I’ve been searching for ways to support the indie writing community. I know there are gestures that help like buying someone’s book or writing a review, and maybe that is the answer I’m looking for, but is there something that you would like to see happen via The Storyletter specifically? Would you benefit from industry-type posts, interviews, motivational essays, or self-publishing tool breakdowns? Let me know how I can help you. I can’t wait to hear your thoughts. ~ WM
I think the best way to support indie authors other than the obvious (buy their book and leave a review) is to talk about it. Tell your friends and family that you liked the book. Recommend it others. Generally speaking, indie authors don't have the big budget to market as well as the huge publishing companies, so any amount of marketing is helpful and word of mouth is golden. Someone may see an ad on social media and think the book is cool, but there is so much more weight to a trusted friend telling them that a book is awesome.
This is something I've struggled with. My reading has skyrocketed over the last few years, but I shy away from writing reviews or talking to others about what I read for some reason. I need to start making it a habit to reflect on the story that I just read and put those ideas down somewhere. This may be a good practice that will increase my enjoyment of reading, as well as produce another layer of the hobby that I can share with others. I like this idea!
i think this is a really good and important question. i don't really have a good answer. off the top of my head, what i think is useful, based on my experience with other sites i've explored and research i've done, is the following:
-exposure for fellow writers (whether it's articles, interviews, or book reviews, etc. is probably helpful)
-directing others to good resources for publishing/marketing/genre organizations/conferences, etc (good references for resources are key to making sure we don't end up chasing our tails when it's time to publish/promote.)
but more importantly...
-warning others to steer clear of bad resources, bad experiences, dead ends, and scams (i know no one likes to say negative things in the industry, but sharing bad experiences or mistakes can help spare others.)
-i'm always a fan of a good, clear how-to guide :-)
Thanks, Jacquie! This is very helpful. Exposure is a good place to start. I'm working on an interview process and should have that rolling out here pretty soon.
The resources and the how-to guides are a great recommendation for implementation. I'm working on one right now about how to record audio for Substack (or, at least, how I do it). Hopefully as I learn these things along the way, I can share my experience/knowledge.
And that's true about the warnings. I've learned a lot about vanity publishing because of said warnings. It's definitely something I want to steer clear of. I'll have to think of topics that can be turned into lessons that could save others time. Thanks for your input!
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. I have one anthology of short stories to my name. It’s probably the most unread thing on Amazon.com, but this doesn’t bother me. What was gratifying to me was sharing the stories while they were being produced with friends and colleagues and getting immediate and very detailed responses from them that were overwhelmingly positive and specific enough to the contents of the stories to make it obvious that the stories had been read.
I don’t aspire to be a career author, and I’m not interested in making money off of what I write, although I think a writer would need to be pretty daft not to appreciate such good fortune if it were ever to come his or her way. But it would be nice to get exposure. Social media makes it very difficult to share stories with friends. In the past their algorithms tended to hide links to my writing projects on sites like Wordpress. Then someone hacked into my Wordpress and hijacked it out from under me, so I just quit that Site.
I’m in my fifties and, although I was tech-savvy in the 90s when the Internet was still novel (and quite the bee’s knees!), the complexity and diffuseness of the Internet and the younger community that have grown with it, are difficult for me to keep up with. I love storytelling, but I feel like there’s no clear means of getting my stories “out there”. Plus the environment seems to be suffering from a glut of chicanery and fraud that makes me wary of reaching out to some of the publishers and magazines that allegedly want to see my work.
For example, not long ago, I tried to submit a story to one of the old-timey pulp magazines that go back the 1960s. I’m not going to mention the publication by name because what happened wasn’t their fault; but it’s one of the reasons I’m wary about submitting stories to online. Their portal was taken over by some malign actor. I went to upload a story and to put in my credit card information to handle the reasonable submission fee. The next thing I know, my email was hacked, my credit was being used to make unauthorized purchases, and the story never actually got uploaded to their site. The submission process was run by a second party contractor, so I wrote to them to let them know what had happened, and they told me that they didn’t run the site, they just processed submissions. I would have to call the magazine which owned the rights to the page where submission portal resided. I tried calling the magazine’s number (one landline number for subscriptions, submissions, customer service, employment enquiries, etc.) and no one answered.
