly at 9am every Tuesday and Friday. But, pick a rough schedule and stick to it as best you can.
Don’t fear the niche
When you write for magazines, you are often forced to think in terms of general appeal. Of “pegs” to the news and headlines that will attract clicks. Newsletters, with their built-in audience of subscribers, reward narrow interests. This can be true conceptually, like a newsletter devoted entirely to a specific topic, and in terms of individual articles. Go where your interests wander. Your readers will follow you.
Only do it if you like doing it
Before everyone was on social media, writers used to ask me (e.g., at publishing panels) whether they should get on social media. An editor had told them they needed a platform or a writer friend said they’d never sell a book without a Twitter or Instagram or TikTok. My advice was always that you should only do social media if you like doing it. Social media followings take a long time and a lot of posts to build up. If you aren’t interested in spending your time on a given platform, then either you are going to be miserable or (more likely) you simply won’t spend enough time there to actually build a following. Newsletters are the same. See point 1.
Make the newsletter work for your artistic practice and life
A newsletter is only going to work for you if you enjoy doing it. And it will work best if it fits into your other interests and needs. For me, I crafted my newsletter in a way I hoped would be as interesting for myself as my readers and that would work in conjunction with the other aspects of my creative career. Basically, reading, teaching, and writing fiction. I read more now because I can write about (or interview the authors of) books that excite me. I use topics that come up in my writing classes as jumping off points for newsletters but also clarify my thoughts in these articles in ways that give me new ideas for the classroom. Broadening my aesthetic ideas and thinking deeper about the craft of fiction also deepens and broadens the quality of my fiction—well at least when I find time to work on it. And one day (soon?) I hope to expand the most useful ideas in Counter Craft into a full-length craft book. The readership here is hopefully proof of concept for a publisher.
Anyway, your own path will be different. Perhaps you are drafting a fantasy novel inspired by the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom or Tokugawa shogunate or the Kingdom of Kush and write a newsletter on the time period that deepens your research and worldbuilding. Maybe you are writing a science-fiction poetry cycle and use a newsletter to tease out ideas of the poetics of nebulae and black holes. Maybe you want to read 100 books a year, and a twice-a-week book review newsletter will keep you on track. Who knows. The point is, you can follow whatever your interests are and deepen your overall thinking and artistic practice.
If you follow this last point, I think it will help you with the other three.
Archive Link Dump
It seems appropriate to end with link to some of my favorite pieces over the years. First, I’ve been deeply happy to interview a lot of writers about their craft. I’ve interviewed too many to list, but you should be able to find most in this link. Otherwise, a handful of favorite pieces from over the years:
Okay, I have once again gotten my usual warning that I’ve gone on for too long.
So, I will end here. Thank you all, truly and deeply and fully, for subscribing and reading. See you here next week, and the week after, and the week after, I hope.
If you enjoy this newsletter, consider subscribing or checking out my recent science fiction novel The Body Scout—which The New York Times called “Timeless and original…a wild ride, sad and funny, surreal and intelligent”—or preorder my forthcoming weird-satirical-science-autofiction novel Metallic Realms.
Congratulations and happy anniversary! I'm with you on blogging: Substack is a simple way to get it into people's hands. I prefer to read your essays directly, without trawling through a magazine selling me other things.
Thanks for writing it.
I will totally buy your craft book :)