What the niche?!
On having one, not having one, and the maths of it all
If someone were to ask me what my Substack newsletter niche is, I would make a huffy sound and respond: “A niche? How dare you! I have no niche!” and then fall directly onto my Victorian fainting couch.
I agree. That is a little dramatic. And probably not the correct response. But this is my fantasy/day dream scenario so I’m in charge!
What seems to be profitable, however, or the most noticeable, is something that has a strong niche. A lot of the newsletters I read have those: witticisms based on a theme, women writing about women and money, stories focused specifically on the weirdness of NYC, questionnaires of people who are aging, questionnaires of people who write memoirs, questionnaires of people who have been laid off, the list goes on (and was probably created by a questionnaire). Now, I have done no actual analysis of any Substack data so this is observational—i.e everything with a grain of salt—but it often appears from the outside, that some of the newsletters that tend to grow quickly (or have any growth at all) have some sort of a niche. And/or a following from another platform. These newsletters have a direction and it seems to be a direction in which other people also want to move in the…direction…of.
I’ve always wondered if one of the great detriments of this newsletter is that I haven’t picked a niche. I sort of had one for a while—daily selfies taken during the first year and some change of the pandemic— but that had a finite timeline. I didn’t even necessarily use them to write about the pandemic so much. I did occasionally. The topic for the week was often inspired by the photos so it, naturally, came up. But also, it was whatever struck my fancy. There are recurring themes, of course, but that’s just being a human being. Recurring themes are why some of us have deja vu. Recurring themes are why so many of us make the same mistake over and over. Recurring themes are why some of us go to therapy. Recurring themes are why so many of us feel like we are the “history repeats itself” adage in human form.
I feel like a recurring theme as a person. And I also feel like a writer with no niche.
That’s not entirely true, I guess. I’m a playwright. In theatre. If you ask the general public they’d probably tell you that theatre, itself, is a niche. A small percentage of the population goes to see theatre and an even smaller percentage of people make theatre. Often when I say “I’m a playwright” to someone outside the theatre community or my friend ground and immediate family, even to other writers, I’ll get a bit of a blank stare, practiced smile and a, “That’s cool.” That’s just fine with me. It’s part of the reason why I’ve always liked to have friends outside of theatre. And why I tell my theatre friends to have friends outside of theatre. When you talk to friends who don’t know any of the intricacies of the art and the community you will always be cool, actually. Also, they don’t know who anyone is in your stories of the drama, so you’ll always be right. They don’t know. So you win! …I digress…
As a writer, I’m sure I have a style. And my writing style is probably better explained by someone who isn’t me. It’s hard to explain the feeling and the sound of writing from inside of it. The thing is, I don’t think having a niche and having a style are the same thing. Niches feel suffocating to me and I think you can get locked into them quickly and, depending on your penchant for changing your mind, often. That’s why I would more readily agree that I have a style, even if I can’t tell you definitively what it is. My personal statements for this or that opportunity try to explain it and usually explain it okay? I don’t know; I often black out when I’m writing those. I can, however, definitely tell you the topics that interest me and continue to show up in my work. But a niche, ugh.
I have written about some topics in the newsletter that have niche appeal. Mental health (CWs) and creativity being two of them.
Both of those editions I wrote because they are things I want to be open about and/or I think are valuable conversations. Some of it is catharsis. Some of it is working through a business philosophy. And, honestly, I thought they might do statistically better or be shared more than my normal posts because they resonated with more people. They felt (millennial air quotes) “important” to me so I thought that might translate into numbers of some kind. Of course, I’m happy I wrote them and very proud of the work, but that didn’t necessarily prove to be the case.
Now, at this point, you might have a lot of questions. One of which might be, “No niches? Really? But I’m helping you figure that out for this-that-or the other-thing!” To which I say, “Writing! I SAID WRITING. Specifically, Substack writing.” I do actually think niches are helpful in some cases. I understand their function in business or marketing related things. I understand how they are useful for reaching an audience that would connect or interact with your business, work, whatever. And yet, even in the places I find them helpful, I can’t seem to help myself figure out what mine are. (See what I did there?!)