That was the biggest disappointment. The other disappointments are minor. I submitted a story that was a very light fantasy (a sort of artsy retelling of an ancient myth) to a literary magazine and paid the $35 submission fee. It was rejected because it was adjudged to be a “fantasy” story instead of a “literary” story (whatever the hell that means). I submitted a ghost story to a fantasy and horror online magazine and was rejected because I used the word “shit” and the rejection email indicated that that one word had trumped all other considerations. I submitted twice to a horror podcast and have had my submissions rejected because the manuscript wasn’t in the first person or written in a way that would be easily translated into an audio podcast, which is fair.
After these experiences, I went through a period of not writing anything at all, but doing recordings through Librivox, which I did all through COVID. I really enjoyed that online community, which reminded me of the old usenet groups I used to belong to in the 90s, because the volunteers who make those recordings are highly literate and love talking about books. But after COVID, I didn’t have the time to concentrate on Librivox. (It would take me at least 8 hours to edit a 50 minute story or chapter from a book.)
My Latin Professor translated all of the Divine Comedy into Old Scots and it’s a very good translation. He’s now in his nineties. About 12 years ago, he paid a publishing company about $5K to edit his work and prepare it for publication. Ostensibly, they were going to publish it online for him and create a printed version as well. But then, just as the work was scheduled to go to press, the company called him and told him that they couldn’t publish it, because they didn’t publish translated texts, only original works. The initial money he paid, was just lost after being led along for over a year. I asked him if he sued, but he said he just didn’t have the energy and so his book would never see the light of day.
This is the challenge that the older generation confronts in dealing with the current publishing landscape. My friends who write or teach writing as a profession offer me advice that tends to leave my head spinning: “You should join this online writing group, because they’ll tell you how to engage with Amazon on advertising”, or “You should follow so-and-so on Twitter/YouTube/Facebook because he/she has monetized her writing.” I just submitted a novel to a contest that was tipped to me by a Hollywood writer. It’s a prose competition. It’s still in the judgment phase, but I’m getting weekly updates telling me that I should pay extra money to share my contact information with publishing houses and film producers, which have been followed by other emails with questionnaires about whether I belong to the screenwriter’s guild or what my user identity code is with such and such writing association. It just seems like, unless you’re a career writer, you’re not worth anyone’s consideration. The commercialism and jobbery of it all is disenchanting, and I don’t think that’s ever going to change.
So when it comes to Indie writers (and I’m proud to call myself one of those), I would say that sites like yours are a great place to hang out. I’m new to Substack, but I may set up my own soon. I’m impressed with how other people use it (including J.M. Elliott) and I feel that this platform would at fulfill my own desire to just make my stories available so that someone, somewhere can read them; and so that I could share the links with the friends and colleagues of mine who appreciate what I write, so that if I suddenly pass away, at the very least I would’ve had a chance to share my stories on the internet where they might be archived somewhere, instead of simply disappearing with the postmortem deactivation of my cloud drive. 😂
I forgot to add that the publisher of my book was a company owned by my college professor. I was credited in a monograph he wrote about when I was his research assistant on a topic so obscure that I’m embarrassed to say what it was. Anyway, his speciality has always been academic writing; he was a senior editor in Manhattan in the 1980s for an encyclopedia on that aforementioned embarrassingly obscure topic that they had only gotten to the letter “M” on after half a century. He told me that he would be willing to publish another anthology of my stories but that I would probably be better served finding a literary agent, since there was huge different between the fiction and nonfiction publishing industries. However, he admitted that literary agents weren’t as common these days as they used to be, and that you usually formally reached out to them to see if they would be willing to take you on. He recommended steering clear of outfits that charge hundreds (or thousands) of dollars to publish “on behalf” of a writer, like the company that bilked my Latin Professor, a highly educated Scotsman and graduate of St. Andrews whose book was not really fiction and could have been considered an academic translation of Dante’s Inferno (since he had studied with a famous scholar of Old Scots), but who approached this publishing company (carelessly) as someone publishing an original literary work. As I mentioned above, he lost about $5K over the course of a year of back-and-forth correspondence between 2-3 members of the company’s highly dubious editorial board.
Thank you for sharing these points, Daniel. The cautionary tales of seeking out publication are a doozy. I can't believe he lost that much money. I think those types of publishers are called vanity publishers and they charge you up front for the costs of getting your book out there, however, like with what happened to your Latin Professor, there are many scams out there that take advantage of new writers.
I think you should totally create a Substack! I can help you if you'd like. The stories you're writing are really great and your voice is so unique. Honestly, at some point the people signing up after reading your work would want just your stuff, so giving them that option would be the way to go. Plus, you could even post your Cave of Branching Tales novel on there. I've been so excited to publish your stuff on The Storyletter btw. It's been such an honor!
