Bye bye Substack, sort of
It’s taken me about a year to de-center Substack from my writing ecosystem and I finally succeeded.
In case you’re new: I went from 0 to Bestseller on the Substack platform within 6 months from joining. I stayed there for 2 years and have now consciously stepped down and I feel relieved and aligned. ❤️
Don’t mistake this for reduced ambition. Quite the opposite.
One more thing before we dive in: de-centering means I’m taking off all the paywalls and will use Substack for what it’s best at: Distribution, traffic and network. Not as my money site.
Some transitions take time. Especially ones that involve de-centering platforms built to keep you hooked.
I launched paid subscriptions on Substack with confidence from ten years of running a creative business, eight of those with some form of subscription model. I genuinely thought I could shift whenever I wanted.
I was wrong.
Be careful before clicking buttons.
When I started writing publicly about leaving the Bestseller model last May with essays like “I don’t want a Bestseller badge anymore”, I discovered I was one wrong click away from losing thousands of euros in refund obligations. I panicked, hit pause instead and felt suspended mid-air for months. If you’ve ever spent extended time in dispersion, you know the external noise gets louder the longer you stay there.
Eventually the paid newsletter became what I can only describe as a psychological and energetic debt that hovered over me like a drone who’s spotted a celebrity naked. And if you’ve read my work before, you know nothing kills my flow faster than an editorial calendar, yet somehow I’d set myself up in exactly that position…
How silly of me. Shouldn’t I know better?
Probably.
But knowing something logically and embodying it are two different things. As artists, most of us need lived experience for things to settle. I’m a firm believer that there are no wasted experiments. If something doesn’t bring cash or recognition or traffic, it always brings experience. And experience deepens the work.
Here’s what I actually know after a decade of doing this:
My career takes off whenever I do whatever I want, however I want it, and I have fun. Because fun is contagious. People want to be around people who enjoy sharing their art.
The hustle blueprint; Be everywhere, post on schedule, optimize everything, equals suffocation for the artist soul. When marketing becomes a separate job title from your art, you make less art. The only way artists thrive is when marketing and selling IS part of the artistic expression. Baked-in Calzone style.
For God’s sake, let’s not hand our artistic genius over to the algorithms. Use them. Don’t serve them.
The keyword is SHARE. Making the art is part one. Sharing it; the process, the hard, the beautiful, the ugly, is part two. That’s your marketing and that’s your selling. Nobody buys the finished thing from someone they’ve never watched make it.
What happened for me on Substack was classic paralysis by analysis.
I grew fast by writing whatever I wanted with zero filter except “do I like it?” Then I started asking “will they like it?” and the whole thing stalled. The audience came for the unfiltered version. When I gave them the filtered one and lost them both (or at least it felt like it).
Guilty as charged, I’m reclaiming the steering wheel.
The title was clickbait by the way… I’m not leaving Substack. But I am leaving Substack as the money-centre of my writing world. No more paid newsletter. No more badge. No more editorial debt.
From here Substack will serve as a live feed. I write when something moves me. You subscribe to read it for free. Eventually you may buy my books, collections or even mentoring over on elinpetronella.com
This feels good.
What role does Substack play in your ecosystem, if you have an ecosystem?
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Love, Elin