I have been blogging in English for 14 years and have written some 700 post (of which around 100 are deleted for hygienic reason). I moved my blog to Substack a year ago. The primary reason was that I couldn’t organise subscriptions on Blogger. Signing up for Substack made me aware of that it had convinient function for subscriptions and that it could manage paid subscriptions as well. I hadn’t really thought about that option.
I write my blog for two main purposes: to influence people and to organise my own thoughts by making summaries of things I read, thoughts I have or experiences I made. For the latter I still find it a bit hard to find stuff as the number of posts just keeps increasing (I try to delete some posts that are no longer relevant or on topics I cover better in a later article). I also write articles (mostly in Swedish though) which are published in newspapers and magazines. For those, the pay is not very good. Most of my writing is books which pay even less and consultancy reports which pays much better.
My main line of thinking is that we should decommodify as much as possible of human life and make us (you and I) less dependent on the market economy and its main representation: money. Still, you need to have a leg in the world of the market both to survive and to be “relevant”. So I decided to introduce a function for paid subscription on this blog. And a dozen of you have signed a paid subscription so far, thank you for that!
Apart from keeping me a bit more motivated, the pay also mean that I can spend more time on the blog, writing more and/or put more work into it. If even more people pay I could perhaps have somebody proofreading my post….
I have been pondering over if I should restrict some post for paying subscribers only, but I don’t feel like it. For now, I will award paying subscribers in two ways. First, I have made a Resources page with links to book and reports I have written for free download. It is still under construction and will be expanded. Secondly, I have launched a permanent Forum post where paid subscribers can ask me for links to information sources or get my feedback on ideas. In that Paid subscriber Forum post, you will also be able to suggest topics that you would like to see covered in future posts. Hopefully the paying subscriber community can share knowledge among each other as well. And grow.
Looking forward to future writing and exchange of views with both paying and unpaying subscribers.