How I Used Substack Notes to GROW

My newsletter is huge now. Sensational.

It only takes about a week of Sara Fay’s Substack Notes Growth Challenge to send me into crisis mode. I join because book sales have really only been able to pay for the cost of advertising the book, so therefore I imagine my author career to be a flirtation with failure.

The newsletter is supposedly the most powerful tool in the indie author’s toolkit, and Substack Notes is the premier place for newsletter growth. I must capture new readers in my web of notes.

However, participating in the challenge starts to feel like weaving a web of lies. According to Sarah, growth might require being on notes every day, which is the opposite of anything I would ever want. Also everyone seems to constantly be sharing inspirational quotes with an earnestness that has me clenching my jaw.

How the Notes Growth Challenge works is that we all are in this private little meeting room/message board where we tell everyone else in the challenge what our note is, and they are supposed to restack it, comment on it, and give it a heart if they like it. Sometimes at the end of the day, I will see that maybe I only got a couple of restacks on a note that I thought was great, and also I will compare it to another person’s boring note and roll my eyes and end up feeling like a loser jerk.

As jolly and positive as my notes feed tries to be, there is an undertone of, you know—that thing. That roller-coaster of elation and disappointment that’s built on whether I can arrange my words in a way that hits. I will live or die by what the crowd says or whether they completely ignore my note.

I restack a person’s beautiful nature video, and a few days later, he shames me for an amusing and honest note I write about checking to see whether specific subscribers have opened my newsletter. The fucker totally newsletter kink-shames me—calls me creepy. So I go into his newsletter and notice that it’s all photos and videos of nature and that in his bio, he brags that he’s a TEDx speaker. Very curated. Very stiff.

I keep trying to get away from social media but talking about ”Getting Away from Social Media” on SOCIAL MEDIA while trying to GROW on social media is stupid, isn’t it?

This is a drawing I drew on week 1 of my break. During week one I also rewatched the entire HBO series of Girls and was reminded of how funny and smart that show is. Karli says nipples are hard to draw, but this proves otherwise.

Not long after the kinkshamer triggers me, I get an email from a local writer about a TEDx event that’s happening in town. Maybe I need to be more serious and step into the in-person rooms, so I impulse-purchase a ticket and go.

Everyone is hot and preppy, and I feel like I’m The Talented Mr. Ripley or to be more current, Oliver Quick from Saltburn. The people in the row in front of me have hair that spirals down their backs in shiny ribbons—the kind you make with a flat iron. The blondest woman says to the man at her right, “You went to Wake Forest, but you live in LA and you’re from New York. Props. You’re bi-coastal.” She then starts talking about her “B to B white glove service” and divulges that she was on a retreat last week.

I paid $160 to attend this TEDx event, so it makes sense that I look around and think rich, rich everybody is rich. All the poor people are going to have to make do with watching the recording on the internet, but we in this room now have the money and the time to spend eight of our Sunday hours in theater seats at the Ojai playhouse. Despite the fact that I work six days a week now because I am dedicated to paying off credit card debt (past self thought future self would be actually rich), the compulsion to spend extra money still sneaks in, so here I am.

Did I ever tell you about when Mom stopped paying the trash bill because she was bad at bills? There was a period when taking the trash out just meant piling it in the backyard until we could drive it to the dumpster in the back of the Vons shopping center and steal their disposal services.

Have you ever had the lunch lady after you for your unpaid lunch bill, or worn shoes you’d outgrown so much that your toes bled? You might think that these things would be a lesson, and would galvanize you against the pull of excess, but it seems they were the raw materials for chaotic financial planning. There is this story I tell myself that the pursuit of wealth is evil, that the focus on money is evidence of a rotten soul. Is that why once I have it, I must find ways to get rid of it?

Or is it that the dollar is just a concept until you trade it in? Having the money is just holding on to what it will potentially get you. If I release it into the world, I get something. Today, I get the experience of the TEDx talk and the sensations of being hot and rich and smart and excited about ideas on this gorgeous Ojai day.

The theme of the talk is “Rewriting our Beautiful World.” Thankfully, in the beginning, the hosts come up and explain exactly what a TEDx event is. I actually wasn’t really sure. I just know that it was important that I go. If the nature-posting kinkshamer can use his TEDx speaking experience to bolster his profile, then I must at least attend one when it’s in town. The hosts are cute and funny ladies, and the blonde one talks about how she didn’t realize her Ted-red dress would blend in with the background props on the stage.

Every speaker makes me cry. Every talk is about something I’ve thought and I can almost grasp. This kind of connection is the thing that makes creators and writers successful. No one is saying anything that’s going to blow the roof off of the building but they all touch something that is already in me, and in doing so, I see myself right up there on stage alongside them.

Yes yes.

Me too.

Me too.

Maybe it’s a little too touching because on the morning that follows, I go dark. When I google the name of the hybrid publisher who put on the event and find out they charge authors $60,000 for their lowest publishing package, it feels like someone stabbed me in the brain. Having gone through the process of writing and publishing my book, I keep thinking that I should have made at least that much money for all the work I put into it, but I’ll tell you that I made -$920.

