It’s OK If You Grow Your Audience Slowly

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Start a newsletter, and almost before you send out a single issue, you’re inundated with strategies and options for growing your audience. Should you cross-promote with other newsletters? Lean into social media to convert followers to newsletter readers? Or maybe even spend money to promote and acquire email subscribers?

But not everyone wants to build out an aggressive growth strategy for their newsletter. Say you’re a person who feels disingenuous trying to market yourself, or you write for a smaller, niche audience and prefer your newsletter to feel more like an intimate dinner party and less of a giant food fair. Or maybe you don’t have the time to integrate time-intensive marketing strategies.

Does this mean your newsletter is doomed to obscurity and failure?

Not at all. I have been publishing my twice-weekly parenting newsletter, Evil Witches, since 2018 with a philosophy that favors slow, organic growth — and it’s worked. With light social media marketing and in-newsletter encouragement to share, I’ve grown my free readership to over 10,000 subscribers, with nearly 10% of those readers paying a subscription fee. The newsletter brings in money — not enough to be my only mode of income, but that’s not my goal. I like having the flexibility to build out multiple revenue streams, including my newsletter, freelance writing, and editing work.

Sometimes I wonder whether I should try to grow my readership more aggressively. Substack, my email platform, certainly gives me plenty of options to do so. Am I leaving money on the table when I bypass these growth suggestions? Am I afraid of success and the obligations that will bring? Maybe, but these concerns aren’t weighty enough for me to prioritize growing my list quickly and significantly — for now, anyway.

I’m not the only one, it turns out. There are plenty of successful, popular indie newsletters out there that prioritize things other than growth. Let’s look at a few of these newsletters, why they take a more pared-back approach to growing their subscriber list, and why that works for them.

Embracing the newsletter as a side project

Kate McKean writes the newsletter Agents & Books, where she shares advice for authors about publishing books and finding an agent. She’s a full-time literary agent herself, working at the Howard Morhaim Literary Agency since 2006, which means that she has to fit the newsletter into her busy schedule.

Part of the reason McKean isn’t focused on scaling her newsletter is that she likes having it just be a fraction of her work. “I don’t want it to be my day job because I really like my day job,” she told me. There is a bit of a chicken-and-egg quality to her work — her newsletter was inspired by her agency work (and, in an “Inception”-like twist, she hopes to turn her newsletter about books into a book about publishing books). 

“The money I’m making from this is exactly enough,” she said. “It’s enough to justify the time I put into it, and I’m completely happy with it. And because it’s not my primary job, it’s all upside.”

Her newsletter also doesn’t need to grow quickly, thanks to her business model. Many newsletters that monetize primarily via advertising need to reach big audiences in order to bring in the revenue they need to keep publishing. But McKean monetizes through a subscription offering. She publishes twice a week — one newsletter for her free list and an additional one for subscribers who pay $5 a month or $50 a year. Of her 15,000 total readers, more than 1,000 choose to pay, and the majority of paying subscribers renew their subscriptions every year.

She sees others in the newsletter space who are hyper-focused on growth, but she’s made a conscious decision to build at a pace that works for her. “I’m actively resisting the hustle culture of it,” she said. “I have a day job, and I’m trying to write a book, and I have a kid, and I occasionally like to leave the house. I already do too much.”

Another benefit of a smaller, more devoted community is that McKean’s readers see her as a human and not some content marketing robot, which can come in handy when she needs a bit of grace. McKean has found that her readers accept that some weeks she doesn’t have time or material to put out a regular newsletter. They know she has other responsibilities.

She’s not opposed to marketing her newsletter, but she’s content to consider the promotional opportunities that come across her desk, like offers to appear on podcasts or do cross-promotion with other newsletters, and decides which she wants to say yes to. She doesn’t worry about trying to maximize every possible growth opportunity.

“I cannot optimize it,” she said. “It would take more time than I am willing or able to put into it.”

Making time for other work

By all accounts, my newsletter, Evil Witches, has been a successful side project (especially compared to the blog I published for many years in the early aughts — five posts a week for zero dollars!). My paid subscriber list is in the very high three figures, and I would love to hit the next big milestone: 1,000 paying subscribers. 

