Hello,
It’s been rather long while since I’ve written a blog post. Life and health have proved challenging. I’ve also discovered another platform to be able to write my musings on life, creativity and Dwarfism – it’s called SubStack.
All Hail The SubStack
I felt resistance to SubStack for quite sometime, I didn’t really understand what it was about and why, or how, I could use it. Then a couple of writers that I follow, moved over to the platform and it really caught my eye.
I set-up an account on there and started to immerse myself in to the platform, how it works and what the possibilities for content and creative creation are.
Following the amazing Claire Venus’s, Sparkle on SubStack, who teaches people how the make the most of their presence on there, has helped to navigate the new landscape.
The pros of the platform I can see from the few posts I have already written are:
- the ease of which you can write a what is essentially a blog post takes a lot of the background admin and tech to get to the point of writing in the first place that you would with a system like WordPress.
- there is so much rich content! It feels a lot like the early to mid 00’s blogging community when everyone was supportive of sharing thoughts and ideas with out being shouted down by trolls. I forgot how much I miss this.
- this rich community means that people are able to delve deep into topics and bring fresh perspectives on a range of life, which incredibly refreshing to engage with.
- there is the opportunity to monetise your content, SubStack make this easy too. It’s great to see writers and creatives being compensated for their endeavours.
The cons of the platform
- The user interface is a visual nightmare and, I find it very overwhelming. There is a definite learning curve to use the system. It has taken me quite a while to get my head around where to find to write your post, read other contributor accounts.
- You have minimal control over the formatting of posts and can seem quite busy. This is a plus, from a teach point of view, but the toes of the artist in me are curling.
- Receiving lots of emails from all the people you subscribe to means a mailbox overflowing, with granted great writing and such, but it takes away the choice from the user to decide how they want to consume content.
- As I mentioned above, I love the possibilities of monetising your work, however, it feels like a bit of an exclusive club and coming up against paywall after paywall. I think is something I’m going to struggle with implementing. I would love to, but I don’t want people to miss out on my work.
- Relying on a third party platform for your presence. With a website – it’s my platform. I pay for the hosting the domain and its upkeep. What worries me about third party platforms is that they could close overnight and what would happen to all that content you’ve created? I think it’s important to have a good balance of digital assets – whether that is your own website, mailing list or both, in case the worst happens and your presence on a third party platform disappears.
There seems to be a lot of cons, but these are not that a big deal in the grand scheme of engaging on the SubStack platform. I doesn’t feel like your writing into the ether so much as you do with blogging from your own website.
Will I be moving Hello Little Lady over to SubStack?
No. This blog, that is, of 2024, can you believe – is 16 years old! That’s a lot of time that I have invested in this space and I’m proud of what it has achieved. I love seeing how I have progressed over the years from a blogger to a creative practitioner and artist. Also, I outlined in the pros and cons, I’m weary of putting all my digital assets in one third party basket.
I can’t deny, I’m tempted by the chance to monetise my musings too, but I’ll need to research more how I will go about this. Life has been so up and down recently that I don’t know if I have the time commitment to be able to provide consistent content. Time will tell, I suppose, but you’ll definitely find me over there if you want to find out what I’ve been up to.
That said, I’m really impressed with the platform and will use as a tool to write posts that help you keep up more regularly with what I am up to. I can see me moving my mailing list from MailChimp to SubStack soon.
Subscribe to the Hello Little Lady SubStack account
So, if you want to keep up with my musings on a regular basis – please do subscribe to my SubStack account over here: