Burnt Toast Allowed Virginia Sole-Smith To Quit Her Day Job. Here’s How She Did It.

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Virginia Sole-Smith, based in New York’s Hudson Valley, is the creator of Burnt Toast, a popular newsletter, podcast, and community about body liberation, parenting, and pop culture. Over 36,000 subscribers have signed up for her anti-diet, fat-positive articles and essays since she launched the newsletter in 2016.

Part of Burnt Toast’s appeal is that while Virginia adheres to her mission of running a fat-positive community, she also touches on many of the tangential topics that her readers also tend to care about. Subscribers get a mix of social justice, research, and radicalization mixed with frank, compassionate, and funny discussions about jeans, pop culture, gardening, books, and travel. Today, Burnt Toast and “Fat Talk,” Virginia’s most recent book, often get name-checked by other popular writers like Anne Helen Petersen and in Roxane Gay’s New York Times “Work Friend” column.

I first got to know Virginia when I was building my freelance writing career. I often saw her byline in publications I read or wanted to write for (from glossy magazines to the New York Times magazine.) She and I connected when I interviewed her on the topic of how family dinner is a scam, which made me realize that I wanted to be friends with this lady. (Virginia is a mom of two kids about the same age as mine and is a member of my Evil Witches community.)

Burnt Toast has been such a success that it has supplanted Virginia’s freelance career and is now her sole income generator (along with her books). But it wasn’t a sure thing. Virginia consulted with several newsletter operators, including me, a few years ago, shortly before she turned on paid subscriptions, as she pondered the choices that come with a paid subscriber model. I told her that, in my opinion, she would be a perfect candidate for a paid newsletter product. She was the real deal when it came to writing and reporting, and I had no doubt she would turn out a compelling, well-written product. She had experience being in touch with what readers want. And with an impressive CV, she had the chops to set a premium subscription price. (She now charges $5 a month or $50 a year for a subscription.) I told her I thought she deserved to profit from her work directly rather than going through the editorial process of pitching, revising, and chasing down invoices and thought it would work out well for her. I’m happy to say I was right!

In our conversation, Virginia and I talked about how she built Burnt Toast, how she uses reader surveys to improve her newsletters and podcasts, and what she’s learned about converting readers to paying subscribers.

(This conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity}

Tell me a little bit about the origin story of Burnt Toast.

I was writing a parenting column for Jess Grose at the New York Times, and I was doing a lot of work for Medium. Then, in January 2021, they [both reorganized]. Those were two anchor clients that I lost, and I was like, “Oh, here we go again. I need to find new anchor clients.” Then, I thought, “I don’t feel like doing that. It’s terrible. I hate that aspect of freelancing. I’ve done it for so long.” I had the first chunk of my book advance that just came in, so I was like, “All right, we have a little runway. The book advance can float me for a few months.”

I was already on Substack, just as a marketing newsletter, and I thought, ‘Let me try this monetizing thing.” That’s when I reached out to you and asked, “Okay, how do we do this?” I talked to a few other people. Anne Helen Petersen gave me a lot of good advice as well.

That was January, and then in June 2021, the list was at around 4,000 people. I was like, “Okay, this seems a decent time to turn on paid subscriptions.” Then, a little later in 2021, we were coming up on 10,000 [free subscribers], and Substack added audio and reached out to me and said, “We’ll cover the first year of an audio engineer if you want to do a podcast on here.” That’s when I expanded into the podcast.

When you started the newsletter and the podcast, did you have an inkling of what it would become?

I knew there were people who were making full-time incomes on Substack, and I could see the potential for it. What I like about it is that your income can increase without your workload increasing.

It’s probably a 25-to-30-hour-a-week job right now. It has steadily been that the whole time, yet the income is going up, so that was very appealing to me because that lets me fit my work life into my kids’ school days and still have some extra time to take on the book and extra projects here and there if I want.

With freelancing, in order to make a lot of money, you just have to keep working, working, working. It’s all about how many projects you can take on, which, in some ways, the sky’s the limit, but also, we need sleep. There’s a cap on what you can do.

I’m pretty good at figuring out the business side of writing, but I have been delighted and pleasantly surprised by how much it does feel like a community. That is something I had no real experience running before. I don’t think I fully understood how much building the Burnt Toast community would do things like help with the book launch. It’s all very synergistic.

How many free and paid subscribers do you have currently?

The free list as of this very moment is 35,178, and the paid list is right around 10% [of that].

Do you have specific growth goals?

I thought it was going to take longer to get to 3,000 paid [subscribers]. The book’s launch sped that up a lot this year. I knew the newsletter was helping the book, but I didn’t know that the book was going to help the newsletter. There was a big subscriber jump because of the book. That was my goal for this year. It was 30,000 free and 3,000 paid, and we blew through that. Now I wonder, “Do I go for 40,000?” It seems like we’ll hit 40,000 free and 4,000 paid, but I don’t know.