But I’m also not willing to sacrifice the time I spend as a freelance writer, editor, and ghostwriter in order to spend more time on my newsletter. Since my newsletter is about parenting and I am a parent myself, I don’t think it would be good for my mental health to spend my entire workday thinking about parenting and then spend my non-work time doing actual parenting. Moreover, I love the hustle of finding work, the challenge of writing stories, the humanity of getting to speak with interesting people I might not otherwise interact with, and the little dopamine hit whenever I have a fresh byline in a new publication. Even if Evil Witches made me $100,000 per year, I’d still reach for this type of professional fulfillment — it’s that important to me.

I heard a similar sentiment from Chris La Tray, who writes An Irritable Métis. He told me he also feels compelled to diversify his revenue streams as a working writer. His newsletter earned him 40% of his income in 2022, he said, but “it’s just one piece of the puzzle as far as how one survives as a writer nowadays.” He has books to promote, workshops to lead, public speaking gigs to show up for, and freelance assignments to handle. Rather than skip that work to put more time into his newsletter, he uses his newsletter to promote and ruminate on these other projects. “There’s often other balls in the air,” he said, “and the newsletter is where I talk about those things.”

Plus, he wants to be prepared in the event that things change in the newsletter space. Will his paying subscribers still want to support his newsletter years down the road? Will his newsletter platform, Substack, still be around? He’s not sure.

“Substack is great now, but these things come and go,” La Tray said. “I would not want that to be my only thing because I don’t trust that it’s going to be around in five years.”

For now, he’s got his hands full. It’s not just about writing each issue of his newsletter — he also needs to make time to engage with his audience.

When a new edition of An Irritable Métis is published, readers can reply directly via email or by heading into the comments section at the bottom of the web version of his newsletter. It’s a best practice to engage with as many readers as possible, but that can also be a major time commitment, especially if readers have questions or are discussing a sensitive topic. In a much larger community, finding time to reply to individual questions or moderate these threads would be nearly impossible, but with a more curated community — particularly one with a connection to the writer or one that’s willing to self-moderate the comments section — there’s less of a time commitment.

But even a smaller commitment is still a commitment. “It’s a nice little community, but I can’t let myself feel obligated to participate in all of it.” La Tray told me. “I just don’t have time. I am one person sending something out to 7,000 people. I can’t deal with 7,000 people coming back to me.” Every few issues, he’ll mention that he does his best to get back to his readers — but it’s not always possible to reply to every email or comment.

Finding the right pace for growth

The way you monetize a newsletter absolutely affects how your newsletter can — or should — grow. That certainly applies to anyone who writes an Expert newsletter, like a consultant or coach. They might only need to bring in a handful of new clients per year to build a profitable business, which means that their email list doesn’t need to be huge to be successful. A few hundred readers might be enough for these types of newsletters.

Kevin Freidberg runs 7-Second Websites, a business where he helps independent professionals rebuild their websites to convert more readers to customers. He also runs a daily newsletter with tips and ideas, and many of his customers are also loyal email subscribers.

He told me he’s found pleasure in working with a smaller community group that “gets” him, like clients who responded positively to a seven-day-long email course he created. “The response to that has been very thoughtful,” he said. “These are my people. They speak my language as well as I speak mine.”

At the end of that email series, he invites readers to set up a time with him to talk about how he can help their business — at no charge to them. Not every reader accepts that invitation. But here’s where slow growth plays in his favor: With a slow-but-steady stream of readers coming through that course, he still has the time to do those 1-to-1 calls with readers. If that steady stream became a flood of email sign-ups, he wouldn’t be able to handle the volume of incoming calls since he’s just a one-person operation. Calls like these are important to his business, too — they’re one of the best ways he converts readers into clients.

Plus, Freidberg already has a waitlist for his business — he doesn’t necessarily need to scale his audience in order to land new clients. He told me he’d prefer to focus on his existing client base — for now — instead of worrying about bringing in lots of new ones. “I’d rather do the best job I can now with these people,” he said.