Maybe you have no questions. In which case, thank you for sticking around. Also, weeeeeee are in different places. I have these questions (to name a few): why do I care whether I have a niche (writing and substack specifically) or not? Why do I think a niche will help me reach more people? Why do I think having a higher subscriber count is an important measure of success?
It’s likely because everyone wants to feel successful in some way. Or, at least, feel like they are doing the thing they set out to do. But, if you are writing a lot, at least weekly, how is that not doing the thing you set out to do? Why does the public viewing portion matter so much? Why are the open rates how you measure the efficacy of your writing (subject lines)? (I occasionally check open rates but basically never check who is opening the newsletter. Considering that a large set of people who subscribe to the newsletter are people I know in real life, I don’t think gathering that sort of data would be helpful to me. It would probably just make me annoyed. Or worse. Disappointed.)
Obviously, there is an argument to be made about living in the age of social media, of likes and comments and views. And it’s not so much an argument as much as it is just a truth. Back in my day, you didn’t know how many people saw your shit. Well, until LiveJournal—a time in which I both wanted and didn’t want anyone and everyone reading my existential depressed drivel written in third person. There is an argument to be made about comparison culture and seeing how many people “like” things that aren’t yours. Social media made it so in order to feel ‘successful’ as a human being, we have to document and doctor up our lives. And when that gorgeous picture of ourselves in front of a fountain or with a glamorous smoothie or laughing after we trip gets four likes, it’s easy to feel like you aren’t even successful as a person who lives in this world. It’s not true. You have value. I also understand if it’s hard to feel that way because these arbitrary numbers don’t seem to reflect that. (See: this entire edition of the newsletter.) Obviously, this part of our lives have an effect on our whole existences. That’s a much larger discussion and smarter people than me are talking about it. But obviously, the effect of publicly sharing and thus, getting (or not getting) public feedback is a factor in the more focused topic here.
The funny thing is while wanting my work online to be seen and interacted with, having been a part of the transition from no internet to internet, I’m actually terrified of trolls. Not negative comments per se but the worst that comes out of people when they can hide behind the anonymity of a screen. The death threats, the going for the throat, the threats of severe violence, the actual verbal and emotional violence. So many people have had to deal with the sheer enormity of this problem, have had their lives disrupted, their mental health destroyed. It is such a real problem in so many parts of the internet and then, life, because people often like to pretend that they don’t know that things you do on the internet also have real life implications in the world. I am impressed with people who manage that on any scale. Much of my work is accessible to the public but not in a way that totally opens me up to that. It’s largely the existential, sometimes benign, musings and jokes and lists, of a random person who lives in Queens. I trust my resilience in some situations. And I trust that I lack resilience in others.
In a more personal sense, it might be because I feel like I haven’t, as yet, been successful financially—in fact, quite unsuccessful—so I’m probably trying to find another way I can quantify success in an actual figure. A real one. If such-and-such people subscribe, if such-and-such people open, if I am chosen for such-and-such opportunity, that’s a quantifiable thing I can point to and say, “Look at it! You can see that too!” It’s not the partially assembled poetry collection languishing on my computer that who knows when will see the light of day. Here are the real world stats! The data! In therapy, this probably lives in the “Napoleon Syndrome” sort of place. It’s a big red flag of overcompensation. I hope mine is, at least, like a burgundy or wine color. Some sort of deep, dark, and beautiful red.
You know, I bet this is a function of job searching too. Of constantly updating resumes. In the last seven years, I have done more than my fair share of that. What resumes want, what ATS’ want, are stats about what you’ve accomplished. “Blah blah increased productivity by 30% by sacrificing two virgins and a lamb on a pyre in ancient Greece blah blah.” The work I do generally isn’t quantified like that. Or, at least, I couldn’t figure out how to. Or I didn’t care to count. When you process 30 or more licenses a day for upwards of 10,000 titles, you just know it’s A LOT. Or when you are on contract to write synopses, you don’t get the stats of whether that synopsis does better than any of the other ones. You just know that your Bojack Horseman synopsis is the best around. Basically, I didn’t make many ROIs or whatever. Or I wasn’t an ROI. There are no ROIs to be found on my resume! Stop asking!
