stats of the stack
an advent gift for nosy people
For the past two years I’ve done a “year in review” stats post. Here’s 2023 and 2024. Some people have the ability not to take things personally such that they can get really into the nitty gritty of stats. They know exactly how many people unsubscribe when they send out a post. They monitor who subscribes and who pays and what they click on and so on.
I am not one of those people. I really cannot handle that level of knowledge. It makes me feel like a stupid baby that I can’t. On the other hand, this moment to moment knowledge isn’t very useful even if you aren’t a stupid baby.
All numbers are from December 1, 2024 to November 30, 2025.
Subscribers
November 2024
5,354 total subscribers
251 paid subscribers (~4.7% of total)
November 2025
9,205 total subscribers (~71% growth)
346 paid subscribers (~3.7% of total; ~38% growth)
I’m going to make a prediction that next year will not see dramatic growth like this year’s. This year had the book announcement and the ghost stories popped up in the Substack Post a couple times and so on. I predict much smaller-scale growth in 2026. Like… 10%. That’s my prediction.
Who reads this newsletter? Here are some audience snapshots.
What do people who read this newsletter also read? They read John Ganz, Jessica DeFino, and Max Read. (The other three Substacks are so huge that I think they are less noteworthy; there it’s more like “this newsletter also has a readership overlap with the New York Times.”) To distill those reading choices down to one character trait: about a fifth of this readership is full of cranks. (I am also a crank.)
There were 154 posts. Who ruled, who drooled? Well.…
The Most Popular Post
At 16,009 views, this one is the winner. I assume it got linked some place? I guess I could try to find out. I will not do this. Let’s enjoy the mystery.
The Least Popular Post1
I thought the post about Mr. Soft Touch was going to continue the curse of “posts about old movies nobody cares about” but it survived. And that’s all thanks to you, the people who care about old movies that nobody cares about. You know who you are. Instead, we’ve got a mid-series Evangelion episode post (3,718 views). In a sense, not that surprising, but also kind of surprising in that it’s lower than other Evangelion episodes. (The least popular “general” post is this one about Tomie.)
The thing is that unless a piece gets picked up elsewhere, a pretty reliable percentage of people read everything, which means that posts earlier in the year are probably always going to make this slot if the subscriber list grows. If I were better at statistics I could not doubt adjust for this but I’m not.
And I’m not going to be.
That’s the BDM promise.
The Post That Brought In The Most Subscribers (Free)
269 free (eight paid). The people love ghost stories, what can I say? (I do have some limited “take-aways” from the ghost story experience, which I will get into below.)
The Post That Brought In The Most Subscribers (Paid)
For a while it really seemed like the February ghost story was also going to be the winner here. But the Swifties claimed the crown here with twelve paid subscriptions.
What I take from this one is that Swifties are the most employed fandom.2
The Most Popular Ghost Story
I mean… it’s February (11,326 views). After that, though, it’s October.
(6,191 views.)
The Least Popular Ghost Story
(4,665 views.)
What else?
This was a weird year for me—good professionally (sold a book!), bad personally (let’s skip that). Around 2021, I broke a mirror and I’m beginning to think that there’s something to that superstition. Seven years feels like an awfully long time, though. I didn’t break it on purpose! It just fell over! Let’s negotiate.3
The biggest thing I did this year for the newsletter was the ghost stories. The main point of writing the ghost stories was to write ghost stories. I am pleased that I did this and I found it really exciting and rewarding to do, and I think it was better for me to do things this way than tinkering around with fiction fragments in notebooks.
As far as “newsletter publishing” goes, though, the ghost story experiment was pretty successful. Their readership remained basically at the same level as everything else. For eleven out of the twelve, nothing really mattered that much when it came to readership: not length, subject matter, weirdness, or how much something was shared or not shared on Substack.4 I could basically try whatever I wanted and you guys were game to read it.
For people who want to do fiction on Substack (or another newsletter platform), the advice I would give, based on my own experiences here, is:
It helps to have a set day you’re publishing the stories. It doesn’t have to be the first of the month but of course that’s easy for people to remember.
It also helps to work under creative constraints. In this case, the constraints were (1) they were all ghost stories (2) they were written the month before.
It probably helps, beyond the “creative constraint” angle, to have a theme… but a theme can be broad. You could have a year where every story features a beagle in some capacity. You could have a year where each story is written following a different writer’s “how to write a story” advice. Many possibilities.
Newsletters are better suited to some work over others. Some stories need print. You can do whatever you want at any time you want, but if you have a very densely written work of social realism you may not be putting it in the best place if you publish it here.
I do practice a kind of purposeful randomness on here, and I think that means people who read posts on here at all are more likely to read everything, whereas if I had a more targeted newsletter it might be harder to experiment with fiction. In any case—I’m happy with the twelve stories I wrote. I don’t know if anything will ever happen with them or if they’ll just live in the archive.
The other big thing I did with the newsletter this year was attempt to take February off. I will probably do that again in some form.
Since the perfume posts are sent only to the paid list, they are all excluded. The most popular perfume post was BPAL (507 views), the least popular was Providence Perfume Company (371 views), and the one that drove the most subscriptions is a tie between Cirrus (two free) and Eris (one free, one paid).
Jobless BDM is an outlier and should not be counted.
Actually… I might have broken two mirrors. I can’t remember. If I did I hope my sentence can be served concurrently and not consecutively.
With the big exception, naturally, of February.
keep on rockin bdm
I keep meaning to thank you for the Cirrus Perfumes post—I was intrigued by some of the fragrances and ordered a sample set, and to my great surprise, the one I ended up LOVING was "Bellano." (I don't usually like gentle florals!) Just purchased a full-sized bottle of it in the Black Friday sale even though it's more of a summer perfume.