How Losing 1000 Substack Subscribers in One Day Gave Me Clarity...
Tips: So You Find Great Connections on Substack
This is not a piece that will help you find more subscribers. It’s about how to keep subscribers when they sign up, with tips I’ve learned from losing 1000 subscribers in a day.
The email when it came through was curt. Unless you remove subscribers who aren’t responding, we’ll do it for you.
And so, dutifully, I did the deed.
1000 subscribers gone in a quick minute.
Let me explain.
I came to Substack about a year ago with a lot of joy and hope. I’m always hopeful—if you know me in person, you probably think of me as a little bit naive. Overly cheerful. Relentlessly positive.
As an author, I’ve worked hard over the years to show up online. I’ve published multiple books for young readers, and part of the joy of that is to be available to readers in the multiple streams social media offers.
But I’ve never been very good at it.
I suspect it’s because I slip and slide wildly in my interests and find consistency difficult. There’s probably a whole lot I could say about social media, consistency, and ADHD, but I’ll save that for another month. This month, we’re looking at how I lost a thousand subscribers in an afternoon, so you don’t have to!
All this backstory is to say that I had slowly been building a Mailchimp newsletter list.
And then rarely writing to them.
When I joined Substack, I brought over my Mailchimp list of over 2500 subscribers.
And began writing to them. Finally. After years of silence. Substack made it easy and fun.
At first, I wrote my pieces like the rare author newsletter I used to send.
Some information about what I was up to
Some book news
Writing tips
Interviews with authors I enjoy
Musings from my author life.
Slowly, here, I realised I loved writing personal essays like this one about living with someone with Alzheimer’s and my four children, two dogs, and writer partner.
On Substack I began to show up more consistently than I ever had before.
It was all going quite well. I gained subscribers in a peaceful uptick.
Until the day I didn’t.
The Cull—as I’ve come to think of it—happened about eight months ago. The email addresses I’d moved over from Mailchimp were a higgledy-piggledy collection gathered over years of different books and different adventures.
When Substack pointed out that I was sending to email addresses that weren’t opening my missives, they were right.
So I did the thing. The thing that made the numbers plummet.
The Cull.
It was long overdue.
It still sucked. Numbers seem like numbers. They seem important.
1000 is a reasonably big number.
But.
That’s the thing that’s not true. Because those were 1000 subscribers I’d failed to attend to. Instead, I’d sent patchy newsletters, inconsistent and random, and never paid attention to what I had.
Now, with fewer subscribers, I have:
The. Most. Beautiful. Connections.
You! Readers who take time to comment and commit and even, sometimes, join me as a paid subscriber. Which makes me so grateful.
Also, I’m different now. I’m attentive.
I lost 1000 Subscribers because I spent years not attending to them. I gathered carelessly and didn’t steward or show up for people who had graciously shared their email and time with me.
What The Cull showed me was that there are easy ways for you to avoid losing subscribers—people who came along to read your writing and support your work.
Here are some tips for you even if you have very few subscribers:
Show up.
Be consistent. Tricky, yes, but much easier when you write something you love. Like the Substack I write now—which I enjoy, and adore.
Enjoy the connections, even if they are small in number. Especially if they are small in number. After all, we’re only made to talk to a small group of people (at most) at a time. And each person who reaches out is worth so much more than a ‘number’.
If people aren’t reading, even if they add to your numbers, trust that if they unsubscribe (or you get a message as I did, which I’ve never heard happen to anyone else, mind!) their journey with you is over. And that’s okay. It’s a good thing.
And if something happens that SUCKS, share it. I promise it feels way better telling you all.
I hope this is helpful in your writing life—and may you never lose 1000 subscribers in a day.
Sent with love,
Alice
xoxo
If you’re new here, my name is Alice Kuipers and I’m a writer, mother and dog-owner transplanted twenty years ago to the Canadian prairies from England. I’ve published fourteen books in 36 countries and my writing has been described as: “For storytellers and story lovers,” by Kirkus Reviews; ‘Gorgeous, heart-ripping, important,” by VOYA; and “Intense and wonderful” by Bif Naked. Join me for a coffee break on here. Xoxo
Alice, if you don’t mind answering, are you saying that Substack contacted you about this? Saying: “Unless you remove subscribers who aren’t responding, we’ll do it for you.”
I’ve just never heard of that before.
Also, I never receive emails from newsletters on Substack; I have emails turned off and read all posts in my Substack inbox. If someone were to cull subscribers who don’t open emails, I would be cut (even though I read nearly every post of every publication that I subscribe to).
Writing a newsletter is toughening up my hide—refining my response to the flurry of Unsubscribe notifications that follow every post. I am learning to wish them well and to understand that it is better for them to move on if my content is not their cup of tea.