Welcome! I'm Simon Owens and this is my media industry newsletter. If you've received it, then you either subscribed or someone forwarded it to you.

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My latest: The products that Charlie Meyerson, founder of the Chicago Public Square newsletter, can’t do without

Charlie is a veteran journalist who joined the Chicago Tribune’s internet team in 1998 and went on to run the newspaper’s email newsletter program. In 2017, he launched Chicago Public Square, a daily roundup of news relevant to the Chicago metropolitan area. The newsletter has been repeatedly named Best Blog in the Chicago Reader’s annual Best of Chicago poll. He’s also the cofounder of the Rivet Radio news app.

Charlie walked us through the products that are absolutely essential to his business over here.

BTW, I’m still looking for creators and media entrepreneurs to feature in this series. Go here if you’re interested.

Do you successfully sell paid subscriptions to your content?

I’m hosting a live Zoom call next week on how to sell paid subscriptions and I’m looking for more featured guests who can answer questions from my audience about this topic. The discussion in these calls is always fun and amazing. If you’re interested in being featured, then definitely reach out.

One of the biggest mistakes newsletter writers make

David Chen, who cohosts an awesome movie podcast, has some good advice for newsletter writers:

I have Substack advice I desperately need you all to consider: Please, for the love of all that is good, re-introduce yourself at the beginning of your newsletter. Yes, every single one.

The growth in Substack (and Notes in particular) has meant that I’m personally finding a lot of new voices to follow. That’s wonderful! I’m sure there are many people like me who find themselves newly subscribed to dozens and dozens of Substacks.

Then, later, when we get our first email from your Substack, it has absolutely zero context about who you are, what you cover, etc. It is really disorienting and if I can’t figure this information out from context clues in the first couple newsletters, I usually find myself unsubscribing.

I re-introduce myself at the top of each newsletter using Substack’s “Header” feature and I appreciate it when any other Substack publication does this too. Something to consider?

This is great advice that I often give to newsletter writers as well. People aren’t always going to remember why they signed up for your newsletter, especially if there’s a lag between when they sign up and when you send your next issue. Always include a very brief sentence at the top reminding them who you are an what your newsletter is about. Check out the one at the top of this very newsletter you’re reading for an example.

Quick hits

How aggressively do you clean your newsletter’s email list? I put together a list of criteria I use every month when I clean my list. [Simon Owens] There were lots of people in the comments section of that post vigorously disagreeing with my methods.

"By sunset, there seemed to be enough newsmakers, news gatherers, and amateur online comedians that it felt like [Bluesky[ — unlike Mastodon, etc. — might actually have a chance." [Big Technology]

BuzzFeed seems to be morphing into a hybrid of a publisher + talent agency + influencer marketing agency. Honestly, I think this is a good pivot considering it's always been a great talent incubator. [Axios]

It'll be fascinating to see if serialized fiction can take off on Substack. I haven't seen many successful use cases yet (though I'm happy to be proven wrong if they do exist). [Author Analyst]

I don't doubt that AI tools will one day revolutionize multiple industries, but every use case I read about them just seems a bit gimmicky to me. For instance, the tasks outlined in this Insider article seem like they'd save a little time on the margins, but it's not like the tool has come anywhere close to automating the person's job. Mostly, this seems like a tool that's good for people who really, really hate writing and want the AI tool to get some words on the page so they can get over their procrastination hump. Am I wrong? [Insider]

How do book publishers calculate author advances? Mostly with a bunch of voodoo math. [Publishing Confidential]

Is the Creator Economy overhyped?

Earlier this week I published a piece that pushed back on the hot takes that there’s no Creator Economy “middle class.” Not only did I think the framing for those hot takes is wrong, but I also think they do a bad job of quantifying the size of the Creator Economy.

