after seven years, i'm leaving substack

It’s closing time, folks.

Nearly two and a half years ago, I wrote an essay that went viral, and that has continued to make the rounds since it was first published in January 2024. It was called “substack f***** up and now we have to talk about it,” and it laid out the problems of ~platform~, which can be tl;dr’d as: it is incredibly difficult for artists to rely on corporate distributors (see also what is currently happening at Spotify). It explained why I was, for the time being, staying. I dove deep on the pitfalls of so-called ethical consumerism and on the financial cost of moving a newsletter of substantive size. As someone who has been here since 2019, that essay also offered an overview of the ebb and flow of Hamish & co.’s anti-trans1, pro-Nazi policies.

(Never mind that anyone I talk to who isn’t themselves a writer — or partnered with one — has no idea what Substack is or what it’s for. “Does Substack KNOW their primary audience is writers?” one friend recently asked.)

This is to say: this missive will probably not be helpful for you if you are on here #forfun or for platform growth.

I’m writing this for my fellow working writers and artists who are somehow carving out a living in this recession, whose newsletters are, or are about to be, load-bearing income streams. To be a working writer is to be a small business owner; if we don’t take our money seriously, no one else will.

My newsletter is a core revenue stream of my business as a self-employed person, so what I discuss here may not be relevant for you. But for my fellow self-employed writers and creatives, especially those of you who have also been traditionally published and are long since disabused of the notion that your books can earn enough to pay $3650/month rent in New York City, as my wife and I do —

This is for you.

This year, I’m projecting about $85K in pre-taxed self-employed income, about a quarter of which I initially projected would come from this newsletter. Some operative information re: that number:

HOWEVER! Meg and I also don’t have some major expenses that, regardless of where you live, might eat up your income. No kids, no car, no pets.

The reason I say all of this because it’s critically important that you aren’t comparing your journey as a working writer/artist to someone who is working with a net while you’re up there on the high-wire, staring down at the cement floor beneath.

(And I also feel that it’s important that folks with a net understand just how fucking precarious this line of work is for those of us without!)

There’s a reason a lot of writers keep their 9-5 jobs, and there’s a reason that most of those people don’t have a weekly newsletter that they write on top of their creative work and their work-work. Where would they find the time or energy?! Which is a long way of saying:

Lyz Lenz, Anne Helen Peterson, Sara Petersen, Alicia Kennedy, Frankie de la Cretaz — they’ve all headed for greener pastures, and now that my website relaunch, Mercury Rx, and Book Deal Breakthrough launches are over, I am, too.

I don’t know how to write this without acknowledging what’s going on in the world more broadly, which is honestly also part of why I took my time with this decision over the last year. Was my paid subscriber income, once upwards of $25K annually, rapidly dropping because of Substack, or the economy? Hamish or Donald? (Por que no los dos?)

This is the part where I nod to the fact that here in the US, we are fully in a recession. The dollar is dropping in value. Inflation is at yet another record high, officially outpacing wage growth in the US. Disposable income is cratering as prices skyrocket because of Trump’s asinine tariffs and this catastrophic fuck-up in the Strait of Hormuz. Chicken breasts were like, twenty dollars at our local grocery store last week. The government shutdown impacted so, so many people. SNAP and Medicaid getting cut stretched people who were already stretched way too thin.

It’s not just unsubscribing to newsletter subscriptions, either. My hair stylist and both of the tattoo artists I regularly see are taking massive hits. So are my fellow astrologers and occultists. Across the board, bookings are down. Cancelations are up. And to be completely frank, occultists usually make bank when ~global things~ are scary, so the fact that we uniformly are making less is a sign in and of itself.

Gone are the 2020-2021 days of throwing cash at Patreon tips jars and signing up for 6-month long digital classes. The cash isn’t there, and the attention spans aren’t, either.

Even before the last 18 months consistently brought a downward trend in income quarter over quarter, my open rates — which had consistently hovered between 45 and 48 percent for years — cratered down to the low 30s, seemingly out of nowhere, and there they stayed. My newsletter hadn’t changed, in either content or scheduling. I hadn’t had a big spike in subscriptions that might explain such a change in the math.

But then other writers #onhere texted that the same thing was happening to them.

