Today Is My Last Day As A Freelance Writer

Times are changing for writers. There’s been a recent wave who’ve stopped contributing to outlets and moved to newsletters like this, such as myself. To give some insight into what’s happening, the following is a postmortem of my decade-long career writing nonfiction for well-known media outlets like The Atlantic or The Daily Beast. 

Ugh, I can’t believe I had to live/work through the deaths of both print media AND online media and now possibly television and film too?? Can I just have a job?! Like, no offense to my beloved Butt News subscribers, but there’s no way that selling direct-to-consumer humorous movie reviews at a freelance tax rate and paying $600/month for my own in... See more

In the wake of the Summer of Substack, the novelty of launching a newsletter where readers pay directly for your work has given way to the reality of, well, keeping that newsletter up. And keeping those readers happy. And finding new ones when, inevitably, some of those readers decide they’re kind of over you (nicely termed as “churn”). Inevitably,... See more

And for the first time in your career, you feel anti-fragile. You’re no longer vulnerable to a publisher’s budget cuts, pivot to video, staff redundancy after a merger, or ‘new editorial direction’. No one can say that what you believe isn’t fit to print. You can experiment with new formats or revenue streams like exclusive chat rooms, paid podcast... See more