Suw Charman-Anderson agreed that content monetization is easier than ever, but she also believes that it’s becoming more difficult for creators to build an audience:

I think the picture re creators is a bit more complicated than just whether there's a 'middle class' or not. On the one hand, there are tools around like Substack, Patreon, Kofi, that help creators directly reach those who want to pay them, so it's possibly easier now to move towards the Kevin Kelly 1000 True Fans model than it has ever been. It wasn't like that when I first started creating content online in 1998 or even when I started my blog in 2001. Aggregating small payments from lots of people was essentially impossible.

But the problem now isn't payment, it's audience. There was a golden age of social media where you could reach a whole raft of people without too much effort. … Now it's much, much harder to gather an audience together using those same tools, because they all punish external links, and in Twitter's case, reach has fallen off a cliff. So it's easier to get paid, harder to find people to pay you.

Then when we look at some of the key kickstarters for creative careers, such as getting a book published (which does still hold a cachet in many people's minds, regardless of the success of individual self-published authors), that's harder and harder to do, and it pays less and less. In the UK, the median yearly income for professional writers – including freelance journalist, screenwriters, authors etc – is now £7,000. In 2007, it was £12,330, which is not a huge amount more, but it would make a difference. The rest of the stats aren't good, and do show that the long tail is doing much worse than the very successful minority:

Worse, publishers are increasingly likely to focus on celebrity writers, to the detriment of true debuts from authors without a huge following.

When you look at the people who've been really successful here, lots of them had existing platforms, such as tens or hundreds of thousands of followers on Twitter, or an existing profile as a journalist, author, artist, subject matter expert, or academic, or they are hooked directly into business- and money-oriented subjects like marketing, investing, productivity. For your average Jo, those case studies are teach us very little, if anything, because we're not beginning from the same starting point.

So, I'm not completely disagreeing with you, but I think that the devil is in the details and the topline figures don't give us an accurate picture of what the creator economy really looks like for most people. When you're at (or near) the top, the world looks very flat. When you're in the foothills you see the true size of the mountain. I'd like to see more profiles of successful newsletter writers who genuinely started in the foothills, without any of the advantages of an existing profile and without any other structural advantages.

Because ultimately, the strength of the creator economy is not about the absolute numbers, it's about mobility – is it possible to start from zero and still be a success?

M. Louisa Locke, a self-published author, pointed to some additional data on this subject:

As one of those small entrepreneurial creators, who has made a living wage in the past 10 years as an author, I applaud this post, because it describes my experience as an indie author. In case you haven't run across this survey that has come out by the Alliance of Independent Authors, I think that it supports your conclusions.

B.C. Kowalski agreed with my assessment that creators aren’t employees, they’re startup founders:

You’re 100% correct - I’ve always felt it was very odd that mainstream press talks about creator economy pursuits as if they’re employment and not entrepreneurship. I read a post from a pair of journalists who quite their papers to start a substack and had grown to $60k in revenue in the first year and were complaining - I thought, dude, that’s incredible for a first year. They were clearly thinking of it in employment terms and not business terms.

The barrier to entry is both easier and opaquely difficult. Easy to start a YouTube channel or self publish a book. But the real barrier is to put in the necessary reps, learn the platform and improve at the craft abs business. You have to toil away for free or low money for a while while you build. Some longer than others.

That’s why I love Substack - of all the platforms I’ve tried it’s been the easiest to monetize - even covering small city politics and news I’ve grown to a sizable side income and in a couple of years I project it’ll be in full-time income territory.

Anyway, great newsletter and I’m glad someone pointed out the fallacy of most creator economy reporting.

How to grow your sponsorship revenue

One of the most consistent questions I get from readers is how they can find more sponsors. So I convened a panel of experts to talk about the best strategies for finding brand sponsors and delivering them value. The panel included:

• Ryan Sager, co-founder of Who Sponsors Stuff

• Jesse Watkins, the other co-founder of Who Sponsors Stuff

• Tom Gierasimczuk, a veteran ad executive

• Taegan Goddard, founder of Political Wire

We talked about recruiting sponsors from your own audience, joining programmatic ad exchanges, hiring sales staff, and joining sponsorship marketplaces.

Watch our discussion in the video embedded below:...