This newsletter is a year old

If you’ve been following me for a long time you might know that I have moved from platform to platform in hopes that one will “work out” for me and what I do. Twitter is my home base and the platform that has worked out best for me1, but Kawaiikochans is my Tumblr/Patreon project (I’m working on an expansion, actually).

In search of a way to make my creative work— the stuff I love to do the most, the stuff I can’t stop doing— something that could help support me, I have moved from Medium to Ko-fi to Substack. Medium could get my articles around, but couldn’t get me paid. Ko-fi could get me paid by my existing biggest fans, but the platform had zero reach; posts couldn’t get around and thus they couldn’t create any new fans. The tip jar model— hoping someone will be kind enough to pay me— didn’t really work; even when a Ko-fi piece got around, it made $0.

So I was hoping that with Substack’s subscription newsletter network, we might be able to reach a happy medium where I can deliver regular quality content to you guys, and fans can reward that with a small regular income for me.

And how has that experiment worked out in the first year? Well, like I said earlier, this isn’t going to be my job any time soon, barring some kind of miracle… but it’s going well enough to continue.

Starting from the bottom line

I’m gonna lay it out: the newsletter made $790 this year. The people who pay mostly lay down the $50 for a yearly subscription, and they mostly did so right when I started the new blog. I’m tremendously grateful to those of you who had that kind of faith in me. To the rest of you, did you know that one of those yearly subs is the beloved Tim Rogers of meaty video review fame? What does he know that others don’t? I wonder!

Of course I can’t leave out that many of you are free comps from the Kawaiikochans Patreon, which makes about $180 a month on average. I know I can’t split my time between both projects, and have a day job, and deliver the Kawaiikochans that I used to five or six years ago when I actually treated it like my day job, so this is my way of compensating.2

Substack unceremoniously kicked comps off a few weeks ago, but if you got their terrible “your sub is expired, go away” e-mail, please rest assured that I renewed all my comped subscribers that I’m aware of. I hope nobody fell through the cracks, and if you’re reading this on the website and you did, please let me know.

Anyway, this doesn’t add up to living money, but it’s a healthy reward for my fun-work that I’m very grateful for. I truly cannot overstate my gratitude to the people who have stuck with me, especially the Kawaiikochans patrons, for years and years.

I am in direct competition with many services that would give you a lot more for your five bucks than I could ever possibly offer. That you choose me means a lot.

What worked and what didn’t

It’s weird to talk about “hit” and “miss” with a project like this. The whole point of the newsletter is that I want to talk about whatever the hell I want, and I want an audience that’s willing to trust and support me. I know that’s a lot to ask for.

But we’re playing the internet content game, and I do need to think about what works and what doesn’t. So I’m gonna start with an edge case.

My top post for the blog by a very wide margin was inevitably the one talking about my own experience in “passion” jobs alongside the Mob Psycho 100 news. I’m really happy with how much it resonated with people: I had the pleasure of seeing other freelancers, voice actors and many others pass it around.

Not all of us in these businesses are at liberty to talk. Though it’s been many years, it was still professionally risky for me to tell on an editor— even, for example, the one who uses their tweet stream as a means to passive-aggressively insult their writers to their large audience as they read their drafts3— but I think that the more of us share our experiences, the better.

It brought in a few free subscriptions as well. Ironically, this piece about people not getting paid doing what they love did not bring in a single paid subscription. Zero. I feel like there’s no way to not sound bitter saying that, but also that it needs very much to be noted.

The Daily Dracula X project spiked views on the newsletter and brought in a pretty steady supply of new readers, even a few paid subscriptions. But I don’t know if I will burn out my energy to go that big on a single game again, as opposed to regular updates on more varied topics. DDX was really a book’s worth of content, and the timing coincided with a very personally difficult period.

Less than “Daily Dracula X didn’t work”— it did, it just didn’t go huge— it was more than I could chew.

What I’m proud of

Daily Dracula X. The post about the good part of Matrix 4. The sub-only slam review of Higehiro. The mahjong post. My beautiful, perfect Egret II Mini. I think I was pretty damn productive and I’d like to keep up the pace.

What I want to improve

As a writer, the subscription format leaves you torn between your natural, motivating desire for people to see your work, and the reality that you need to hide some content behind a paid subscription, because someone needs to pay to keep the thing afloat.

So this sure isn’t going to sound like an improvement, but I’m definitely going to have more sub-only posts going forward. The double article for Doan’s Island, one free with a bonus paid post like a podcast, is the kind of thing I have in mind for the future. The more niche a piece is in nature, the more likely it’s going to be a sub-only post.

I always have new ideas for pieces and even series, but they don’t always get cranked out. Presently I have a few op-ed and review ideas floating around that I need to focus on and flesh out, while keeping an ear to the ground to focus on things wider audiences actually care about— like posting about the Mob Psycho dub, like talking about SF6. So my work is always just ahead of me, and I always want to do better.

Final words

I said I was looking for “less cool work”, and I really am.4 While I was able to turn my hobby into work ten years ago, and I’ve gotten further than many, it’s been quite another story trying to turn things into an independent living. Meanwhile I see the people ahead of me crashing into brick walls: permanent crunch, unlivable wages, getting laid off in their sleep.

It is because all that sounded so bleak just now that I’ve decided to go back to doing it for myself. Because this, well, I take joy in doing it. I don’t think I’m going to stop.