Ways Your Newsletter Can Pay Off — That Don’t Involve Reader Revenue or Ads

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A few years ago, Substack made a change that I didn’t like: They added a graph to their dashboard that shows how many paid and free subscribers you have, with up and down arrows to show where you’ve improved and what ground you’ve lost. It’s the first thing you see when you log in. You can’t avoid it.

If you’re the kind of writer who obsesses over every metric — particularly around revenue — you probably loved this change. But I liked it better when your home page was a launching place for writing a blank post. Suddenly it felt gamified against my permission, telling me where I was succeeding (growing) or failing (stagnancy) or extra-failing (loss). I don’t market my newsletter, Evil Witches, or paid subscription aggressively, and I’m happy with the income my newsletter brings me, but now I felt a pang measured in numbers every time I logged in. 

We’ve written before about different ways to measure success with your newsletter. Our advice has been to judge the success of a newsletter based on metrics in four different buckets:

• Engagement — These are metrics that measure how readers actually engage with your newsletter, including open rate, click rate, traffic to your site, or unsubscribe rate.
• Growth — These are metrics that show you how fast or how effectively you’re growing. That might include overall list growth, conversion rate on a landing page, or the cost to acquire a new email via a paid ad.
• Monetization — These are metrics tied to revenue from your newsletter, like the lifetime value of a reader, click rate on ads, or sales from the newsletter for a paid product.
• Feedback — These metrics show you how much readers tell you they like your newsletter, whether that’s through polls, surveys, or direct replies to your emails.

But I realized something recently: Regardless of those judgy up and down arrows, my newsletter has given me a lot more opportunities and revenues that live beyond some of those basic metrics. Newsletters can open unexpected doors for their writers. You might not be able to measure the positive outcomes on a dashboard, but they can still be impactful — and in some cases, even life changing.

Job offers or new paying work

Sam Shedden publishes The Melbourne Snap, a local news source in Australia. Originally from Scotland, Sheddon began publishing it in 2024 after relocating to Australia. Sam had previously worked with some senior leaders at Reach, the U.K. and Ireland’s largest commercial news publisher, and they observed his work on the Snap. “The chat was like, ‘Well, this is interesting. Could you do something for us?’” he said. 

Reach eventually hired him to write a newsletter for them and to help train their journalists to help the company launch 30 new newsletters for them. “The corporate gig came because of my experience with the Snap,” he said.

I’ve seen much of this myself. Evanston RoundTable, a local newsroom in my community, launched a parenting newsletter, Raising Evanston, which goes out to over 12,000 readers a week. Because of my work in the newsletter space — and my local ties — they hired me to write the newsletter for them. 

This work’s led to plenty of other paid opportunities, too. I regularly get freelance offers from my newsletter to write for alumni magazines or digital publications. But here’s where it gets really meta: My newsletter led to work writing about newsletters which has led to some paid consulting — about newsletters. After all, if I hadn’t entered the world of newsletters, I wouldn’t have seen, applied for and gotten a regular job writing and editing about newsletters for Inbox Collective. Some of that work has led to opportunities to do some consulting on the topic. In the last few years, I received a tiny honorarium for speaking to an undergraduate classroom about newsletters, and a not-so-tiny honorarium for consulting with a newsletter group at the Gates Foundation.

Finding new collaborators or clients

Diana Lind writes the design newsletter The New Urban Order, which is about the future of cities, and her newsletter has netted her not just readers but work partners. She met one colleague after reading her work online. “I was like, ‘If we lived in the same city, I would ask you for a coffee, and since we don’t, let’s just do Zoom,’” she said. Staying in touch, they realized they were attending the same conference and even pitched a panel together.

Matthew Karmel is a New Jersey based attorney who works for the law firm Offit Kurman but also runs a newsletter called the Planetary Lawyer Project. He said that often, his newsletter issues serve as a calling card that gets shared with like-minded clients and colleagues. “There have been several different instances, including large companies, where I’ve been able to authentically share my passion with someone else and therefore build a relationship that drives further work.” Sharing his experience and insight with an audience raises his visibility. “It’s hard for me to get in the same rooms as a lawyer of a Fortune 100 company or in the bigger institutional legal departments,” he said. “If I start talking about climate pro bono, that’s a very easy way to get into those rooms.” He knows that it’s the passion and work he puts into the newsletter that make potential future colleagues start to read him. “None of it would work if I wasn’t authentic and I didn’t really care about these things.”

