525,600 minutes on Substack
Taking stock
It’s time to look back on the year I’ve been writing on Substack.
In 525,600 minutes1 (aka 1 year), Interested In Things has seen:
43 posts
108 subscribers
2 name changes
3 Substack recommendations
Countless hours writing, reading, commenting, posting, studying, obsessing
I don’t know if it’s an exaggeration to say it’s taken over my life!
It all started with a short story about an asteroid. Having mostly written novels up until that point, I let things get deep, and the story was long. Too long. 10 thousand words long, give or take.
But the feedback I got from beta readers prior to publication gave me confidence:
This is brilliant! Really really brilliant.
Unexpected, entertaining and clever.
Wow, Shoni this is so bloody gripping!
It seems so prescient and urgent with all that’s going on in the world, conflict wise.
My very generous friend Heidi became the first contributor when she agreed to take the outline and feed it to ChatGPT to make an equivalent version written by AI.
It was a gimmick but it was fun, and we both wrote about our experiences.
And then I was off to the races. Aiming to publish once a week, I wrote stories, but that’s not all. I tried essays, interviews, poems, just whatever sprang to mind.
I did a Substack building course with
, where I learned some amazing techniques and strategies, including pitching. She encouraged us to do 5 pitches a week, and I immediately wrote to my favorite author, Andy Weir, with a bunch of interview questions. Amazingly, he answered them!The result blew everything else I’d done out of the water in terms of engagement.
I scored another interview, this time with another Substack writer,
, who interacted a lot more deeply than Andy had, and even shared the post, which drove engagement and views:
I drew on my experience to write up some stories from my travels, and these did as well, if not better, than my fiction.
Fiction wasn’t going well. I had the (I thought) brilliant idea of writing a South Park-style parody of the crazy drama that was going on at OpenAI, when Sam Altman got fired, the board got removed, Sam came back, Ilya saw something, then left, the entire safety team bailed…
It took a few weeks to write, during which I didn’t publish, and it bloomed into a huge story. The draft in Google Docs is over 11k words long. Having learned that this was too long for Substack, I split the story up and released it as a series. It crashed hard.
I never bothered to polish and release the final chapter, but if anyone was into it and wants to read, let me know.
I rebuilt my confidence with some shorter stories, including The Extra, which was selected by Top in Fiction, a publication that gathers and recognises fiction across Substack.
Then, I noticed something.
During all this time, I had also been actively engaging with other writing and writers on Substack, discovering and subscribing all over the place. Around this time, my subscriber count overtook the number of others I subscribed to (I think it was around the 50-mark). It made me think about what I was actually doing here. Why did I start this thing?
The real reason was to publish my book, Journey to Kyron.
So publish I did. Four posts covering the first chapter-and-a-bit came out, as well as a companion piece around the world building. Watching the % open stats drop scared me, and I stopped.
This was a story I’d been working on for over 15 years, on and off. I wasn’t sure I could handle the reception. I wrote about my writing, and then went back to personal essays and short stories.
I reached out to a few more people for interviews, but nothing has materialised just yet (
still waiting on your final reply!!) Same for competitions and collabs.I opened up paid subscriptions so I could write some more gritty content and for the first time became a paid author!
Deciding to get even more personal, I wrote about the biggest trauma of my life, my dad’s suicide. It was more widely read than anything I’d done before. My biggest hit.
These numbers all seem tiny compared to a lot of publications that show their growth or sell their methods, and it’s a constant struggle not to compare myself to others.
It’s also a constant struggle to keep writing to publish.
I haven’t released anything for a few weeks now, and not because I’m working on a long story or the book. I’m writing every day, but only in journals. I’m posting every day, but mostly on Twitter and Notes.
They say that it takes around 5 years of consistency to build something, so it’s early days for me. The journey is volatile, scary, and rewarding. I love writing but sometimes berate myself for not feeling like it, not being inspired, thinking too much about the audience, not providing enough value to an audience, being too self-involved, not having a well-defined niche, etc, etc, etc.
I’ve gotten past the terror of the Send to Everyone Now button, but the gradual anxiety of waiting for a response - any response - got so gut-wrenching that I turned off notifications.
Making connections with people online is odd, but everyone I’ve met has been kind and respectful.
I’ve discovered some great writers, some with huge followings, some with just a few loyal fans.
My favorite recent discoveries have been
(sex worker who hates sex work) and (medical doctor who hates “western” medicine).Newsletters that I look forward to and open as soon as they hit my inbox are these:
Elle not only envisions a bright future for all humanity, she goes out into the world and explores where it’s already happening and what more could be done.
Aella does sex data like no one else, and her essays are always thought-provoking.
Owen sums up the tech news each fortnight so I don’t have to.
Kristy is a woman after my own heart. Don’t wait for permission, just go out and LIVE!
Eleanor makes me laugh out loud with every post.
And my guilty pleasure,
, with his aggressive but inspiring life advice.Favorite fiction is
and and of course a special mention to , who not only writes great fiction, but is always there supporting and cheering on other writers on the platform.I’ve been actively supported by
, , , and , among many others, so huge thanks to you for all the conversations, feedback, and encouragement.Super huge thanks to all the readers. You have no idea how much a like, comment, private message, or share means to me or any author that you follow online. It really chases away the monsters who are constantly at our backs.
And of course, my biggest fan, Pierre, who reads any draft I put in front of him and gives his honest opinion. And likes all the posts. And adds me to sci-fi groups on Facebook. And is a paid subscriber. And puts up with me spending all my mornings, evenings, and weekends writing or complaining that I don’t have enough time to write. Merci, mon amour. Je t’aime!
I can’t tell you what the next year will bring for Interested In Things. My hope is that it will be fun, interesting, informative, and entertaining in equal measure!
Some ideas:
The tech landscape is moving so fast that I have plenty of material to work with, so more short stories
I have only barely scratched the surface of the possible travel stories and personal essays that I could write
I recently started The Artist’s Way, a Course in Discovering and Recovering your Creative Self, by Julia Cameron, so I could share my progress and invite you to join me if you feel creatively blocked (not limited to creative writing)
Journey to Kyron is waiting patiently to continue, along with companion pieces on things like food, relationships, spaceship design, and the geography of exoplanets
Please let me know in the comments what you’ve enjoyed, what hasn’t hit home, and what you’d like to see more of.
Much love,
Shoni
Thanks for the shoutout! Doing what I can.
Thanks for the shoutout!
I've stopped worrying about the open rates - I don't actually understand what it means anyway. And I'm not entirely sure if the data is correct, as I think different programs do or don't send the data, and I don't know how the app works, and, and... So if it makes you feel a bit better my open rate hovers around the 25-30% mark, and I get around 10% of that in terms of likes/comments.
Whilst to begin with you sort of get disheartened, once you start thinking 'I'm going to write for myself first', then you sort of trust that a filter comes into play, where people who like it will stay and those who don't will leave, until you eventually get a loyal base of subscribers who do read your stuff (even if it doesn't register on the open rate thing) and that's the point when you start feeling good about the whole thing. So I now have 95 subscribers, which might not seem like a lot to most people, but to me, that's something. It's the fact that half of them have remained subscribers for around six months now that makes me happy and positive.
And I do love the way people support each other on Substack. That's real friendship, that is, and it means the world...