Rest Day Ruminations: Wet Legs & Substack Feedback
Still wondering what to do
Here’s a Rest Day Ruminations post. Thank you to my lovely paying subscribers who make some of the posts open to all, as with this one.
Wet Legs
I am prepping this post on Saturday night, as tomorrow I will be working all day at the cinema, showing three films to the discerning residents of Dumfries. I’ll start work just before 10am, and hopefully get home by 8pm. In case you wonder what the films will be: Wonka (again); Monsters Inc; The Boy and the Heron (dubbed).
“Karl, what’s the wet legs thing about? I don’t know whether to boke or smile at the image.”
Well, I live by a river. The Nith and its banks are often full of plastic bottles and bags, cans, dumped bikes, shopping trollies (from irresponsible supermarkets that don’t require £1 coin deposits), broken glass, farm plastics and barbed wire, and so on. I rarely have any luck asking the Council to remove items, so I often just sort it out myself. I’m always safety conscious about conditions, and sometimes a grappling hook and rope is enough to do the job.
The CanalRiverTrust says: “Studies show that around 80% of the plastics and litter found in our oceans comes from inland waste that passes through water-courses around the world and out to sea.” And the oceans are apparently littered with 171 trillion plastic pieces, much of it from rivers that pass through towns.
So when a neighbour reported deteriorating plastic sheeting caught in branches in our lovely river, I knew the only way to get it out was to do it myself. So first thing this morning I climbed down the steep concrete wall to the Nith armed with scissors. I cut up the thick plastic and removed it.
Aye, it was bloody cold.
We can’t depend on politicians to do the right thing. My MP and MSP both brush off concerns about the ongoing UK/US-backed genocide being perpetrated by Israel. We have county councillors voting to waste our money bulldozing lovely Greensands for an unnecessary car park. As ever, if you want to see the right thing done, you have to ignore all those self-serving politicians and do it yourself. But I think Scotland has a culture of people just getting on with things independently. It’s why I’ve been having meetings with people like my Council’s Countryside Development Team to look at footpath repairs and tree plantings. Why I had a dusk run in the drizzle and collected two bags of rubbish, splashing through puddles while pink cloud glowed their mirror selves on the water. (I stopped by the river to apologise to nature for human carelessness, and the next day I planted a new bush in my garden.)
On the environmental theme, here’s some information from an article I published on Tuesday, 22nd July 2014 on my old Caredig I Natur (CIN) website. Caredig i Natur is Welsh for “Kind to Nature”. I saw it as Ceredigion’s premier site for green issues. :-) I deleted the site the other day when I closed down my final Google account.
How long does it take to decompose?
Paper towels: 2-4 weeks
Banana peel: 3-4 weeks
Paper bag: 1 month
Newspaper: 1.5 months
Apple core: 2 months
Cardboard: 2 months
Orange peel: 6 months
Plywood: 1-3 years
Wool sock: 1-5 years
Milk carton: 5 years
Cigarette butt: 10-12 years
Leather shoes: 25-40 years
Steel can: 50 years
Foam plastic cups: 50 years
Rubber-boot sole: 50-80 years
Plastic containers: 50-80 years
Aluminium cans: 200-500 years
Plastic bottles: 450 years
Disposable diapers: 550 years
Monofilament fishing line: 600 years
Plastic bags: 200-1000 years
Substack Feedback
I recently ran a poll to see how my newsletter and paid subscription options were being received. Often, posts can be like books, where we release them to the world but we don’t know what people think as there is just silence in return. Tumbleweeds, even. (Until the reviews come in, if you are lucky.) I’m going to do a quick summary of the results of my poll. You can see the current types of posts I write (and about which I asked questions) here.
Newsletter: it seems that most subscribers read these and that I send them out with a frequency that satisfies people.
Weekly Writers: similar to above, with a slightly smaller audience as it is mostly of interest to writers (hence the name …)
Friday Fiction: generally popular again. I asked “Do you like reading the guest contributions by other writers?” - a third said yes, two thirds said “sometimes”. No one said “no”. I also asked how people feel about serialised long fiction, where a book is split over a number of weeks. A quarter said they’d like that; more than a quarter said they’d hate it. So I probably won’t repeat what I did for Harvest Festival with longer works.
I agree that serialising something to more than two or three posts isn’t very satisfying from the reader perspective. I was originally trying to think of ways to make sure I would always have something to send. Of course, for anyone who has already read my work, it all ends up being redundant anyway, including the short stories. Which makes me think it could be good to do Friday Fiction mostly as other people’s work or recommendations, and not feel like there has to be something every week. I’m still contemplating how all that fits together.
Rest Day Ruminations: again, mostly read, with a generally acceptable frequency. You’re reading one right now!
It seems people are generally happy with what they get, whether they are a free newsletter subscriber, or someone buying my coffees and getting extra posts as thanks.
Currently I make a few of the paid subscriber posts free to everyone, funded by the kind paying subscribers. Paying subscribers were happy for me to continue in that way.
The Future?
So my current system is that fans can subscribe for free, to be informed when I have a new book out, and occasionally receive other “bonus” posts.
