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Surviving Your Negative-Subscriber Article
How I Learned That If You Love Your Readers, You Have To Let Them Go
This is about those times when you write something, and more people choose to stop following you than choose to begin following you. It feels bad. And it can really demotivate you to do more. But it’s kind of a good thing.
Let me start by saying, I’m probably not qualified to be giving writing advice. I’m an engineer by trade, not a writer, and I just started writing articles last April on Substack, at age 57. Substack was a pandemic hobby and side-hustle, and adding Medium to the mix was a side-side-hustle.
It was supposed to just be a creative outlet, and at first, no one read anything I wrote. But I was enjoying the process of writing up accounts of weird things that happened to me in my past. It felt a little like closure to get these things on paper, and that was it.
But then a weird thing happened. I wrote a story on Substack about a bonus program gone horribly wrong in an old job of mine, and after that, my inbox started going crazy with subscribers. It took me a while to figure out someone had posted it to Hacker News, and it had made its way to #1 there. The story had over 150,000 views, and I picked up hundreds of subscribers in a 24 hour period.