When Creator Math Isn't Mathing

How & why I'm pivoting my business

There has been a lot of discourse about the “Substack Collapse” over the past couple of weeks. This is not about that.

This post is about what I’m doing to adjust my creative business because my previous business model has stopped working. I’m not interested in ascribing blame becasue it doesn’t matter whose fault it is; it only matters what I’m going to do about it.

I’m not leaving Substack. Substack is just a tool I use to help grow my business, and I’m adjusting how I use that tool.

TL/DR

I have eliminated the paywall on all Escape Motivation posts on Substack. I will be publishing one or two free posts each week, with one every Monday, and sometimes a bonus post on Wednesdays.

You can still support me and this publication by becoming a paid Substack subscriber. You can also now support me by leaving a tip on my tip page.

Most importantly, I am now sending out a free digest post each Sunday where I share summaries and paywall-free links to everything I have published over the past seven days on Substack, Medium, YouTube, and my blog. When you subscribe to this digest, you get a free ebook. Click here to learn more.

This digest is also where I will share news about new releases, events, and sales. It will be free of platform control and algorithms, arriving in your inbox each Sunday.

If you don’t want another email, I get it. No worries! But this digest is the only way I know of to make sure all of my work is widely available.

Slight Course Correction

In reviewing my posts from the past few weeks here, I realized I was veering into guru territory. That’s not where I want to go. I want to share my journey and give you hope, inspiration, and ideas for your own creative business journey.

I do not have all the answers. I have no desire to be a coach or to create a course. I don’t believe that success is perfectly replicable. We must all cut our own paths, adapting what has worked for other people to our own unique circumstances. Business templates and blueprints are just digital snake oil.

Going forward, I want to share more about my creative business choices and my business obsessions. For example, love what Dropout is doing as a streaming company. I will be writing more about that.

Overall Strategy

Escape Motivation is a division of Weirdo Poetry. If you know Weirdo Poetry at all, it is likely as the name of my flagship Substack newsletter. But Weirdo Poetry was started as my indie publishing imprint, and my strategy is to return that brand to that role.

The thing I most enjoy is making books, all kinds of books. I am using Substack, Medium, and my blog to find more readers and to streamline how I help readers find my books.

My books are widely available, including through my own store. But I have not been good at letting you know about those books. I have also limited myself in my publishing choices. I will be publishing more weird stuff, including more zines and books focused on creative anti-capitalist business practices.

My creative business is not about maximizing profit; it’s about maximizing my chances to make and share cool shit.

I cannot pay my electric bill with poetry comics, so I have created a way to get paid to do the stuff I love so I can keep making stuff I love.

I want to make it easy for readers to support my work without feeling like I’m always selling stuff.

What Broke

The past six months have been some of the roughest for me financially in fourteen years. Part of this is AI mania. My freelance income has all but evaporated as my former clients are only starting to realize that AI cannot replace high-quality, experienced writers, but they are trying to force down my rates. This is not unique to me.

Part of what broke is the economy, putting pressure on all of us as almost everything has become a subscription.

This pressure is one reason so many creators are seeing Substack income fall. This is why I’ve reduced my prices on both of my Substack newsletters to as low as they can go, $5 a month. I have never made more than about 10% of my income from Substack. I haven’t yet found my footing here, but I have made a lot of friends and collected a handful of true fans. It’s why I refuse to turn this place over to Nazis.

Rising costs have also hit me. My Weirdo Poetry Substack had been offering a physical letter and poetry comic art print to paid subscribers, something I call the Weirdo Poetry Snail Mail Club. I am decoupling the Snail Mail Club from Substack. Existing paid Substack subscribers will still get the letters and art prints, but all future Snail Mail Club members will only be offered through my Weirdo Poetry Shop. The rising cost of postage, materials, and Stripe’s increased fees mean I cannot profitably sell physical items through a Substack membership.

However, the biggest hit my creative business has taken has been changes made at Medium. I have been writing on Medium off and on since 2019. But throughout 2025, I was able to be a full-time online writer. My work exploded on the platform, and then they changed how writers were paid and how work was distributed.

Again, this is not me scolding Medium or complaining. It’s not my platform, and they can change what they want. I just realized they are not a trustworthy partner for me. That platform is heading in directions I am not interested in. I still use it as a tool for my business, but I cannot rely on it as an income source any longer. Any money I make there is just a bonus.

To give you a sense of the math of an online writer, for about a year I average 30,000 reads on Medium each month. Medium defines a read as one person spending at least 60 seconds on one of my stories. Each person is only counted once.

Last July, I was making about 15.5 cents per read. Since each reader is only counted once, I was getting $0.155 out of each reader’s $5 Medium subscription. I could live with that, as the more high-quality work I wrote, the more my audience grew.

This July I had 10,000 readers, which is pretty typical since March, when for reasons I do not know, my work was no longer widely distributed through the Boost program. This past July I made a hair more than 8 cents per read. In other words, out of each reader’s $5 Medium subscription, I received on average $0.081. Since it is now much harder to attract new readers and for my existing followers to see my work, the math is not in my favor.

