Ten Thousand Thanks!

You've made my week (and a lot more) Audacious Ones!

What a week it’s been, my Audacious lovelies! (Too silly? I kinda like it. :)

First, I have more news to share about Cummari’s Women’s Almanac and the free offerings coming up that you won’t want to miss. (Info at the end.)¹

This newsletter is free for all. Sign up so you won’t miss a post.

And I want to share with you three great things that have happened this week that I think you will appreciate.

1) I’m happy to report that the new medication I’m taking (Betahistine) for my Meniere’s is really helping. It’s the very first time that I’ve found anything (medication or otherwise) that has had such noticeable results. I’m hugely relieved! I feel like a fully functioning human again.

2) As a result, I was able to attend my first week of classes. What an incredible semester it’s going to be! On Tuesday, I met Sarah Hall, who is a wonderful and generous teacher. I’m so excited to work with her! And I met Jeanette Winterson in her virtual masterclass and took about five pages of notes.

Listening to her I was reminded of the day that I had decided I wanted to do my MA at the University of Manchester. I was listening to her on a podcast, talking about Virginia Woolf. (This one, which is also on Youtube, where you can also see Keira Knightley making some interesting ‘listening faces’.) I can’t remember the details (I’ll have to listen again), but I know that I felt like my brain had just woken up from a long nap. I started having all kinds of ideas of what I wanted to do with the piece of fiction I was working on. Her words, her passion, her insight had lit me up. And here I am, almost a year later, with the opportunity to learn from her every week. I am so grateful!

In our session, Jeanette mentioned that she had restarted her Substack newsletter! You can find it here:

I GUESS IT'S TIME TO COME BACK

3) Last but not least, this week Audacious Women, Creative Lives hit a huge milestone:

There are now 10,000+ of you!

Can you believe it? I hardly can. A year ago I had 1,400 subscribers. The same number, about, that I had a year before that, when I first moved my newsletter to Substack. That first year, I experienced essentially zero growth, which was a little disappointing. So how did I get out of my rut?

First, last January, I booked three one-on-one sessions with

Sarah Fay

at Writers at Work and got some good advice about how to write on this platform, which is really quite different from any other. (It’s a newsletter and a blog and a growing social media-ish universe!) I had also been learning from her Substack as well. Essentially, I learned to write shorter, better focused posts/letters. And I learned how to explain what my newsletter is about, and I came up with a new name that expressed that. And by following her advice, I started to grow, slowly but steadily.

But then, I published “Two Years Ago I Quit My Life” last June and it started to go viral, and you know the story, right? Elizabeth Gilbert shared it and then everything went bonkers for a while. Then things calmed down again, but a steady stream of people were still finding it and finding all of us, and they’ve just kept coming. I get about 20-30 new subscribers every day, by the magic of Substack’s algorithms, I guess. And I still get new comments on that viral post every week.

So how did I experience this bizarre (to me) growth on this platform? I sought advice (Sarah is great, as is

Claire Venus (she/her) ✨

, and I’m sure there are others out there), I got down to work and began to write regularly, then I got personal and wrote something vulnerable that struck a chord, and then I got lucky. It’s not exactly a scientific formula, but I know a lot of people (and many of you, dear readers) want to succeed on this platform, and it can feel daunting, so I wanted to share my journey.

I will also say that I was going for growth because I wanted to sell a memoir I was writing about my year of travel after I quit my life. After the viral growth and E.G. endorsement, my agent decided it was time to submit the proposal I had been working on for over six months.

But it wasn’t enough. (I had about 6,000 subscribers then.) It’s a tough field out there, at least at the major imprints. I’m still trying to decide what to do with it. It’s on the back burner for now while I’m completing my course and writing my first novel. (Really my second, as there is a nearly full draft of an earlier one on my hard drive, and tons of other false starts.)

So if you’re reading this and you’re thinking, gee I really want to go viral and have a ton of new readers, ask yourself why. Is there a specific reason it would help your career? (I thought it would but, as Courtney Maum told me, what’s viral today may be passé by the time the book is actually published, 2-3 years from now, so editors aren’t so wowed by the viral post or essay.) Are you hoping to make a living from your Substack? That seems to work best for people who have services to offer, not just content. Or they are already reasonably well-known. (FWIW, my paid subscriber numbers are still pretty low, since I haven’t really been able to focus on building out what I have to offer. That’s waiting until after my course as well. So stay tuned!)

Here’s my take on the whole question. Substack is a great platform for writing and publishing a newsletter. That is what I came here to do, disenchanted with other platforms that were too complicated. I was tired of spending as much time formatting and fixing glitches as I was actually writing! Then Substack started adding new features, like Notes and Chat and Referrals, and lots of things that make it a great place to find new readers. Or for them to simply find you! So if you’re interested in writing a newsletter/blog, this is the place to be.

But why write a newsletter in the first place? Jeanette said in her post that she came back “because I want to talk about what I believe in.” She has so many beautiful things to say about why it matters that we share what matters to us. Like this:

“If we are nothing but life on the outside, then we are nothing. The world right now is all about the outside - money, power, data, control. As yet, till the BCI chip flows down the line, there is no CCTV inside your head. Your imagination isn’t data. Don’t hand it over. It is your secret supply of unquenchable life.”

Another reason, and one of my main reasons, to write on Substack is to connect. It’s all about sharing and meeting new people and having them read your words and respond in the comments. And the quality of the relationships you can build with readers here is dependent entirely on what you put into it. And if you’re having great connections with people, does it really matter if they are 100, 1000, or 10000? It’s a heck of a lot easier to have real connections with a smaller audience. Think playing music in a pub versus a concert hall. It’s all about reaching out, sharing, and creating opportunities for what we all crave: connection.

Heather J. Kent, “Only Connect.” You can find her on IG or at her website.

Okay, back to my reading for this week: Zadie Smith’s On Beauty for my Contemporary Literature and the Literary Industry class.

Thank you, as always, for reading, subscribing, and being the amazing readers that you are!

You know that I love hear from you, so pop in the comments and share your thoughts about any or all of this week’s letter. Until next week!

—Anne

P.S. Did you enjoy this post? If so, please click on the❤️ at the bottom or the top of this email/post. It helps me know what kinds of posts you value and helps others discover what we’re up to here.

1. Free events to sample the Women's Almanac guides, teachings, wisdom (learn more and register at https://www.womensalmanac.com/events):

1. Feb 8th - Prepare to Receive - A Manifestation Preparation Workshop with Tarot Reader, Laurel Flynn.

2. Feb 12th - Felt Sense Focusing - Somatic Healing Workshop with Holistic Life Coach, Somatic Educator and PSYCH-K Facilitator, Emily Arin Snider

3. Feb 22nd - Unmask & Embody: Neurodivergence, Patriarchy, and Reclaiming Ourselves - with Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, Registered Play Therapist (LMFT, RPT - S) Maggi Leavitt

4. March 23rd - The Women's Almanac's first official session of our year long program for Ostra (Spring Equinox).