Karmel has even used his newsletter to launch small working Zoom groups to discuss timely topics and share what they’re working on. “That’s intended to facilitate collaboration, coordination, meeting people, so getting to know people on a different level and bringing them out of the engaged subscriber list into something more active,” he said,” and build the network of potential clients that way.”

Landing speaking gigs

Christopher Pepper writes the newsletter Teen Health Today while holding down a full-time job in San Francisco public schools. The newsletter boosts his profile and keeps him front and center in people’s minds when they need experts. “When my readers, many of whom are school leaders, are thinking of potential speakers to bring in to talk to their staff and/or their parent community, I seem like a known and trusted resource,” Pepper said. “Those speaking gigs pay well, and they are fun.”

For Dan Oshinsky of Inbox Collective, having a newsletter has directly led to dozens of speaking gigs over the years. “Just this year, I got the chance to travel to Denmark twice, once to keynote a conference, and the other to lead a multi-day workshop,” he said. “Both of those opportunities came about because readers wrote back to my newsletter and invited me to speak.” Some of these opportunities are paid — ranging anywhere from a small honorarium to thousands of dollars for a talk, Oshinsky said — but for a newsletter writer who’s just starting out, even getting an unpaid opportunity to speak might lead to bigger, paid gigs down the road.

Landing book deals and selling books

Some creators aspire to add the title “author” to their resumes, and their newsletter can be a great way to send out samples of their work, show that they can write for the long haul and to get their work in front of the right eyes. I myself have had a few publishers and agents reach out to me asking if I would be interested in writing a parenting book based on my newsletter’s point of view. (I was flattered but declined. I’ve written books; it’s hard!) But writer Mikala Jamison, who publishes the Body Type newsletter, is an example of someone whose newsletter turned her into an author.

“I think I’m a good example of how the ‘little guy’ can still do well in the newsletter world,” Jamison said in an interview. She launched her newsletter, which covers body type discourse, without an existing audience, without many connections or a big social media platform. But as her audience grew, she got a literary agent and landed a book deal from her newsletter. That book — “The Forever Project: How Exercise Helps Us Like Our Bodies (And Ourselves) For the Long Haul” — comes out next year. “And in a little twist of fate, the COO of my now-publisher, New Harbinger Publications, was already a Body Type reader,” she said.

Kate McKean — whom Inbox Collective covered about a few years ago — is another writer whose newsletter launched a book deal. In McKean’s case, it’s noteworthy that she already had a job in publishing, but it was her newsletter, Agents and Books, that got her over the finish line after attempts at selling other books didn’t succeed. When she started her newsletter in 2019, on the nuts, bolts, and emotions of publishing, she thought it could lead to a book deal. She was right: her book, “Write Through It,” came out this spring. “I couldn’t believe I was getting ‘the call,’” she wrote after her book sold. “The same call I’ve made probably a hundred times, if not more. I’ve wanted it so badly for so long. And it finally happened.”

Newsletters can open other doors for these authors. McKean scored a blurb for her book from author Sarah Knight, who was already an Agents and Books reader. Pepper, who is currently promoting his new book, “Talk To Your Boys,” uses his newsletter to sell books and get readers out to book events. “The newsletter is my biggest media platform, and I try to create a relationship with readers and provide them with information and support they find valuable,” he said. “My hope is that some of those readers will be early buyers of the book.” 

Creating impact in their community

In 2024, Liz Nelson Kelly launched the newsletter Project C, which covers creator-model journalism, to inform and bring together writers looking for a new path after they’d been burned, editorially and financially, by the traditional news world. After working many years for companies like Gannett and Vox, she realized she wanted to address the question: “What will I do to help foster this ecosystem going forward?”

She’ll be the first to say that Project C is not a money driver. “It is top-of-funnel for me,” she said, meaning that the newsletter helps attract readers who are starting to consider launching their own media property. “I want people who are curious about creator-model journalism, who are thinking, ‘Could I do this?’ to have a place to go to learn about the space.” The newsletter is successful, she said, in that it establishes her as an authority in the field — and that leads to consulting jobs. There is a revenue strategy tied to Project C — she has a paid community that readers can join to learn from one another. “We now have 109 creator model journalists who are all in the Project C community helping one another every single day,” she said. Plus, she offers an eight-week workshop, Going Solo, for anyone interested in making the leap into the creator world. She said that there were over 130 people on the waitlist for the upcoming cohort, which “tells me that there’s a need, that people are continuing to see this as a path, and we’re there and we’re helping them.”

