These 5 Newsletters Took A Break From Publishing. Here’s How They Did It.

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Making the decision to take extended leave as an independent publisher or newsletter author can be daunting, especially if a person is running their operation solo or with a small team.

Writers are increasingly taking much-needed time away for a variety of reasons, including to grow their families or take care of loved ones, recharge with a vacation, cope with burnout, or reimagine what their newsletter might look like in the future. 

Publishers have to make a lot of judgment calls about how to structure their leave — especially if it’s for a month or more — and answer questions about when to tell readers, whether to schedule sends while they’re off and how to keep growing their operation while they’re away.

For example, when I took maternity leave from my newsletter early this year, I shared the news about our growing family several months into my pregnancy once I was comfortable. I decided to continue publishing for paying subscribers since they were supporting my work financially but took a hiatus from updates for the free list. 

I was thankful to see that readers were supportive after the announcement. I didn’t see an uptick in readers canceling their subscriptions, and even though I wasn’t publishing free posts readers continued to sign up for that list, replenishing the top of the audience funnel while I was away.

I’m certainly not alone in taking leave from my newsletter. Here’s how five publishers (including me) planned for their breaks and what happened after they returned. 

My Sweet Dumb Brain

Katie Hawkins-Gaar said she approached taking parental leave from her newsletter My Sweet Dumb Brain the same way she would from a full-time job.

About a month or two before her due date, Hawkins-Gaar said she started working on a content plan. Instead of publishing twice a week — an essay to her free list with a prompt for readers to respond, then a roundup of reader responses for paying subscribers — she planned to publish twice a month for the three months following her daughter’s birth in October 2020.

She announced her leave in an essay about burnout and the importance of taking time off. Then, her editor stepped in to send some guest posts and roundups in her absence. 

“With newsletters, they’re so personal,” she explained. “You realize over time, the feedback you get from readers, that they do really care about you and you care about them.”

For the most part, Hawkins-Gaar said readers were super supportive of her taking parental leave. In fact, not long after she started the paid edition of her newsletter, she took a short break and decided to pause paid subscriptions. 

“I actually got backlash from my paid readers saying, ‘Don’t pause the payments. We are supporting you and are supporting you taking breaks,’” she said. “It was really interesting and very eye opening.” 

Upon returning from parental leave, Hawkins-Gaar kept her same newsletter cadence, though there was a temptation to “make up for lost time and publish more.”

“The tag line on my newsletter is navigating life’s ups and downs, all while being kind to yourself,” she said. “I constantly have to remind myself of that.”

(Note: I participated in and served as faculty for Poynter’s Leadership Academy for Women in Media, which Hawkins-Gaar co-founded. I also volunteer through her mentorship program, Digital Women Leaders.)

Journalism jobs and a photo of my dog

My own maternity leave from my newsletter Journalism jobs and a photo of my dog, which provides a weekly curated list of recent job openings, industry readings and trainings to more than 13,000 readers on my free list and twice monthly posts on career advice for paying subscribers, was modeled after Hawkins-Gaar’s example. 

I took a three-month break from my free email sends starting when my son was born, but continued to send two subscriber-only posts a month for paying readers. These largely focused on Q&As, including one with a career coach, a freelancer, an author and more. 

I updated two other paid posts that were previously sent — one with my favorite job hunting resources and another with industry newsletters I enjoyed following. Both needed updating and saw open rates of 64% and 69%, respectively, according to Substack’s analytics.

I told my readers about my pregnancy in small footnotes leading up to my leave and shared my plan with them shortly before my due date. Though I was nervous about my announcement, the response was overwhelmingly positive, with feedback flooding into my inbox. 

And that sentiment continued when I was on leave. Churn remained at normal levels, and though I wasn’t growing much in the way of new paid subscribers, my free list continued to grow through Substack’s network, Google, and other referrers while I was focusing on my family. 

The Objective 

In July 2021, The Objective announced it was taking a break.

The collective, which is run by volunteers and describes its focus as “holding journalism accountable for past and current systemic biases in reporting and newsroom practices,” wrote at the time that in order “to critique journalism, we need to model the behavior we want to see. But we’ll be back soon.”

The Objective’s co-founder and co-executive director, Gabe Schneider, said a break became necessary because their work was taxing, writing about and editing people’s personal experiences. 

“We’re not paid, and if we stop, the audience will probably still be there and understand if we explained that we’re taking a break, we’ll come back and be better and more recharged,” Schneider said.