I think based on your input, maybe producing a list of reputable small presses or quality contests looking for submissions would be a neat idea. I think I could totally do that every so often.
So sorry you’ve had all those unpleasant encounters with publishers. I also think it would be great if you had a substack! I already enjoy reading your work here, and I look forward to discovering more!
Ps- the Inferno in Old Scots sounds fascinating. I hope someone publishes it.
Sigh... the app doesn't have any editor capabilities just yet. You only get the option on desktop at the moment. The website version on the phone might work, but I'm not certain.
Something I've thought about in regards to this is how on social media, we say we support one another but then we continue to share mainstream content rather than the content our followers are creating.
We focus on our own creations and works that inspire us and sometimes fail to recognize what is being made around us, at the same level we are at.
Over the past few months, I've come to realize that a big thing that's holds us back is envy & greed. Deep down we all want to make it big because we believe that will bring us happiness in our passions. We then become envious of those who were once at our level but grow to where we wish we can be at. Then there's the greed aspect, which stems from the fact that we want to hold onto our own money to promote our own works instead of purchasing or even just donating a couple bucks a month to creators we "support".
In the end though, what I'm wanting to do is find ways to prop up other creators and organizations that share my same love of storytelling and values. I want to share more works that I enjoy and network in more ways.
I was hoping someone was going to bring this up. I agree with you 100%, Matthew. The further I dig into this concept, the more I realize how right you are that we are stronger together.
That was one of the reasons I started The Storyletter, I saw so many talented people attempting to go at it alone (or at least from my perspective they were), and I wanted to create a place to promote others. I definitely try to share/remind/retweet other indies that are doing cool and unique things.
I'm learning so much about self-publishing, indie creators, and just running a company in general. Granted, I don't have employees, but maybe someday. To get back to your point about envy and greed, I think there is an element of that. I wonder if it also ties into ego, where creators believe that what they are working on is somehow greater. And maybe it is, but the inability to deflate the ego and share time with someone looking for help or collaboration hinders both of their growth.
I struggle with this at times, I admit. But I think I'm getting better at it. Talking with each of you has definitely helped open my eyes to what's going on in the industry.
I wonder if there is a way we could set up an "indie" funnel. The idea would be that like-minded creators join a channel on Discord (or something similar) and when someone drops a link into the channel everyone has to blast it out to their audiences. It would need to be within reason (no nudity or questionable stuff) and maybe have slow-mode enabled so it's not 50 links at once. There's a similar concept called BookFunnel where authors team up on a themed promotion and when it goes live they share each others' work. Thoughts?
Yeah, ego can definitely play a role in it. And I honestly that would be great, but how would we incentivize people to share on their channels. It's hard enough getting people to just like a post. Ik I have a hard time with it, but I feel like if we made a system to get participation in sharing other people's work, that would help.
But then again, there's a different between sharing bcuz you want them to share your own work and sharing bcuz you genuinely like the content and want others to join in the club.
True. Then it would need to start small, really close hold with creators that respect one another, I suppose. Honestly, you wouldn't want to just repost anyone's stuff willy nilly anyway because like you said, you want to be passionate about the content you're sharing so that when you do share it it means something. But the alternative is no one shares it and then it gets 2 likes and lost in the feed forever. Hmmm, if feel like there's something positive there but I don't know what it is!
Exactly! There's some other things I've thought about before but doing them by myself, I never know where to start and a lot of it I feel like requires a full team to get done.
And I actually have a question for you. If you were to hire employees, what kind of jobs would you need to fulfill specifically?
That’s a good question. I haven’t really considered it since I have a day job and this has just been a side project. But if it were to become viable and I made that leap, I think there would need to be a full-time editor, a merchandising/shipping specialist, and PR/marketing specialist. Those 3 things would enhance the business while affording me time to network and build out relationships (and continue writing).
Another route I’m considering is owning a cafe that would double as Storyletter HQ as having a physical location is a dream of mine. Providing a space for people to connect and materialize their projects. So I’d need to hire baristas and staff for that too.
But it’s a huge risk and I haven’t considered all the variables yet haha.
A Storyletter cafe would be awesome! But yeah, that's a big leap and taking it one step at a time is the best thing right now. You are doing great though! With the time you've had, you've made a great home here on substack and I'm definitely looking forward to seeing it grow even more and helping it grow in whatever ways I can.