My questioning of how I measure success, if I feel successful, if I even want to be ‘successful’ in the systems we currently live in, if age ain’t age ain’t nothing but a number, if these fake crows I’ve decorated with will turn into real ones and fly away some day, is not anything new. Particularly lately. As we get to the end of the year and I feel behind on things I set out to do in 2024 and also feel behind on things I set out to do in general, the questioning has been particularly prescient. It’s a line of questioning I’m certain is common among many people. It feels like a very human thing to try and think through. But I did find the timing of an edition of Platonic Love, a newsletter I started reading not that long ago, called “Does Substack have a jealousy problem?” too coincidental.
The writer of this edition of the newsletter asks other Substack writers, notably ones with tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands subscribers, to talk about their feelings of jealousy regarding other Substack writers. None of the answers were particularly eye-opening. Across the board it was “yes.” Some people differentiate between “jealousy” and “envy” in interesting(?) ways. Or rather, I should say, none of it was particularly eye-opening for me. For a long time I’ve been of the camp that there is no way on this earth that I can be the only one who feels any one particular way at any given moment. Sometimes that’s a helpful viewpoint for me and sometimes it’s not. Sort of depends on how I’m trying to deal with my own stuff or if I’m trying to deal with it at all. But in my most isolated, it does tend to be helpful. Even if I don’t have empirical evidence that I’m not alone I, at least, feel like I’m not.
I say the timing of this edition of Platonic Love was “too coincidental” because of the numbers thing. The whole thing is talking to people with an amount of subscribers that is basically unquantifiable to me because there are so many. I’m existentially working through what it means when numbers are low while reading a newsletter post where the given premise is that these feelings are coming from people who have subscriber counts as big as the population of the town I grew up near. I can’t say reading it made me feel any better. I guess it didn’t necessarily make me feel any worse either. At least, not about having or not having feelings of jealousy (I do). It’s the numbers. The numbers!
There has been a movement among my friend group, and Millennials in general I think, to untie our sense of worth from our job titles or careers. This mental and emotional work has become necessary because of the near constant layoffs and upheaval in our working lives. It’s easy to get sucked into thinking your value comes from the work you are doing for a company, a cause, whatever. And then it’s devastating to realize you are a line item on a budget sheet. It’s also happening because it’s another one of those things that is not an argument, it’s the truth. You have value for being a person. You get to have hobbies and friends and family, and a life outside of business hours. Working does not ‘earn’ you those things. They are yours. But it’s hard to believe that because that’s not the messaging we grew up with and that’s often not the messaging we get now. Oh, and we have to pay rent and buy groceries and shit. It can be hard to reconcile that, often, consistent income from work is what allows you to live but your actual value is not defined by the work you do. A lot of my friends have done incredible work stepping into their own value as humans. I’m so proud all the of the time. And, honestly, I think I’ve done an okay job of untying my worth to any sort of job too.
But that’s with regular work. With my writing career, that does not seem to be the case. (Once again, see: this entire edition.) Lately, I’ve been wondering if it’s not actually the niche, or lack of one, that is detrimental to me. Maybe, it’s the low level sound of the sentence, “But what about the numbers?” being played on a loop in the back of my brain. Which is a silly question. Because I don’t care for maths. It’s a silly question because I keep a spreadsheet of submissions and if I want to feel extra bad, I can go look at the ‘nos’ there. It’s a silly question because I do have access to the numbers for my Substack but I don’t think they tell me anything. It’s a silly question because if I try to up my numbers in a positive way, I feel like The Count grabbing numbers from the air. It’s not useful.
What I suppose will be useful is this: what I know is that in the last year or two, probably since I started the newsletter, I’ve been some of the most productive writing-wise I’ve been in a very long time, maybe ever. You sit typing so much! Ya hear me, Samantha Jean?!
…okay, it might not be useful today. I’m stubborn today. But, being reminded that success is not about numbers might be useful for you. And, hopefully, when I come back and look at this post on some far off date, it’ll be useful for future me as well.
Okay, now, I would do this job for sure.
THANK YOU for reading. You are never just a number to me! If you’d like to learn more about the newsletter, here’s my About page. It’s about…me…and this…newsletter.
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