 | These stories are presented thanks to Litmus, an all-in-one email marketing solution that enables your team to send error-free emails and drive immediate impact — regardless of their technical coding knowledge. Their tool helps you create messages that can cut through the clutter and rise above the rest. Learn why 700,000+ users across companies of all industries and sizes trust Litmus to create effective email campaigns that convert. |
My newsletter story begins in December of 2019, barely a week after my tribe, The Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians, received federal recognition. This finally arrived after more than 150 years of effort to prove our legitimacy. The landmark event is the “happy ending” of the narrative of a book I had signed a contract to write just a couple months prior. The newsletter, in my initial plan, was to be something of a companion piece to the writing of the book, which is about the tribe, my familial relation to it, and my efforts in reconnecting with my Indigenous heritage.
I’m always on the lookout for opportunities to express an Indigenous perspective out into the world. This perspective is what I describe my newsletter, “An Irritable Métis”, as being about: thoughts from a crabby middle-aged Native guy with plenty of meandering, often contrary, regularly hypocritical, and occasionally self-contradictory ideas about the world. Writing the newsletter is sometimes tedious, but so is putting on pants. Both are things I have to do to live the life I am living.
Publications need more Native perspectives and I am happy to offer mine, so I keep one eye out for them, if a passive one. These opportunities come my way more and more often either way, whether I am watching for them or not, almost entirely the result of my newsletter. This is by design.
It is rare that I query a publication with a story idea. I largely threw in the towel on that process years ago because it isn’t worth the time or frustration involved, at least from my perspective. I decided that I was better off just writing what I want to write and hopefully creating an audience for the things I write about, rather than exert as much effort in telling a story as I do in convincing a third party that the story was worth telling in the first place. It was a gamble but it has paid off for me.
Despite all my best intentions, my commitment to actually writing the newsletter faltered right out of the gate: It went dormant for four months. I can’t say what was different about my attitude toward it when I picked it back up again in earnest, but since May of 2020 I haven’t had a single month with fewer than three or four posts, and some with as many as eight. The content quickly became not so much a companion piece to the book — Becoming Little Shell, which should finally hit the streets late summer/early fall of 2023 — but a separate-yet-connected thing of its own.
I never intended to monetize this work. I didn’t figure it would be worth the hassle. I also didn’t expect it to succeed and I feared that disappointment, however predictable, would derail my efforts to build an audience that might be interested in my upcoming book. And an audience was growing! Not rapidly, but slowly and steadily. It wasn’t until almost a year after picking the writing back up with serious intention that a friend of mine, Anne Helen Petersen, who writes “Culture Study,” took me by the proverbial ear and did some “napkin math” on my behalf. She basically convinced me I was being foolish if I didn’t give paid subscriptions a try. So I did, in March of 2021, using Substack.
I write whatever I want to for “An Irritable Métis.” I don’t have a set schedule; I aim for two posts a week but depending on how busy I am — I am often busy with other things — I’m happy if I can manage one. I almost always do. Sometimes they are long think pieces and rants, other times they are hardly more than a collection of promotional bits for other things I’m doing. It’s all pretty random but also reasonably coherent. I don’t imagine there’s been anything that has arrived in the inboxes of my several thousand readers that has been entirely unexpected.
Of those several thousand readers, about 13 percent pay either $5 every month or $50 a year (most opt for the latter) for the opportunity, which is a little higher than what I might have expected –– especially since nearly everything I write in my newsletter is available to all readers, regardless of subscriber status. I’m guaranteeing readers nothing so far beyond eternal gratitude, though that’s been enough for now.
Aside from putting a beer in one hand and my book proposal in the other of the person who would be my eventual editor and book publisher, opening up a paid option for “An Irritable Métis” was without a doubt the most significant decision I’ve yet made in my writing career. In just a few months I was making more money than I was making as a part-time bookseller (a gig I often described as my “freelance career”). When I hit that crossroads I had another decision to make: keep the job — one with its share of headaches but also one populated by dear friends and a menagerie of delightful personalities — or go all in with the writing, propped-up as it was by the newsletter income. I chose the latter.
Now I make my living as a full-time writer. The newsletter is a huge part of that, often providing half of my monthly income; an amount, with my low overhead, I can live on. Nor does “full-time” writer mean it is all pen-on-paper, fingers-on-keyboard writing. It is largely writing-adjacent gigs, like teaching workshops, both in person and online. I teach poetry to reservation kids in the winter, and I’m just wrapping up teaching a storytelling class at the university level (my personal academic career ended with a high school diploma). I also pick up checks here and there doing speaking gigs, whether keynote addresses at conferences or presenting the story of the Little Shell for anyone who asks me to. It is a living cobbled together through various income sources that enables me to not be hassled by a boss more arrogant and unreasonable than myself.
Without the newsletter I might not be doing all this. Or if I was, I would be more prone to taking on gigs I might not want to but have to for the money. The newsletter income does allow me plenty of opportunities to say no, if only to myself, to work I don’t want to do, and that, more than anything, is the true gift.
| Thanks to our sponsors |
|---|
| The stories you’re reading on inboxcollective.com are made possible thanks to the generous support of our fall sponsors: ∙ Litmus, an all-in-one email marketing solution to help you create campaigns that convert ∙ Who Sponsors Stuff, a tool to help you find relevant sponsors for your newsletter |