I think the best way to support indie authors other than the obvious (buy their book and leave a review) is to talk about it. Tell your friends and family that you liked the book. Recommend it others. Generally speaking, indie authors don't have the big budget to market as well as the huge publishing companies, so any amount of marketing is helpful and word of mouth is golden. Someone may see an ad on social media and think the book is cool, but there is so much more weight to a trusted friend telling them that a book is awesome.
This is something I've struggled with. My reading has skyrocketed over the last few years, but I shy away from writing reviews or talking to others about what I read for some reason. I need to start making it a habit to reflect on the story that I just read and put those ideas down somewhere. This may be a good practice that will increase my enjoyment of reading, as well as produce another layer of the hobby that I can share with others. I like this idea!
This is a great point. I don’t do this either but I will make a concerted effort to do so going forward.
i think this is a really good and important question. i don't really have a good answer. off the top of my head, what i think is useful, based on my experience with other sites i've explored and research i've done, is the following:
-exposure for fellow writers (whether it's articles, interviews, or book reviews, etc. is probably helpful)
-directing others to good resources for publishing/marketing/genre organizations/conferences, etc (good references for resources are key to making sure we don't end up chasing our tails when it's time to publish/promote.)
but more importantly...
-warning others to steer clear of bad resources, bad experiences, dead ends, and scams (i know no one likes to say negative things in the industry, but sharing bad experiences or mistakes can help spare others.)
-i'm always a fan of a good, clear how-to guide :-)
anyway, i'll keep thinking...
Thanks, Jacquie! This is very helpful. Exposure is a good place to start. I'm working on an interview process and should have that rolling out here pretty soon.
The resources and the how-to guides are a great recommendation for implementation. I'm working on one right now about how to record audio for Substack (or, at least, how I do it). Hopefully as I learn these things along the way, I can share my experience/knowledge.
And that's true about the warnings. I've learned a lot about vanity publishing because of said warnings. It's definitely something I want to steer clear of. I'll have to think of topics that can be turned into lessons that could save others time. Thanks for your input!
It sounds like you have some great ideas in the works! Thanks for thinking of indie authors and how best to get work like ours out there :-)
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. I have one anthology of short stories to my name. It’s probably the most unread thing on Amazon.com, but this doesn’t bother me. What was gratifying to me was sharing the stories while they were being produced with friends and colleagues and getting immediate and very detailed responses from them that were overwhelmingly positive and specific enough to the contents of the stories to make it obvious that the stories had been read.
I don’t aspire to be a career author, and I’m not interested in making money off of what I write, although I think a writer would need to be pretty daft not to appreciate such good fortune if it were ever to come his or her way. But it would be nice to get exposure. Social media makes it very difficult to share stories with friends. In the past their algorithms tended to hide links to my writing projects on sites like Wordpress. Then someone hacked into my Wordpress and hijacked it out from under me, so I just quit that Site.
I’m in my fifties and, although I was tech-savvy in the 90s when the Internet was still novel (and quite the bee’s knees!), the complexity and diffuseness of the Internet and the younger community that have grown with it, are difficult for me to keep up with. I love storytelling, but I feel like there’s no clear means of getting my stories “out there”. Plus the environment seems to be suffering from a glut of chicanery and fraud that makes me wary of reaching out to some of the publishers and magazines that allegedly want to see my work.
For example, not long ago, I tried to submit a story to one of the old-timey pulp magazines that go back the 1960s. I’m not going to mention the publication by name because what happened wasn’t their fault; but it’s one of the reasons I’m wary about submitting stories to online. Their portal was taken over by some malign actor. I went to upload a story and to put in my credit card information to handle the reasonable submission fee. The next thing I know, my email was hacked, my credit was being used to make unauthorized purchases, and the story never actually got uploaded to their site. The submission process was run by a second party contractor, so I wrote to them to let them know what had happened, and they told me that they didn’t run the site, they just processed submissions. I would have to call the magazine which owned the rights to the page where submission portal resided. I tried calling the magazine’s number (one landline number for subscriptions, submissions, customer service, employment enquiries, etc.) and no one answered.
That was the biggest disappointment. The other disappointments are minor. I submitted a story that was a very light fantasy (a sort of artsy retelling of an ancient myth) to a literary magazine and paid the $35 submission fee. It was rejected because it was adjudged to be a “fantasy” story instead of a “literary” story (whatever the hell that means). I submitted a ghost story to a fantasy and horror online magazine and was rejected because I used the word “shit” and the rejection email indicated that that one word had trumped all other considerations. I submitted twice to a horror podcast and have had my submissions rejected because the manuscript wasn’t in the first person or written in a way that would be easily translated into an audio podcast, which is fair.
