Why I'm Making My Substack a Free-For-All
#1: It feels good in my heart.
When I joined this Substack thing, it was mainly because I wanted a free, easy way to disseminate my posts to subscribers via email. I quickly discovered, however, that Substack is a beautiful community of creatives who want to have actual conversations and connections on the platform — the way Facebook, Instagram, and the like were in their infancy, before advertising and algorithms got in the way.
Substack reminds me of the heyday of blogging — when you’d find friends in the comments, cross-link content, and network in a virtual-yet-somehow-organic way. It was my favorite time to be a blogger.
In the 15+ years that I’ve blogged, I’ve never monetized my posts — at the very most, I posted a single ad in the sidebar of my blog because it was a requirement for being a member of a food-blogging network I was in.
I’m not faulting those who choose to do it, but personally, I hate having to dodge and scroll past distracting ads (especially the ones that pop up in the hope that their appearance will coincide with a click) to read what someone’s trying to say to me, and I didn’t want to do that to my readers, either. I also hate hitting paywalls on news sites.
So the thought of introducing paywalls here on Substack doesn’t sit right with me. It doesn’t feel good in my heart. I mean, I like the idea of getting paid for the personal, entirely self-driven thoughts I put here, but it also feels really weird to make people pay to hear from me.
So I’m not going to do that. My content has always been free, and for now, at least, it’s going to stay that way. If you want to hire me to write something specific for you, let’s do it. If you feel a calling to support my words here by buying me a coffee, that’s great too (but you don’t have to).
But the biggest reason I’ve always had for this — my personal writing — is so that my words might reach the right person at the right time and help them, inspire them, let them know they’re not alone. I don’t want a paywall to prevent that.
Maybe this is the Worst Business Decision Ever. But it doesn’t feel that way, and trusting my heart and my intuition has always led to beautiful things.
Let’s go with that.
Thank you for being here.