It doesn’t enter my mind that I’m a bad writer, or that maybe my cover isn’t calling to readers or that I need to tweak my book description. What it tells me is that the world is a sick sad place where writers don’t get paid for their work. We just get more work and have to start coaching/publishing/inspirational speaking gigs to fund our silly little dreams.

I pen a letter to my subscribers letting them know that I’m taking two weeks off.

I have a conversation with Allison Deraney and Rachel Casey for the Sober Banter Podcast while in the middle of my break. I talk about the addictive nature of sharing writing online. I am afraid to listen to it afterward. I am afraid I am a Debbie Downer because I have seen the darkness of the universe.

Two weeks into the break, on the day before Valentine’s Day, I quit sugar. That may seem like a non-sequitor, but quitting things is, like my thing.

Talking about quitting things is my Shania Twain Mayo story (if you haven’t seen I Heart Huckabees, stop reading this and go watch it so you can understand the reference). This is how I keep my identity. I quit and start and quit and start. This time I found a podcast that talks about sugar as though it is as harmful a substance as cocaine, which it might be. It’s either killing us slowly or quickly. It’s killing me in stops and starts. I use it as another numbing agent. I can totally annihilate myself with a box of Thin Mints, but this year, I refrain.

Without the sugar or the posting I am left without anything but Netflix, a pile of library books, and my three-week long headache.

The best thing that happens is that I become the kind of reader I was as a child.

I don’t have to write or check notes, or restack anyone’s anything, so I am left with long expanses of time for fiction. There is this dinner-table poisoning incident in one of the novels where the only family members who survive are the ones who didn’t use the arsenic-laced sugar. I see this as evidence that I’m on the right path.

There is a sister in one of the books whose headaches turn out to be an inoperable brain tumor and I spend a few days researching how to tell the difference between a tension headache, a sinus infection, and a brain tumor. Every story is meant for me.

There is this pressure to be grateful and proud, but then there is also this grief. There is this sadness that while I’m building this thing (an author career?), I must be a serious person. I must also be a nice person. I can’t leave scathing reviews for the lab that did blood tests that could neither confirm nor deny the presence of a tumor.

My two weeks off extend to four weeks off.

When I say I took a month off from writing what I mean is that I almost never stopped working. This is not my job. It is my expensive hobby.

At my real jobs, I talk and talk and walk and smile and carry things from bars to tables, pour water, open bottles of wine. I get a piercing headache whenever someone asks, “What are the favorites?” I don’t know why. It’s that, “What are the standouts?” and “Can I get some lemon for my water?” It takes everything. It takes all of my social energy to pull myself together and tell them what the favorites are while appearing to be normal and definitely not on the verge of snapping back at them to ask a more original question for once.

Ask me if I’ve ever put my Diva cup out to charge under the full moon. Ask me if the ghost who haunts the restaurant ever follows me home.

I almost never stopped being perceived.

And what story am I supposed to come back with after taking a month off? That my head and mission became clear and now I know what I must do?

That I emerged from the cave with untold amounts of insight?

There was never a cave. There is no retreat.

I put pressure on outcomes.

But really what do I do during this time away? I record three podcast episodes but I don’t edit them. I don’t even listen to them. I can’t stomach the sound of my voice. Like covering a mirror after someone has died. I can’t hear what I have to say.

And there’s a part of me that is like okay you are doing so well that you are inventing problems.

There is this thing that happens with our water heater where now and then it just stops working, and I have to take time to re-light it and then I have to wait for it to heat. It is always when I am naked and standing in front of tepid water.

Karli says that when faced with the water that is neither cold nor hot, she just wants to cry. I feel the same. It’s the most devastating moment of the day when the pipes are no longer pouring steaming streams of clean water and we must either wash with water that is the same temperature as the air or put our clothes back on and wait.

And if you think about it in terms of the existence of humans on this planet and the movies where servants heat pots of water over an open flame for the master’s luxurious bath, walk miles to a clean water source, or pull it up from a well with a bucket, it would seem that we modern humans might be among the most spoiled of people that have ever existed.

Our biggest problems are excess numbing agents: sugar, alcohol, and being frozen, and hunched over a small screen.

If anything is true, it is that the idea of “arrival” is a dangling carrot that I will never get in my mouth. So, what did I learn? It’s not the writing and publishing every week that’s making me sick. It’s the desperate reach for readers. It’s holding these two conflicting truths that I don’t want to talk to anyone. I don’t want to consider the Substack gaze, the Instagram gaze, the gaze of the guest as he watches me open a bottle of wine.

Isn’t a newsletter just another form of social media? Isn’t a book, for that matter? This conversation is not over, but I must publish this and send it to my readers now because what I really learned is that while I might not want to always be seen or heard, you can almost always find me, if you know where to look, begging to be read.

Also, listen to this episode of Sober Banter where

Allison Deraney

Rachel Casey

and I talk about all of this.

Conversations on Creativity and Balance with Allison and Julie