After these experiences, I went through a period of not writing anything at all, but doing recordings through Librivox, which I did all through COVID. I really enjoyed that online community, which reminded me of the old usenet groups I used to belong to in the 90s, because the volunteers who make those recordings are highly literate and love talking about books. But after COVID, I didn’t have the time to concentrate on Librivox. (It would take me at least 8 hours to edit a 50 minute story or chapter from a book.)
My Latin Professor translated all of the Divine Comedy into Old Scots and it’s a very good translation. He’s now in his nineties. About 12 years ago, he paid a publishing company about $5K to edit his work and prepare it for publication. Ostensibly, they were going to publish it online for him and create a printed version as well. But then, just as the work was scheduled to go to press, the company called him and told him that they couldn’t publish it, because they didn’t publish translated texts, only original works. The initial money he paid, was just lost after being led along for over a year. I asked him if he sued, but he said he just didn’t have the energy and so his book would never see the light of day.
This is the challenge that the older generation confronts in dealing with the current publishing landscape. My friends who write or teach writing as a profession offer me advice that tends to leave my head spinning: “You should join this online writing group, because they’ll tell you how to engage with Amazon on advertising”, or “You should follow so-and-so on Twitter/YouTube/Facebook because he/she has monetized her writing.” I just submitted a novel to a contest that was tipped to me by a Hollywood writer. It’s a prose competition. It’s still in the judgment phase, but I’m getting weekly updates telling me that I should pay extra money to share my contact information with publishing houses and film producers, which have been followed by other emails with questionnaires about whether I belong to the screenwriter’s guild or what my user identity code is with such and such writing association. It just seems like, unless you’re a career writer, you’re not worth anyone’s consideration. The commercialism and jobbery of it all is disenchanting, and I don’t think that’s ever going to change.
So when it comes to Indie writers (and I’m proud to call myself one of those), I would say that sites like yours are a great place to hang out. I’m new to Substack, but I may set up my own soon. I’m impressed with how other people use it (including J.M. Elliott) and I feel that this platform would at fulfill my own desire to just make my stories available so that someone, somewhere can read them; and so that I could share the links with the friends and colleagues of mine who appreciate what I write, so that if I suddenly pass away, at the very least I would’ve had a chance to share my stories on the internet where they might be archived somewhere, instead of simply disappearing with the postmortem deactivation of my cloud drive. 😂
I forgot to add that the publisher of my book was a company owned by my college professor. I was credited in a monograph he wrote about when I was his research assistant on a topic so obscure that I’m embarrassed to say what it was. Anyway, his speciality has always been academic writing; he was a senior editor in Manhattan in the 1980s for an encyclopedia on that aforementioned embarrassingly obscure topic that they had only gotten to the letter “M” on after half a century. He told me that he would be willing to publish another anthology of my stories but that I would probably be better served finding a literary agent, since there was huge different between the fiction and nonfiction publishing industries. However, he admitted that literary agents weren’t as common these days as they used to be, and that you usually formally reached out to them to see if they would be willing to take you on. He recommended steering clear of outfits that charge hundreds (or thousands) of dollars to publish “on behalf” of a writer, like the company that bilked my Latin Professor, a highly educated Scotsman and graduate of St. Andrews whose book was not really fiction and could have been considered an academic translation of Dante’s Inferno (since he had studied with a famous scholar of Old Scots), but who approached this publishing company (carelessly) as someone publishing an original literary work. As I mentioned above, he lost about $5K over the course of a year of back-and-forth correspondence between 2-3 members of the company’s highly dubious editorial board.
Thank you for sharing these points, Daniel. The cautionary tales of seeking out publication are a doozy. I can't believe he lost that much money. I think those types of publishers are called vanity publishers and they charge you up front for the costs of getting your book out there, however, like with what happened to your Latin Professor, there are many scams out there that take advantage of new writers.
I think you should totally create a Substack! I can help you if you'd like. The stories you're writing are really great and your voice is so unique. Honestly, at some point the people signing up after reading your work would want just your stuff, so giving them that option would be the way to go. Plus, you could even post your Cave of Branching Tales novel on there. I've been so excited to publish your stuff on The Storyletter btw. It's been such an honor!