Slow growth is still growth

To be clear, newsletter operators who prefer slow growth don’t ignore their numbers and aren’t immune to the ego boost — and possible bank account bump — that arrives when they cross a new subscriber number threshold. I run occasional discounts to increase paid subscriptions to Evil Witches, and I send grateful emails when larger publications like Cup of Jo link to me, which usually leads to lots of traffic and sign-ups. I do want new subscribers — but I especially want engaged subscribers. Often, the most engaged readers are the ones who come via word of mouth or who found me through a newsletter, website, or podcast they already like.

Slow growth means sometimes feeling a little jealous of others with ostentatious numbers. “I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t love to have 50,000 followers and 2,000 paid subscribers,” La Tray told me. But he’s also not willing to do anything and everything to reach that number. He quit social media and is content to let the newsletter audience “grow through word of mouth rather than spending a bunch of time promoting it.”

In some cases, that also means ignoring some of the growth levers available to writers. When Substack rolled out a newsletter-to-newsletter recommendation tool, I didn’t use it quite as much as other writers. I didn’t feel comfortable recommending some newsletters that I wasn’t intimately familiar with — I just don’t have enough hours in the day to read everything I’d like to read. I also tried the platform’s “free preview” function on an issue meant for paid subscribers, and while it did convert several free readers to paying subscribers, one reader told me how much she hates when newsletters do this. I am the type of sensitive person who would rather not risk receiving that type of critique again, even if it might bring in more revenue for my newsletter. 

Deliberate growth gives a writer like me time and bandwidth to feel like I’m writing for, as Freidberg puts it, “my people.” This means that I can play with different formats and try new things, like giving my paid subscribers a chance to advertise their services to others for free, or a “matchmaking” service putting interested readers in touch with each other in real life. (I thought I would receive a few responses to this, max, but I heard from dozens of readers all around the world. It was both overwhelming and validating to realize I had hit on something people wanted.) 

Unlike some of the parenting writing I’ve done for places like The New York Times or Parents Magazine, my newsletter isn’t a super-polished product designed for the masses that’s been vetted by teams of editors who have to worry about how my pieces align with advertising budgets. I love the playful and experimental writing I get to do in my newsletter, and I think if I spent too much of my time trying to grow my list aggressively or tinker with my content to try to appeal to an ever-growing list and not myself, I’d run the risk of losing the thread of why I began this project in the first place. 

As Freidberg put it: “You have to be able to stay interested in it or you won’t do it.” He writes a daily newsletter, which means that some issues get a big response and others not so much. Still, his small community has a strong relationship with him, the writer, so they’ll still be eager to hear from him the next day.

In my conversations with the operators behind indie newsletters, I consistently heard that they do, in fact, pay attention to certain metrics. “I don’t ignore the numbers,” Freidberg said. “I like to be around the 45% open rate. If it starts to dip below or the unsubscribes start to pick up, it doesn’t feel very good. It makes me think, ‘OK, who’s getting lost? Am I losing my people?’” A decline in engagement might make him think about making a small push for new subscribers.

An upside of organically growing your list is that you typically don’t see a surge in unsubscribes or unengaged readers. There are a lot of ways to grow your list, but not all will lead to readers who open and read for the long run. Plus, many email platforms charge based on the size of your email list. If you’re not ready to monetize that new audience, you may find yourself with a big list — and an even bigger monthly bill from your email platform that’s out of proportion to the size of your team (which in many cases is just one person).

No one I spoke to said they were opposed to growing their list. Instead, they just didn’t make it an area of focus. McKean, who has been operating her newsletter for four years, told me about charting her subscriber growth over the past few years. While her newsletter’s growth hasn’t been viral, she still continues to build her audience every single year.

“It’s been consistent, reasonable slow growth,” she said. “It’s not blowing-your-mind numbers, but they don’t go down.”

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The stories you’re reading on inboxcollective.com are made possible thanks to the generous support of our spring sponsor, Litmus. They’re an all-in-one marketing platform that empowers you to build, test, review, and analyze emails more effectively than ever so you can get the most out of every send. Learn why 700,000+ professionals trust Litmus to make every send count.