A Seasonal Newsletter Offers Just The Right Size Audience

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Rega Jha had a problem. Namely that in 2020, Stripe wouldn’t work in India, where she’s based. This meant that it wasn’t going to be possible to set up recurring payments for the newsletter she’d decided to launch. 

Jha, the former editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed India and a longtime freelance writer, was ready for a new project. Needing to have a new opinion every week for her column for the Times of India was wearing her down, and freelancing didn’t pay well. 

But newsletters intrigued her. This was when “Substack was making millionaires in America,” Jha said. Over the years, starting with her work at BuzzFeed she’d built a loyal audience on Instagram — more than 100,000 followers — and she suspected that if she launched a newsletter, her audience might be willing to pay for it.  A paid newsletter seemed like the perfect solution — until she ran into the issue with Stripe.

Substack, like many digital tools, doesn’t actually process credit card payments. They rely on a third party, Stripe, which works in 47 countries around the globe. So if you’re based in North America, Europe, or Australia, and use Substack — or any other email service provider that processes a paid subscription using Stripe — there’s very little stopping you from starting an indie newsletter. In some parts of Asia, like Japan or Thailand, Stripe works.

But if you’re a writer based in India, like Jha, Stripe won’t let you set up an account, which makes collecting recurring payments from readers a complicated, and often manual, process.

But Jha figured out a clever workaround. After speaking with a developer friend, she realized that she still had an option: She could use PayPal to process a one-time payment from interested subscribers, and then send the newsletter via Mailchimp. She decided to charge a flat fee and promised to write for however long the money allowed. Ultimately, those constraints guided Jha toward a new type of newsletter that turned out to be an excellent fit. 

In August 2020, Jha launched Small Scenes, a limited-run paid newsletter of personal writing. It’s all done in English, and akin to a season of a podcast. Subscribers pay up front and get access to the whole run of editions (yes, you can join in the middle). Jha commits to sending a newsletter every two weeks for six months, and then she’s done, free to work on other projects.

And the audience is still large enough to bring in significant revenue for Jha. In 2020, during the first year of Small Scenes, more than 1,000 readers paid 900 rupees each to subscribe — a rate equivalent to about $11. Since she doesn’t accept recurring payments, she has to collect payments all over again when a new season starts. In 2022, a similar number of readers paid to subscribe to her newsletter.

An Audience that’s Just the Right Size

In solving her immediate problem — needing a substitute for recurring payments — Jha inadvertently solved several others. First up was audience size. Small Scenes is an anthology of personal writing, similar to early blogs or Tumblrs. As such, its audience is naturally limited, and in fact, is poorly served by chasing a wide general audience.

“These are thoughts and feelings and experiences,” Jha says. “I had a sense that I did not necessarily want hundreds of thousands of people to have access to that.”

It’s a conundrum familiar to nearly everyone who writes on the internet. Criticism and harassment are common, and many journalists, like Jha, self-sensor in order to avoid some of it. A smaller audience can give a writer more freedom to write about personal or sensitive topics. While screenshots of emails can still go viral, it’s less likely that a bad-faith actor will pay for Small Scenes just to criticize it. 

“I realized that the income question and the privacy question were both sort of contained in a paywall,” says Jha.

A Finite Commitment

Unlike most newsletters, Small Scenes has an end date. Its structure is similar to a podcast or a limited-run TV series. The audience knows what they’re signing up for at the outset, and so does Jha. The first season ran from August 2020 to mid-February 2021. The latest season wrapped in mid-August of this year.

“I like the commitment to a fixed time period and the stated agreement between the readers from the get-go that this is not indefinitely going on,” she said. “I just don’t think I’m capable of infinitely newslettering to regular deadlines without burning out.”

Burnout among independent newsletter creators is a real risk, and staffing during vacation or holidays is a stressor. Large organizations can sometimes arrange cover staffing for a newsletter during planned absences, but small firms and solo creators are less likely to have that backup. Some creators like Ann Friedman or Anne Helen Petersen will contract out “guest hosts” during their vacations. Other newsletters like The Charlotte Ledger might skip weeks for staff time off, or plan a themed week full of interviews or stories planned weeks ahead of time. 

Jha prewrites when she has a conflict with her usual newsletter workflow, like when she attended a friend’s wedding earlier this summer. Otherwise, she moves her schedule around the newsletter season. Small Scenes was originally sent weekly, but Jha downshifted to every two weeks for season two. 

“I realized weekly left me sort of very little time to do anything else,” she said. “I like the newsletter to be this space to express myself and a way to make money that sort of runs in the background while I can also engage with other projects as they come up.”

Continuing to Iterate

Social media, especially Instagram, was integral to Jha’s ability to start and monetize her newsletter. That platform continues to be important for driving signups to Small Scenes. Jha was less active on Instagram in the run-up to season two and believes this is why it took so much longer to match the sign-ups from season one.

“Keeping that audience of your followers activated and ready to pay is part of being able to make money,” she said.

Jha’s experience echoes that of other newsletter writers who use social media as a conversion tool, like Claire Mazur and Erica Cerulo. You might not want to live with it, but you can’t fully live without it either. 

A limited-run series also requires more deliberate planning in advance for community-building aspects, like Q&As or Discord channels, Jha explained. An ongoing newsletter can build momentum and expand slowly, whereas a seasonal newsletter needs to hit the ground running. 

Jha plans to keep writing this way and thinks a seasonal newsletter could take many different forms in the future. She wound down season two in August but is thinking about possibilities for the next season of the newsletter. Travel writing is an obvious fit — subscriptions could fund the trip that she then writes about — as is a bigger reported series. The caveat is that this type of newsletter needs a pre-existing audience that can be counted on to show up for the creator to have confidence they’ll be able to finance their next project. In a way, it’s similar to an author’s newsletter before a book launch when they’re encouraging pre-orders. But for Jha, there’s no going back.

“There’s just so much potential to build so many different types of experiences with this format,” she said, “and I’m going to lean into those possibilities.”

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