[I also think,] “Oh, when I reach this much, I know I’ll have the income that we could bring on an editor.” I think in terms of goals like that.

What are you working on right now for Burnt Toast?

I’m running the results from my reader survey tomorrow, which is fun. [Editor’s note: Here are the final results.] I try to do that once a year, and it’s interesting to see what’s shifted as the newsletter has grown over the years and what readers care about or like or not don’t like. Some of the feedback is very random. Some of it’s very helpful.

What’s your strategy around running and utilizing reader surveys?

One thing I did was make the survey pretty long. Corinne Fay, [my assistant and podcast co-host], was like, “This has 50 questions. This is too long.” I said, “Yeah, but honestly, I only want the people who are that invested.” I don’t want a troll driving by to think, “Let me give her a bunch of mean answers.” I only want the people who are willing to spend 15 minutes slogging through this thing to fill it out because they’re the ones who have put the most into the community. They’re probably the most active in the comments. That’s who I want to hear from because they’re the ones who are in the community anyway and should be driving. If I’m going to make any changes, they would be who I would listen to.

What kind of marketing do you do for Burnt Toast?

Instagram is the only social media platform I’m super active on. Although to be honest, it’s so irritating — I have 43,000 followers on Instagram, and it is never in the top five drivers of traffic to Substack. My biggest drivers are direct and Google, which means most of the way Burnt Toast is building is people texting it to their friends. Mom chats and mom Facebook groups are what my career runs on. It’s other moms saying, “You need to read this. This will be so helpful.” It’s hard because how do you market to people’s texts? You don’t.

The marketing things I do put the most thought into are subject lines. This is where media training comes into play. I know it needs a very clickable, provocative subject line, and ever since Substack introduced the mid-post paywall option, I’ve played around with that a lot, and I do use that option pretty effectively.

I give a lot for free. I want the content to be accessible, but I have increasingly added a bonus segment that only the paid subscribers get or a paywalled, more provocative piece, and you do see that.

My most successful issue recently was an essay about dressing for the book tour. That was about showing up fat and being visible, a thinky essay, an emotional piece about clothes. But then I paywalled all of the clothes that I wore, saying, “Okay, here’s the list of what I actually wore on tour,” and that paywall has converted a hundred people or something. That’s where the reader survey is actually only so helpful because, in the survey, people often want to sound more intellectual and activism-oriented than they are. Nobody said in the survey, “We want your clothing recs,” but that’s totally what they want. It’s kind of funny, but when you do a reader survey, you have to keep in mind people are performing a little bit there.

What is your favorite kind of feedback to get on an issue?

I love it when someone tells me that it enabled them to advocate for themselves or their kids in some way, like, “This helped me going into the pediatrician,” “Those helped me talk to my mom.” I love it even more when people who are pretty skeptical of my work say, “Oh, well, this helped connect some dots.” I sometimes get emails from Boomer moms who are clearly still pretty enmeshed in diet culture, but they’ll say, “This is helping me understand my fat daughter better.” I’m like, “Okay. You know what? I’ll take that breadcrumb.”

What was some of the best advice you got before launching?

The advice about keeping your best stuff free is still true with the caveat that that was more true before we had paywalls, and now, you need a good chunk free, and you need the provocative [content after]. The paywall is such a useful tool, but I do see people paywalling too much too soon before they’ve built a community and a list. Then, if everything’s behind the paywall, you have no ability to build the community on the list because people can’t share it.

I think it’s also true that paid subscribers don’t need a ton of extra perks. I see people getting elaborate, thinking, “They need merch, or they need all these [extras].” They’re actually there because they’re investing in you as a writer, and they’re investing in the community, and they don’t need a lot of extra stuff.

In terms of conversion, I’m thinking about, “Okay, what’s going to get the free list to come over?” knowing, of course, you’re never going to get all of them. I heard somewhere that most people, if they’re going to convert, do so within the first 30 days. [Ed.’s note: This percentage varies considerably on a publication-by-publication basis, though it’s true that conversion rate usually dwindles the longer a reader’s been on your list.] Anytime I get a big spike on the free list, I try to make sure to do a sale or a particularly good paywall pretty soon thereafter, just to maximize how many of them will come over.

Is there any advice you wish anyone had gotten ahead of time or advice you would give yourself if you were to start all over again?

It probably took at least six months, if not more, to get to that 10% [conversion rate]. I thought I was doing something wrong for a while in that first year. I now have talked to more people, and I’m like, “Oh, it takes a while to build.” Different newsletters just build differently. It’s easy to look at their most successful ones as the model, but it might not be the right model for you because your readers and your goals might be very different.

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