I think based on your input, maybe producing a list of reputable small presses or quality contests looking for submissions would be a neat idea. I think I could totally do that every so often.
So sorry you’ve had all those unpleasant encounters with publishers. I also think it would be great if you had a substack! I already enjoy reading your work here, and I look forward to discovering more!
Ps- the Inferno in Old Scots sounds fascinating. I hope someone publishes it.
Goodness. Right after I hit the send button, I saw several typos in my posts. Apparently, you can’t edit posts to correct those...at least in the app.
Sigh... the app doesn't have any editor capabilities just yet. You only get the option on desktop at the moment. The website version on the phone might work, but I'm not certain.
Something I've thought about in regards to this is how on social media, we say we support one another but then we continue to share mainstream content rather than the content our followers are creating.
We focus on our own creations and works that inspire us and sometimes fail to recognize what is being made around us, at the same level we are at.
Over the past few months, I've come to realize that a big thing that's holds us back is envy & greed. Deep down we all want to make it big because we believe that will bring us happiness in our passions. We then become envious of those who were once at our level but grow to where we wish we can be at. Then there's the greed aspect, which stems from the fact that we want to hold onto our own money to promote our own works instead of purchasing or even just donating a couple bucks a month to creators we "support".
In the end though, what I'm wanting to do is find ways to prop up other creators and organizations that share my same love of storytelling and values. I want to share more works that I enjoy and network in more ways.
I was hoping someone was going to bring this up. I agree with you 100%, Matthew. The further I dig into this concept, the more I realize how right you are that we are stronger together.
That was one of the reasons I started The Storyletter, I saw so many talented people attempting to go at it alone (or at least from my perspective they were), and I wanted to create a place to promote others. I definitely try to share/remind/retweet other indies that are doing cool and unique things.
I'm learning so much about self-publishing, indie creators, and just running a company in general. Granted, I don't have employees, but maybe someday. To get back to your point about envy and greed, I think there is an element of that. I wonder if it also ties into ego, where creators believe that what they are working on is somehow greater. And maybe it is, but the inability to deflate the ego and share time with someone looking for help or collaboration hinders both of their growth.
I struggle with this at times, I admit. But I think I'm getting better at it. Talking with each of you has definitely helped open my eyes to what's going on in the industry.
I wonder if there is a way we could set up an "indie" funnel. The idea would be that like-minded creators join a channel on Discord (or something similar) and when someone drops a link into the channel everyone has to blast it out to their audiences. It would need to be within reason (no nudity or questionable stuff) and maybe have slow-mode enabled so it's not 50 links at once. There's a similar concept called BookFunnel where authors team up on a themed promotion and when it goes live they share each others' work. Thoughts?
Yeah, ego can definitely play a role in it. And I honestly that would be great, but how would we incentivize people to share on their channels. It's hard enough getting people to just like a post. Ik I have a hard time with it, but I feel like if we made a system to get participation in sharing other people's work, that would help.
But then again, there's a different between sharing bcuz you want them to share your own work and sharing bcuz you genuinely like the content and want others to join in the club.
True. Then it would need to start small, really close hold with creators that respect one another, I suppose. Honestly, you wouldn't want to just repost anyone's stuff willy nilly anyway because like you said, you want to be passionate about the content you're sharing so that when you do share it it means something. But the alternative is no one shares it and then it gets 2 likes and lost in the feed forever. Hmmm, if feel like there's something positive there but I don't know what it is!
Exactly! There's some other things I've thought about before but doing them by myself, I never know where to start and a lot of it I feel like requires a full team to get done.
And I actually have a question for you. If you were to hire employees, what kind of jobs would you need to fulfill specifically?
That’s a good question. I haven’t really considered it since I have a day job and this has just been a side project. But if it were to become viable and I made that leap, I think there would need to be a full-time editor, a merchandising/shipping specialist, and PR/marketing specialist. Those 3 things would enhance the business while affording me time to network and build out relationships (and continue writing).
Another route I’m considering is owning a cafe that would double as Storyletter HQ as having a physical location is a dream of mine. Providing a space for people to connect and materialize their projects. So I’d need to hire baristas and staff for that too.
But it’s a huge risk and I haven’t considered all the variables yet haha.
A Storyletter cafe would be awesome! But yeah, that's a big leap and taking it one step at a time is the best thing right now. You are doing great though! With the time you've had, you've made a great home here on substack and I'm definitely looking forward to seeing it grow even more and helping it grow in whatever ways I can.