Joy Mayer is another journalist who turned to newsletters to inform and support other writers. She runs Trusting News, a non-profit that trains journalists to earn the trust of their communities, and sends action items out via the newsletter Trust Tips. She first dipped her toe into the community-building world via the now-defunct journalism platform Gather. “The purpose of that newsletter was to connect people doing similar work in different newsrooms who otherwise felt alone,” she said. Through that experience, she saw the power in building connections, especially so other professionals could find commiseration and solutions from each other. There was “so much listening, so much amplifying and supporting of people doing good work,” she said. “The feeling of shepherding that on behalf of the community was really powerful.”

She applied that same mentality to Trust Tips and feels validated by the effort. “When journalists subscribe to a newsletter that is fundamentally about training,” she said, “there’s an aspiration there: ‘I want to be the kind of journalist that takes time to learn things and that is making bandwidth for exploring new ideas and changing our routines.’” She takes satisfaction in having built a network for these types of journalists., “There’s something very special about people having invited us into their inbox and being reminded once a week that we’re here.”

Launching events with readers

Lind, of The New Urban Order, said that one of her professional aims is to build community, and so she has leveraged her newsletter readership to host events where she can meet up with her subscribers, who pay to attend. “There’s some revenue from that,” she said. “But I’ve actually made some genuine friends and contacts as a result of it.” Some readers she met at one joined her in collaborating to enter a competition for re-imagining San Francisco’s Market Street. At another event in Detroit, Lind met someone who helped her launch what would become her book club. “Beyond the subscriptions and the revenue that comes with it, the [newsletter] has been a source of new collaborators and people who are really passionate about some of the same issues that I am.” she said. “And I feel like especially in these times, deeply connecting with people who are interested in the same topics has been for me, just a real source of joy.”

Lind noticed something interesting when she launched her book club. She initially made it only available to paid subscribers, but interest among that base was low, so she opened it up to everyone — and even though she didn’t expect it, that choice actually did have an impact on her newsletter revenue. “The group was maybe half subscribers, half not. But what happened is the people who weren’t subscribers afterwards then became subscribers, because they thought, ‘This was really fun and I appreciate you now more,’” which she sees as a different way of enticing readers to subscribe beyond just paywalls. “Sometimes by providing something for free to someone, they will then later realize, ‘How am I going to be a part of this community and not support it in some fashion?’” she said. 

They’ve made new friends

Lind doesn’t just host events because she thinks it’s good business. She really wants to talk to her readers and likes being with her audience. “It doesn’t feel like it’s just a bunch of randos,” she said. “It’s people who have above-average interest in a particular topic, and I think as a result, are maybe a little bit more interesting.” She credits keeping her events to groups of no more than ten people or so “so that we can still get a dinner reservation.” 

Caitlin Dewey, who publishes Links I Would Gchat You If We Were Friends, told me about two women in Buffalo, New York, who were among her earliest and most devoted and engaged subscribers when she launched her newsletter from Washington, D.C. In 2018, she moved to Buffalo, knowing nobody — except the two subscribers who reached out to her.  “We hung out a couple times,” she said “Fast-forward seven years, they were the ones who threw my baby shower a couple months ago. They’re among my best friends. Our partners are all friends. It’s a wonderful thing. It so exceeds the newsletter.” 

This friendship has come full circle when it comes to the newsletter in that her friendship strengthens her writing. “When I am writing the newsletter, if I’m on the fence about writing something, I have this helpful sort of concrete target audience with these two friends,” Dewey said. “And so whenever I’m deciding making an editorial choice, I just think to myself, ‘Will Katie and Christine be interested in this?’ And if the answer is no, then it’s probably not a fit for my newsletter.”

Setting new goals for the year ahead

While there’s no playbook for launching a newsletter that helps you meet lifelong friends, it is worth thinking about success with your newsletter that goes beyond the stuff you can measure.

Think about setting a few types of goals for the next year with your newsletter:

• Personal goals — These are the goals you set just for yourself. For instance, you can use your newsletter to build a weekly writing habit.
• Professional goals — These are the goals tied to things that can help you in your career. Maybe your newsletter is a side project for now, but you want to use it to help you land your first speaking gig.
• Leadership goals — These are things you want to do to improve your industry. That might mean creating spaces where others can get the chance to learn, or creating platforms — from small Zoom calls to a new industry award — that helps elevate underrepresented voices.
• Learning goals — These are goals tied to skills you want to learn. A lot of newsletter writers these days, for instance, are using their newsletter as a place where they can experiment with various AI tools that they hope to use more in their daily workflow.

Setting new types of goals can help you start to identify new ways that your newsletter can help you over time. You may find that your newsletter is excelling in multiple ways, even if you can’t always measure them.