What happens when an influencer favours slowing down on Substack over speeding up on social media?

Only good things, I promise

I was slow to start a Substack. ‘Who will want to read what I have to say let alone have it invade their inbox?’ went the usual voice of doubt that lives rent free in the mind of any creative. Reluctantly, I’m told I tick the ‘influencer’ box, but I consider myself a writer first and foremost. I had been writing a column for a respected Sunday newspaper here in Ireland, an opportunity which came to an end as so often is the case for freelancers. It doesn’t matter how good you are; there’s just not enough column inches to go around. It’s competitive and it’s about how many followers you have (i.e. how popular you are) as opposed to your wordsmith skills. It’s also massively about who you know, which can breed a lot of disingenuous relationships and social climbing. My friend told me to just replicate the column on Substack. Build it and they will come, etc. It had been working for her. So I dived in. 

A lot of writers do it so they can start earning an income almost immediately, which is true. Within my first few weeks I was earning almost a thousand quid - far more than you’d ever get as a fee for a print feature. And this was me writing what I wanted to write, things I decided were worth talking about, not assignments I’d been handed to keep brands and advertisers happy. I could not believe the numbers I was seeing as people in their droves subscribed to suss it out. The challenge would lie in converting unpaid subs into paid ones, but over here I didn’t have to shout the loudest, have the biggest following or be best friends with the CEO to do so. I could let my writing speak for itself. Substack has successfully democratised writing (and content creation in general, whatever form it takes), giving everyone the opportunity to be published - and paid - regardless of whether they’re a celebrated scribe or starting from scratch. It’s also a slick, intuitive platform, a network in itself, which allows you to be found, seen, heard and recommended, without having to be the most popular kid on the block. Where it had been elbows at the ready in traditional media, here there was a piece of the pie for anyone who came to claim it. 

While adding a new revenue stream to everything else I was doing was certainly motivating and exciting, it soon became about so much more than that. It gave me - and my readers - a chance to slow down and step off the warp speed content churn that is social media. A place where you defer to an algorithm over which you’ve no control. Another friend described social media as akin to fast food. You get your quick hit but you’re never fulfilled. And it’s not very good for you. You fall into social comparison traps, you doom scroll, you might even ‘hate follow’. And if you’re on the creation side of it, you are constantly measuring your worth against your numbers and trying to ‘play the game’. Substack, on the contrary, allows for more nourishment. You can slow down and properly digest something that entertains you, engages you, or offers you a different way of thinking. On the writer's side of it, I’ve never come away from a writing session without feeling utterly satisfied, and that’s before I’ve even hit ‘send’. I think more and more of us are growing tired of the always moving, never enough nature of social media. I know I am. A reel a day? 7 outfit or life hack style videos per week? Is that the route I want to go down? Not really. It became exhausting trying to keep up to keep in. I also noticed that if I wanted to grow my social following, I had to share far more aspirational content and less relatable content. Meaning I had to show a lot less of my personality or what I was actually experiencing and present myself as a neutral, inoffensive blank canvas on which to showcase makeup, fashion and double zip babygrows (most of my followers are new parents). The more honest and myself I was, the more followers I lost. And not because I have a particularly polarising personality (that I’m aware of), but because people just don’t want that on social media. Not the way it’s going anyway. I had a choice: pull back on being myself and share more of what sells in order to grow my following, or do what I really want to do which is write and share and pontificate. I couldn’t do that on social media where there’s just no space to do so, I couldn’t do it in traditional media where there’s not enough real estate, but I could do it here. And that’s where I am right now: slowly but surely moving my eggs out of the fickle social media basket and into something far more sustainable: Substack. 

Beyond the career related benefits, there is another unexpected upshot to starting this Substack and one that I believe would benefit every single one of us. Here I can be vulnerable. I can build a community where it feels safe to talk about the things we’re afraid to talk about, which is not only helpful to those reading (and, for example, drowning in early motherhood) but hugely cathartic for me. Sharing and putting my hands up and saying ‘is it just me who feels this way?’ has always been a coping mechanism of mine, but social media is no longer the appropriate place to have those conversations. Not for me anyway, where things can be taken out of context and judgement and negativity can come your way (remember earlier when I mentioned the act of ‘hate following’? Honestly, sometimes people follow you on social media only to wait for you to trip up and get something wrong. And the more your following goes up, the more exposed you become. Here, if someone really wants to troll me or pick apart my parenting for example, they’ll have to pay for the privilege of doing so. So for that reason, it has massively improved my own anxiety around what I share and the need to protect myself and my family while at the same time still talking about the things that really matter to me, such as anxiety (which is why I started gaining a following in the first place, following three books and a multi-million download podcast on the subject of managing and understanding anxiety). 

On that same note, the simple act of sitting down to write has become a self-care tool that I was seriously lacking. Yes, you can scribble away in a journal any time you feel like it and not share it with the world, but by doing it here, I’ve given myself an accountability that I really need in order to stay on top of things. I have bought more journals than I care to admit, only for them to gather dust and live out the rest of their existence as a coaster for my cups of tea. I’ve never stuck at it. But here, to honour the commitment of showing up for those who have subscribed, I’ve done myself the world of good. It anchors my week, it slows me down, it gives me the chance to process things - be it reflecting on the horrific state of the world right now or looking back on hurdles in my personal life that I’ve now come through. I feel free here: free to be raw and vulnerable and unsure but also free to be confident (without worrying someone will think I’m up my own arse) and experiment and test things out. Potential income aside, Substack allows me to regularly flex muscles that, if you’re a writer, you simply can’t do without. 

So while you might not go viral overnight, or earn the (somewhat outdated) prestige of seeing your name across a broadsheet headline, you get to be in the driving seat of your own creativity on Substack and that can only be a good thing.