There is a paid subscription option that includes the full variety of posts above, and ebooks of any new titles I release (£35 a year - a reduction on the monthly fee of £3.50 per month, which is the minimum Substack lets us charge). Some posts are aimed at fellow writers, some aimed at fans. The idea here is to give some value back to people going out of their way to support me as an author.
I also have a Super Supporters tier for the most loyal of fans who really want to support my writing. (£100 a year but includes a few extras, such as print copies of any books I write that year.)
So a free tier; a paid tier; and an extra level of paid tier. (That is the most tiers you can have with Substack, which is good as it would get complicated quickly!)
The question I grappled with was whether the current system mixes up subscribers who are fans of my fiction with subscribers who are authors. Because, as well as writing books, I also teach creative writing and edit fiction for authors, and offer mentor-like guidance and advice to emerging writers. And I think my current system seems to cope all right with the two types of people who take out a paid subscription.
However, I could change all that.
One option is for me to drop a paid option for fans. Just to say they sign up for the free list and get a few bonus posts. And just have one paid subscription, but aim it purely at writers and authors, as a kind of friendly group writing academy for paying subscribers only. So they’d get posts about writing and publishing as now. Maybe even one on a publishing issue, and one on writing technique each week (so two posts). Plus an optional weekly writing prompt, and maybe a different person each week would have the opportunity to come up with the writing prompt. Perhaps chances to share work for feedback or critiques from each other. Maybe any work that was well liked in the private writing group could have the option of going to all my fans as a Friday Fiction if the author wanted (a little bit of visibility perhaps, a chance to build an audience and test writing out). We could even have a post where any publishing news, competitions, grants etc got shared - with subscribers sending them to me to compile each week. So this paid subscription would have a few posts each week, and some opportunities. Whether it was successful would depend on enough people subscribing so that it was worth my time in organising it, and - more importantly - so that it felt like a small community, and if someone needed feedback on a short piece or passage there were enough people that you’d hopefully receive some feedback (maybe everyone would get a chance to submit things in turn). Although I can’t change the monthly fee, I can offer an annual sub reduction, so could charge anything from £15 a year to £40 a year. Not sure where I would place it as a sub or what the demand would be.
I could do the above, and also use the extra tier to offer my editing services. Maybe stop doing editing and mentoring elsewhere, and just offer it to the higher-tier of authors. So as part of that sub they’d be entitled to my feedback on up to x,000 words a year and maybe some other advice. And to manage my limited time, I’d only offer editing to these subscribers (and limit the number to what I thought I could manage). Obviously anyone in this tier would also get access to everything in (1) above.
I could change things another way. I could keep the paid sub but make it only for fans of my work. Perhaps some Friday Fiction, some book/film reviews. Perhaps insider posts about my work. I could still include free ebooks of any new books. Then the higher tier would be reserved for authors along the lines of (1) above. The downside would be, they’d also receive all the posts for fans, so they might feel a bit overwhelmed, or like I am spamming them about my own work.
Option 4 is to change nothing and continue as I already do!
This is really just me thinking aloud (while sat in silence with Dolly on my lap). It’s the balance between being an author, and offering services to authors. Between fans I want to thank, and writers I want to support.
And if I try to do all this regularly, there will be significant time implications for me (partly counteracted by me giving up external editing?)
It would also depend on demand. With this kind of thing, you have to do the same amount of work regardless of the number of subscribers. So at one end you might spend ten hours a week working on all this for one subscriber. You are then perhaps making £25 a year for 500 hours of work. That would work out as 5 pence an hour. Or you might have 100 subscribers, so you would be paid £2,500 a year for 500 hours of work. That would work out as 5 pounds an hour. Oops, maybe I shouldn’t have got the calculator out, the result is too depressing! Then again, I have already spent more than two hours working on this post, which is totally unpaid. Hmm.
If you read this far, thank you! I’m always happy to hear your thoughts. You can email me. I’m approachable. One of you wonderful people had contacted me to say that they supported me in general “even though our politics differ”. I do like that civilised humans can communicate without needing full agreement on every topic. In fact, it led me to think about traditional definitions of “left” and “right” in politics. Part of my reply was:
“I have to admit, I find left/right to be pretty confusing nowadays. Especially as it is only usually about views on one axis, when there are probably hundreds of topics that don’t fit neatly on it. As a tool, I just find it not very useful. Obviously many people identify me as a lefty, and yet on some topics I’d probably look right wing, and vice versa. It’s all bonkers, since it is attempts to explain a massive variety of possible viewpoints as an almost binary division or gradient, and we’re all more complex than that. It’s taken me fifty years to start getting the broad areas of my worldview in order. I have thousands of files for my grand (probably never to be published!) book of beliefs.”
I’ll stop here. It is getting late. This will be sent out tomorrow via the magic of scheduling.
Or it won’t, if I screw up the settings. Then I will look very silly.
Which is nothing new to Mr Wet Legs.
Peace! Karl
Good luck figuring the subscriber issue out, Karl. Thanks for cleaning up the river -- important work!