Illusions and Harsh Reality on Substack

It feels good to be misled

 To reinstate wild 
                              Fancy 
                              would we hide
Truths whose thick veil 
                               Science 
                               has drawn aside?
                           -- William Woodsworth

How many views are from my eyes
          Writer as reader thus disguised
Self-deluded on dopamine highs
Counting the numbers 
           And riding the lies
Clutching the phantom
Embracing the myth
Patterns in random numerical shit
            Chasing the ghost
            In name of the prize
Hurry now!
Damn you!
             Hearken my cries,
                              "Comment!"       "Like!"        and       "Subscribe!"
Pardon me while I imbibe
Gotta get drunk
                          on a stack this size.

Illusions and Harsh Reality on Substack!

         For my mother who reads these things, a reminder. I only drink metaphorically.

In the name of all that’s good in this world, I hate to think what the AI voice over is going to do to that poem.

As illustrated here, I’ve turned paid subscriptions back on. I’d turned them off because it felt silly to have them on. So, why change my mind?

This is still a small account with only 113 subscribers. I’d intended to wait until I hit 500 or 1000. Why change my mind? Someone here said Substack pushes your posts a little more when the paid subscriptions are turned on, because that’s how they make their money. Is it true? I don’t know. How do they know? I don’t know. It couldn’t hurt to try.

But why tell you? If we ALL get the little boost then none of us get the little boost. I’ll tell you why:

                      BECAUSE ALL OF SUBSTACK ISN'T READING MY POST

It’s just you, and you’re not my competition. My competition is all the millions of people here aren’t my readers. I can spare to pass along a rumor to a few friends.

But wait… this substack got 4 thousand views is the last month. That’s a lot of people!

Nah. Didn’t happen. That’s a pretty number when you’re getting started. All these numbers feed directly into my veins, encouraging me to work and keep those numbers turning, only so many of them aren’t what they seem.

The biggest disappointment was in the reality behind the podcast numbers. There’s so much information here and it sounds so good. 12% of my listeners come from Apple Music. 1% from Spotify. < 1% from Overcast. Don’t get me wrong. 12% is good and will one day hopefully mean some real numbers, but I was interpreting all of this differently, envisioning two different audiences in my mind, one Substack and one for the podcast. I was hitting my release schedule of two to three recordings a week, and I watched to see how delays between releases impacted how many listened.

Only that was all wrong. All wrong. 77% are people listening off the email or app, which is great, but that’s my audience. I need to be focused on that need.

The Weird Fiction is doing pretty well. “Notes on Writing” has 118 and “The Repairer of Reputations” has 85. But we can see that I was hitting the 40’s before that. Right now, Podcasts are giving me between 12 and 25 listens, and those aren’t likely to be the same people. That’s not my audience. You are.

That matters because if I have all this stuff on my mind right now, this right here, about Substack, I’m free to write about it. I’m not neglecting a Podcast audience to do so, and you’ll be more likely to read this over my next James Joyce analysis by a factor of 2. I have no intention of going full meta, but when I have relevant and real things that I want to talk about, it would be foolish not to.

And that brings me back to those other sets of numbers. How many people are really reading our work?

Now, when I point how some of these numbers are deceitful, I’m not complaining. It’s the exact opposite with the numbers on Laterpress, and that’s no fun. I want to be deceived—to a point—but there come moments when we have to make decisions for the direction our Substack business is going to take. For that, we need to be closer to reality.

Let’s take a look at the first chapter of

You can click on the chapter and read if you haven’t already. I include it here as a generous and cynical marketing move, but that’s not what I meant. Let’s look at the numbers; they say there were 181 views, which is good compared to my average. At the time I had 63 subscribers, and 52% of those opened the email, which is phenomenal. I don’t normally come anywhere near that number.

That’s 33 opens. My numbers also tell me that 26% of views came from email.

33 / .26 = 127 (rounded up) That’s the real number of views, and again, the reality isn’t bad. 53 views (minus however many were me) were people returning the page a second or third time. That’s gold.

If I wasn’t clear about the formula, it’s the number of opens divided by the percentage that came from email. The big bold percentage number you’re given under email is not what you want to use. It’s the little “opens” number below that and the little percentage under the heading of Traffic Sources.

It gets a little less rewarding of an exercise with smaller posts. It’s easy to become discouraged, but I have a solution.

I appreciate the reward system that fooled my brain into seeing high rewards, encouraging me to put in the work necessary to build the base for a new newsletter, but eventually, we need to see the numbers for what they are. On top of that, mine would be far worse than they are, except that I have three or four other accounts who are there for me consistently, and I’m there for them. We read each other’s stuff and give it the boost we need to be seen. Without them its far too easy to drop something on Notes that never gets any interaction at all.

If you run a fiction-oriented substack, the invitation is there for you to join us. You’ll need to join another account of mine. The link is in the chat for Deeper Stories. Once you’ve subscribed, all the action is also in that account’s chat. We can each share one post a day for other members to interact with. In return, you interact with the posts of others. You don’t have to engage every day. But if you want to share, you need to interact with the posts of others—and it’s a good practice to leave an emoji in the chat to show you’re doing so. It helps everyone see that people are engaging.

This is not going make your account huge, but it does leave you feeling less alone. Your work gets a little nudge, and over time, we get to know each other and each other’s work. We check up on one another. If you don’t have that already, you’re invited to check out our little tribe. We’re there to help.

— Thaddeus Thomas