some meta newsletter thoughts

and a question for YOU

Edit: The overwhelming response poll-wise (and hard subscription numbers–wise) is interest in the subject, but lack of interest in subscribing for it. So we’ll see if I think I can do it, but it’s likely that it will be free to read. Thanks for your input, everybody!

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Every attempt I’ve made to routinize this newsletter has led to me

• freaking out about providing value for money

• being late because I’m so obsessed with providing value for money

• freaking out that now I have to provide something so superlatively amazing that no one will care it’s late

• repeat until complete collapse

For this reason I have settled on what I do now, which is… update whenever and have everything paywalled after a certain period of time. It’s like I’m busking over here, more or less. (And I keep the comments paywalled because I don’t want to deal with people who don’t know my deal and / or spam, but that’s another story.) It’s the only way I am productive.

I avoid any granular subscriber details here. For instance, Substack notifies you by default when individual people subscribe / pay / unsubscribe, but I have all of that switched off—unless you comment or email me, I have no idea who is subscribed, who is reading or not reading, paying or not paying, or anything like that.

But there’s a certain level of info that Substack shoves in your face whether you like it or not. (So from this I know that about half of you open the newsletters, and one or two of you often switch to paid after a newsletter goes out (thank you, by the way!). Thus the paid subscriber base continues to grow, albeit probably a little slower than if I had some “I update three times a week, if you want X you have to pay” set up. (Plus, I do not promote this newsletter elsewhere because… I don’t really have an elsewhere anymore.)

And this works for me even though it’s (kind of) a bad business plan, because it is the plan that I will actually do. But here are the cold hard subscriber numbers (as of Sunday afternoon, which is when I wrote this), if you’re curious:

It is thus with some trepidation that I want to float the idea of doing a paywalled series, because I am worried about repeating this cycle. But I want to float it among us (paid and unpaid alike! unpaid subscribers can comment on this one!) to get a sense of if you’d want this or if you feel like eh… can take or leave.

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Recently I picked up a book by my old neighbor, Sofia Coppola. (I did not ever meet her, but I did meet her dog.) The book is extremely cool—basically an archival scrapbook of all her movies. So I was looking at this and I thought: why not do a Substack series of posts where I read through the archive and watch the movies and so on?

We’d do it chronologically, there could even be a couple different kinds of posts per movie if that seemed like a good idea, I could also read / watch the material around the Coppola movies (the Antonia Fraser Marie Antoinette book, the original Beguiled movie, etc) if that seemed relevant…. But basically, at minimum, at least one essay post per movie that’s in the book.

And then, of course… Priscilla is coming.

But… this would be a project that’s expensive in terms of money and time: buying copies of things, watching them, doing the reading, and so on. I don’t mind that I don’t make a lot of money off this substack, but I don’t want to lose money on it.

So the questions from me, to you, are:

Everybody can comment on this post so please feel free to chime in… I think if between 10–20 of you are interested enough to subscribe (meaning, actually subscribe, not just vote) I will go for it. (And of course I’m interested in the thoughts of those of you who already pay.)