The bulk of their three-month break was spent resting and working their regular jobs, but part of it was also used to recalibrate The Objective, which ultimately shifted from being just a newsletter to a nonprofit publication that started paying its writers, he explained. 

As they announced their time away, Schneider said The Objective gained new readers signing up for their newsletter after leadership spoke on LION Publishers’ podcast about sustainability and taking time off. They also didn’t see subscriber loss after the break. 

“What I took away is that there’s always time to rest and recognize that your work can take a toll on you,” he said. “You will become less productive the longer you strain yourself and don’t take a break.”

To keep the work sustainable after they returned, Schneider said The Objective has diffused responsibilities across the group, expanded its leadership team, hired part-time staff and started taking breaks as individuals when needed. 

The Overshoot 

When Matthew Klein worked at Barron’s, he was able to take 20 weeks of parental leave. Earlier this year, when his second child was about to be born, the founder and writer for The Overshoot, a “premium subscription research service on the global economy, financial markets and public policy,” said he had to find a balance between his work and growing family. 

When men don’t take leave, research and evidence show it “systematically disadvantages women professionally,” Klein said. “If one class of people has to take off X number of months, potentially several times over the course of a career … and another group does not, that’s going to have perpetual problems.”

He settled on eight weeks. 

Klein said he thought if a subscriber was paying annually, they were not likely to cancel for that short period of time. Additionally, he believes some readers might not be paying out of their own pocket and were signed up for professional reasons. 

He said he thought about writing some pieces in advance, but his child arrived two-and-a-half weeks early. After about a month’s break, he was able to set up a few guest posts for the second month. 

By the end of his leave, Klein said he was about flat in paid subscriptions.

“I was also lucky,” he explained. “The piece I wrote earlier that week before she was born was remarkably popular, and it got a ton of net subscriber adds, which was great and unexpected.”

#jesspicks

Taking June off from her newsletter #jesspicks — focused on tips, resources and inspiration for building a business your way — wasn’t initially a part of Jessica Williams’ plan for 2023. But after a promotion at her day job, while juggling caregiving for her grandmother, she realized something had to give. 

“The best time to take a break is when you feel like you can’t take a break,” she said. 

Williams said she used the time away from her newsletter to work on a speaking page for her website and practice self-care. She saw similar open rates and views to her newsletter, which sometimes drives revenue through sponsorships and affiliate marketing before and after June. 

“Whenever I take a newsletter break, I definitely get a lot of love for it,” she explained, adding that readers told her that her announcement made them feel like they could also step away. 

Ready to start your own leave? Here’s a checklist to help you prepare.

Develop a content plan in advance — If you have the ability to plan for your leave, determine what path you’d like to take when it comes to newsletters while you’re away. This could range the gamut from no emails to decreased frequency to a normal publishing cadence and everything in between. If you plan for normal or decreased frequency, it can help to coordinate guest posts, Q&As, or refurbish and republish a top post readers might not have seen in a while. 

Tell readers you’ll be away — It’s up to you how personal you want to get with your announcement about why you’ll be away, but a little transparency goes a long way with loyal readers. And it’s especially helpful to share your timeframe for when you plan to be back. 

Set up that out-of-office message — I get a lot of emails from readers with tips for jobs to include in my newsletter, so I made sure to set up an OOO message that explained I was on maternity leave with a link to my newsletter announcement when I would return, what my publication cadence was and a thank you. You may want to consider something similar in your own voice, of course!

Review your welcome series — To ensure new readers who might find your publication have a solid onboarding experience, think about tweaking any welcome emails you send so they understand that you’re away, what to expect from you during that time and when you’ll return. Strong communication from the start sets you up for a better relationship in the long term.  

Get the input of someone you trust — Taking extended leave means making a lot of decisions and possibly giving readers more insight into your life than you might otherwise share. Consider running any sensitive posts or big strategy shifts past someone you trust, a person who knows you and your business model. This can help you get that final gut check before pressing publish. 

Thanks to our sponsor

The stories you’re reading on inboxcollective.com are made possible thanks to the generous support of our fall sponsor, Who Sponsors Stuff, which gives you and your team the tools to quickly find and reach out to relevant sponsors for your newsletter. They track 350+ newsletters, have direct contact information for 6,000+ sponsors, and keep you on the cutting edge of who’s spending money in the email advertising space. Find out how their Sales Pro product can supercharge your ad sales operation today.