The past twelve months have also shown me that I can sell my books when I actively market them, and that I need to be better at making it easy for readers to find my books on all the platforms they are sold, including my own shop. The math shows me that book sales are the place I have the most room for growth, which is wonderful since I love making books.

The Medium and Substack numbers show me that people do enjoy my work and are happy ot pay me something for my work.

Ebooks Instead of Tote Bags

Instead of trying to fight against the obvious trend of subscription fatigue, I’ve chosen to lower Substack prices and to make it easy to tip me across every platform where I publish.

I want to grow in such a way that instead of making eight cents from a reader, I make closer to $1. Tips seem to be an easy mechanism to make this happen. I still accept direct support through Substack subscriptions. But I am not paywalling any of my Substack content, and I’m removing paywalls from all the archived content. (Substack makes this very tedious.)

For readers that continue to subscribe through Substack, I’m offering all of my growing library of ebooks for free. It’s like when you support PBS or NPR in the U.S., only instead of a tote bag, I give away books.

I have dabbled with tips before, and I have received a handful of tips every month since I first put out a tip link more than a year ago. I am now being more systematic. I’m not going to be putting pressure on anyone, but I am going to make it easier to find my tip links should anyone feel so moved.

Most readers will not tip. But some readers will, and some readers will buy books and join my Snail Mail and Zine Clubs.

If I do my job, all of these income streams should add up so that I can keep making cool shit and avoid getting a “real job”. Not that any employers have even hinted at wanting to hire me.

Email Lists & Crowdfunding

The most important change I am making is the digest I mentioned above. Medium once promised to let all of us writers have access to the email addresses of people who signed up to get email alerts from us. They made some changes, and that is no longer the practice.

I have over 30,000 followers, more than 19,000 of whom get email alerts when I publish on Medium, but I can only reach them through Medium.

Substack promises that I will always have access to my subscribers’ email addresses. I don’t think Substack is lying. But things change all the time.

I need an email list I actually own. Plus, Medium has all kinds of distribution quirks that mean most of my followers don’t see my work. Substack has its own distribution quirks.

I could just import all my Substack subscribers to my new digest. (I’m using Kit to manage this email project.) But most of my Substack subscribers are not active. I also don’t feel good about dumping thousands of names into my database without them having asked ot hear more from me.

By leaving a link in my Medium stories, Substack posts, and in all of my books, I will be collecting the emails of my most active and supportive readers. These are the readers I want to make sure I treat the best. These are the readers who are most likely to help me when I do a crowdfunding campaign for an ambitious project, not only by contributing, but also by telling others about it.

My digest allows me to use all of my email marketing knowledge ethically to better serve readers and free us both from the interference of platform algorithms.

Freelancing

For the next year or more, I will still need to be freelancing to cover my bills. But my freelancing is also changing. I am no longer targeting law firms for copywriting work. I will still take on those projects, but I am going to focus my freelancing efforts on doing copywriting for writers and artists, illustration work, and book design work.

I want to work with other creative people becasue they are underserved, more pleasant to work with, and more likely to be closely aligned with my core values.

I will be mostly using my blog on WeirdoPoetry.com to write about topics related to my freelance services.

What Still Needs to Be Done

There is still a lot of work to be done. I have made all the needed changes to Escape Motivation on Substack. I have set up my email digest, ebook lead magnet, and landing pages to join the digest.

By tomorrow morning, I will have made most of the changes to Weirdo Poetry on Substack.

I still have a lot of work to do on my main website and my Weirdo Poetry Shop. I also need to do more work on putting links to the digest in all the versions of my books.

I am working on three different book projects at the moment. I also want to develop a schedule for the production of some audiobooks and video books.

I need to do a lot more to set up a soft sales funnel for my freelancing.

However, all of the stuff will be done gradually.

I will be sharing what I learn here as my business continues to evolve.

Make More Cool Shit

This business is not for maximizing profits; it’s to maximize my time to make interesting art. One big reason for all of this change was that my creative work had become stagnant. I was writing for algorithms and not to delight me and my readers.

I want to make more cool shit. I want to keep being weird. While I will be posting here every Monday on Escape Motivation, I will not commit to a specific day for my Weirdo Poetry Substack.

I will post at least once a week. Each post will be about creativity or an example of how I’m developing my creativity. It will be a kind of sketchbook or a collection of prototypes. On that Substack, it will always be pilot season. I will be posting poetry comics, of course, but also fiction, graphic memoir, and all kinds of experimental stuff.

I’ll be posting to my blog a few times a week, but I haven’t sorted that out yet. For now, I will also be posting dailyish on Medium. There I am less weird. I cross-post most, but not all, of my Escape Motation posts there. I also post about mindfulness, happiness, and how to resist AI.

I will also be experimenting with ways to convert some of my work to video on YouTube. I will also keep experimenting with animation.

But you will always be able to find links to everything I’m doing through my digest.

Thank you for your support!

If you find anything useful here, you are welcome to sign up for a free or paid Substack subscription:

You can also always leave me a tip!

If you want a weekly look at everything going on at Escape Motivation and Werido Poetry, sign up for my free weekly digest and claim your free ebook.

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