Folks aren’t reading as much as they used to; they’re exhausted by ICE in their neighborhoods, by the daily terrors of this regime, by the price of fucking chicken breast.

tl;dr In this current moment, writing more, offering more is not the answer to declining newsletter income. Raising prices is risky when disposable income is disappearing. Focusing on audience growth is good, but is not a short-term fix to give your budget more wiggle room next month.

No: it’s time for working writers on Substack to get very fucking real about the cost of doing business on this platform. And maybe you, like me, will realize that the math is no longer in your favor.

I don’t actually have an issue with the 10% cut Substack takes from newsletters — to a point. When getting started, it’s MUCH cheaper and more manageable to give them that 10% than to be eating the $50 and up monthly surcharge at other major newsletter platforms (although some platforms are free up to a certain number of subscribers). For a $5/month newsletter that has maybe 20 paid subscribers, Substack takes $10/month — which is a decent deal, all things considered.

It’s once you start scaling subscribers that it eats into your bank account.

At the newsletter’s peak in late 2024, I had nearly 450 paid subscribers. I knew that at that point the math of the monthly cost was not weighted in my favor, BUT my newsletter was experiencing such exponential subscriber growth that staying here still felt worth it.

But in late 2024, Substack started actively working against newsletter growth. Put another way, they leaned 110% in and went full-tilt on their ongoing pivot from newsletter service to Social Media Platform.

To give you the finances of it: in this last year, I’m down nearly 100 paid subs and have lost ca. 20-22% of my annual income. My audience growth hit a wall in January 2025 and has not recovered.

The biggest names on Substack who have left — some of whom I mentioned above, like my friend Lyz Lenz — have all gone to Patreon, which (and this is important) paid them to bring their audiences over. Which, good! I want good writers to get paid! Patreon is beta testing newsletter functionality right now and has Quips, a kind of Notes, which some of my friends like.

But I’m not looking for a platform. I’m looking for a tool I can use to send out my newsletter. Which Beehiiv is. Alicia Kennedy and Frankie de la Cretaz both moved there and have spoken about enjoying it. Frankie recently shared about what their beehiiv finances have looked like, and the difference from Substack (positively so!) is staggering.

This speaks to the aforementioned tipping point of how at a certain point, it is far more affordable and sustainable to pay $100 a month to a platform than it is to pay out 10% of all subscriptions.

Beehiiv has a monthly fee. Because of the size of my newsletter, I’ll pay just under $100/month — roughly about what I pay for my website hosting every month. Consider that these days, Substack is taking at least $200 in fees every month, and you can see how moving to Beehiiv immediately puts at least $100 more in my pocket every month. I don’t need to tell you that things are tight right now, and that every little bit counts.

Stabilizing my income doesn’t look like charging you more, actually. It looks like me taking responsibility for my back-end systems and making smart, sustainable moves.

Other things that pushed beehiiv over the edge vs. Ghost or Patreon:

I have no illusions that any platform will have perfect politics, but I do know that the bare minimum is not fucking over your primary audience.

You the already-subscribed don’t have to do anything. Throughout the rest of May, I am going to transition us out of Substack and onto beehiiv. There will be forthcoming emails with the technical to-do, but I don’t want to overload you with the ~why~ and the ~how~ in the same missive.

The last business-as-usual newsletter on Substack will be tomorrow’s New Moon in Taurus missive. After, it’ll just be transition updates and instructions!

However, I do want to flag for paid subscribers that unfortunately, due to longstanding, behind the scenes issues, I will not be able to seamlessly transfer paid subscriptions from one platform to another. (I am NOT looking for advice here. I’ve spoken with Stripe at length. Do not mansplain my own business to me.)

This means that paid subscribers will have to manually resubscribe on beehiiv.

This is part of what has delayed my transition: there will, inevitably, be a significant subscriber churn (and ironically, an initial pay cut) as I pause subscriptions here on Substack. (I can only afford to do this because of the success of my new workshop Book Deal Breakthrough, which has bought me a precious buffer to accommodate this transition.)

Another appealing facet of beehiiv is that they offer tiered subscription offers. More on those coming soon, but I do want to flag for folks early that the Discord-inclusive tier will be $12/month. (Folks already active in the astrology for writers Discord: we’ll be discussing how to make this affordable for folks for whom this is a stretch!)

Shorter, more detailed timelines and how-to’s coming soon.

Love y’all. Thank you for allowing me in your inbox these last seven years. I don’t take your attention and energy for granted. And I hope to be in your inbox again at the end of the month.