Hello, this is Celeste. I have been writing poems since 2017 and my low-fantasy crime novel Project Dylan since 2022. Letters for Creatives is the place where I share my thoughts on writing, creativity, resources for creatives, and interview creators and authors.

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It is my honour to be able to interview Karina Kupp, one of the co-founders of Chill Subs. I have always been curious about the business aspects of things. So this interview would be a mixed exploration of business and creativity.

In two years, Chill Subs has become one of the most famous platforms to help (new) writers to find more opportunities to submit their writing and help them to solve any problems in their writing career.

Chill Subs has its own website, social media and two newsletters (Chill Subs’ Startup Diary and The Sub Club). They are on press, including Publishers Weekly, Brevity and many more.

Can you tell us how Chill Subs started?

I think it really planted its seeds when I was posting poems on Instagram back in 2021. After about half a year of doing it, I started wondering about traditional publishing and the whole lit mag world. I didn’t know a single thing about it other than well, there was The New Yorker, so I was really curious.

I spent the whole month googling everything about it, buying a Duotrope subscription, and going over each magazine in the Poets & Writers directory. I opened the magazine, and if I liked it at first glance, I scanned three latest issues to see if I liked the writing. If I felt like they published similar stuff and the website looked nice, I added them to my spreadsheet.

The spreadsheet grew and started to feel overwhelming. Gosh, so you’re supposed to understand what to do with it all?! And apparently, I can’t send the stuff I posted on Instagram to most magazines?!

I dumped my worries in an Instagram post and mentioned my spreadsheet saying I can share it with anyone interested. And a lot of people felt the same! The whole struggle of posting on Instagram vs. submitting. Many people requested access to the spreadsheet too.

I was getting ready to share it, but then my husband and I had some beer in a bar and I thought “Who needs another spreadsheet? A website would be 1000x more fun!”. A website that would be cooler than Duotrope in a way that’s: 1) well…free; and 2) really warm, accessible, and helping people connect with the magazine better.

And so I made a website in about a week, and the rest is history!

Do you build Chill Subs full-time?

Oh yeah. I quit freelance in May 2022 three months after starting the project. I felt like something special was going on and so I wanted to use the momentum (luckily I had enough savings). Plus Ben joined around that time and we were suuuper excited and ready to make it work for real.

But then those savings ran out and I had to get a client in 2023 for 20 hours a week. But it didn’t really mean I worked any less on Chill Subs, more like having 1.5 jobs. So I worked 12 hours a day and then felt guilty for not having enough time for the project and trying to compensate on weekends. And somehow I was completely delusional and kept saying OH I’M FINE (girl, no).

Though honestly, we all worked 12 hours a day with or without a client cause you don’t think much about a healthy work schedule when you are this excited about something and want to do everything at once.

But in October last year, we were finally able to start paying ourselves a small salary, so I quit freelance again and we got ourselves weekends and set availability times!

What is it like to work on a newsletter, a literary magazine, and a database of literary magazines?

Well…I don’t really work on all of them! So it is really easy haha. I don’t because we have a fantastic team. So it is mostly me, Nikita (our designer) and Marcin (our second developer) working on the website, Ben and Kailey working on our newsletters, Kailey running the Write or Die magazine with her editorial team, and Shelby doing her magic over on social media.

But each of us interacts with these different parts, and it is really amazing to be the place for all of it. The database has given us access to such an engaged audience and we are so lucky to have this opportunity to experiment with different formats. We have A LOT of ideas, so being able to just create something and say HEY CHECK THIS OUT is really a dream come true.

If we are talking about individual parts, then let's see:

- Working on the database - exhausting but super rewarding

We do everything manually, so it is usually hours and hours of collecting info until your hand falls off and you feel dead inside. But then you get to make a new filter on the Browse or something and people are super excited and it is all worth it in the end.

- Working on the newsletter - awesome

Newsletters for the win. They’re really such a nice, calm form of interaction, compared to social media. Soothes my soul. You can also pack them with useful information and hey, people love useful information delivered to their inbox.

- Working on the magazine - something we’re super proud of

We want Write or Die to be an example of what a great magazine should look and feel like (because we talk about magazines and the best practices all the time, so we wanted to be able to show rather than tell) As a result, we have a beautiful magazine, fantastic editorial team, we pay $50 for essays (publishing 4 a month) and $200 for fiction stories (publishing 1 a month, packing it with a special illustration from Nikita and screaming about the author everywhere for the whole month, including publishing an interview with them next to their story)

So that is pretty much it!

You have noticeably posted much less poetry and writing as you focus on Chill Subs. What are your plans for Instagram in 2024?

Oof, that is really a painful topic. Well mostly I just don’t have time for social media or creative writing now (whenever I do have free time, I try to work on my music) But also, every time I try to make an effort and post anything at all now, I just realize more and more that it doesn’t make me feel good.

I guess I feel too self-conscious. Like oof, I didn’t post anything for months, and then I post this thing. Why this thing exactly? I have 392420 more things I want to talk about, but I can’t pack all of it in the time that I can dedicate to social media. And I take a lot of random photos thinking I’ll post them but I never do, and then the ones that get uploaded feel sort of forced and not representative of my real timeline and this annoys me.

So it all feels awkward, random, and silly. And then I get sad that I don’t understand what I’m doing with it. I think my problem is that I don’t have space to commit to it in any kind of “strategic” way (and for some reason I feel like I have to if I want to have some sort of career), and I don’t have time to write poems so this is out too, and I just don’t care enough to post personal things all the time. And then we also have this problem where I’m a writer, a musician, a developer, an entrepreneur, and it’s hard to think of a cohesive public profile for all of it, and ALSO being bilingual makes it painful cause I naturally talk to my friends in Russian, so what am I even doing here?

So yeah, Instagram and I have a weird relationship. My plans for 2024? Oh just survive with it and don’t look too much into what other people are doing.

How do you organize everything that you have to work on?

Easy, get yourself someone who is more organized than you and you’re all set! I have Ben intensely reminding me about things on Slack, sometimes in CAPITAL LETTERS. Works like a charm.

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