You, and all of us
Big Substacks and podcasts which have thousands of paying subscribers sometimes do the Annual Report posts. This is a version of that.
If you started reading Long Play only this month, welcome aboard and have a look around. The most read pieces are listed on the home page, under Most Popular. NB that after three months of availability, free posts get archived behind the paywall.
There are about 380 of you as of right now – the number goes up by one or two every week. It’s a smallish group of people, but – and I don’t use this term lightly - elite. Most of you have way more interesting jobs than mine, and are way more interesting than I. There are at least 3 CBC journos, 2 Globe writers, and at least 2 of what Marc Weisblott, not entirely jokingly, would call “retired media moguls”. There are people who run publishing houses and work in them. There are editors and retired editors. There are philanthropists. A good number of classical musicians. At least one SPAD to a former Prime Minister. There are university professors and school teachers. There is one legendary Canadian art philanthropist and more than one eminence grise of Canadian journalism. There are a good number of novelists and non-fiction writers among you. A couple of TV producers. Some talented historians. A bit of PR expertise too, among you. A couple of playwrights. A theatre legend. And then about half of all the subs whose anonymous email addresses and Substack profiles don’t reveal anything. But judging by the comments they leave and emails they send me, they’re equally brilliant, and equally fair-minded as their less anonymous counterparts.
The fact that y’all are reading my dispatches and keep being interested (and tolerate my typos) is just extraordinary. My open rate is between 55 and 65% percent on e-blasts sent to everyone, and up to 80% for posts only sent to the paying readers. The around-60% is apparently a good open rate. Outside the blockbusters, most popular and shared reads are in this order:
Long (and I mean, there’s a reason this newsletter is called Long Play), in-depth conversations with authors, historians, social scientists, artists. Far from it being a drag, a 4000-word piece is apparently catnip for you lot.
Book reviews plus: in-depth essays about a book that tackle more than that one book. Some of these are among the blockbusters (the Kathleen Stock book review; the Jesse Wente book review) or tend to do well (the two recent ‘was sexual revolution bad for women’ books, for example). Some of the Short Reviews for the Busy People have also done well.
Cri du coeur type commentary of the “is Canada / angloworld going completely insane, or is it me”, usually on topics that our media avoid like a plague or frame always the same way
Performing arts reviews for something in Toronto (unless it’s opera, which tends to draw international eyeballs, interestingly). This is only fourth probably because most of you don’t live in Toronto.
Okay, I can hear you, when’s the but coming? There’s bound to be a but.
Yes, alright. The but is that in its third year, Long Play has only 33 paying subscribers. Which means that after Substack takes its cut, the credit card company its cut, and after the annual subs discount is counted, I get about $200 in earnings. A month.
Most of my paid writing opportunities have disappeared during covid, and we’ve come out of lockdowns into a Canadian mediascape without arts and culture or longform writing, and politically much narrowed. The news of layoffs in Canadian media and even shut-downs of entire outlets are basically a bi-weekly recurrence. The old business model based on advertising is in its throes, and the new, reader-subscription model has not yet developed and complexified enough to replace it. We all follow too many individual Substacks and podcasts. We all want some sort of “grouping” of them into a magazine or a daily paper format, so we wouldn't have to pay each individually, but this is not yet happening – unless you are Bari Weiss’ The Free Press, and one or two other exceptions that prove the rule. All this in addition to the regular mainstream media subscriptions that we have.
So currently there is no better way to invest in the future of journalism, if I can put it pompously like that, than by subscribing to individual writers’… carts. Or veg boxes. Just imagine us as medieval peddlers, travelling city to city. Or think of Mackenzie (whose Mackenzie House, if it ever reopens, you should visit) and his little printer inside his home. Those were the original bloggers and Substackers, but before journalism professionalized. Of course some of the most popular Substackers today have taken a side in an incendiary values war and are pushing it like Mackenzie did his propaganda. And that’s fine. But there are a bunch of us who are more long-form, more multiple-sources, more I-prefer-reading-to-Netflix. We used to have a home in the media once, but not any more, especially in Canada, which is not buying its cultural products.
In other words, if you were ever thinking of becoming a paid subscriber to Long Play, now would be the time. If the LP is adding anything to your life, try out a subscription. Paying subs get from 20-60% more content per month, depending on the month. If y’all didn’t live all around the world, I would have also introduced in-person meetups – we could perhaps call ourselves the Free Speech Club? Once there are more of you locally, we can do that.
If you’re not ready to subscribe, tell two friends about Long Play. Post something from it somewhere.
How I make it work, not having family money or partner money to fall back on, is that I work two additional jobs to pay the bills. I have an 18-hrs-a-week desk job, and I teach adult ESL one-on-one every week too, usually in a local library, in addition to this newsletter and paid writing for other outlets. I work all the time. I don’t think I’ve had a two-day weekend in a decade. If I travel for my vacation, it’s usually with an interview or two lined up on location, and the research and the book buying, unavoidably. I am not complaining: boo-hoo, first world probs etc, but I would prefer it to have more time to work on Long Play during the week. Those in-depth chats and essays that you like reading? Imagine if I could do them more frequently. I’d like to invite other people to review or do reportage for me as well, but at the moment I’m barely paying myself and there is just no budget.
I have so many plans. I’d like to talk to Siri Hustvedt, and Jean Philippe Toussaint… and Jon Kay and Bill Bryson about writing about science for popular readership, and with a podcasting historian or two about ‘selling’ history for general public, and I’d like to talk to some former premiers about where Canada is going and what it even is anymore (if anyone has Jason Kenney’s email address? I have Wynne’s) and with Helen Thompson about oil and gas, and if Ian Hacking hadn’t died on us recently, he would have been on the list too.
I would like to have a series in which I talk to people who work in regular yet essential jobs that make this city work – and ask them about their lives. Construction workers, PSWs, nurses. This series could be called My Job.
I’d like to talk to artists and writers about money. How do they make it work.
I would like more time and focus on these projects. But I will need many more paying subscribers for that.
If you’ve been thinking about it, now is a great time. Take a month-by-month sub, see how you feel about it in a few months.
And a quick final appreciation for my paying subs:
If this newsletter keeps happening, it’s thanks to you.
The paying subs are usually the most devoted readers, with most opens per post, but interestingly not always. A couple of you have no time to read much – maybe open one quarter of all emails – but still carry on with the payments month by month. I am a bit in awe of you. You realize that a Substack sub is exactly like any other media sub: whatever subscription to a daily you might have, you never read everything on the home page or in your inbox. But you do read what really interests you – and this thing that interests you exists precisely because of your subscription.
OK that’s all on this topic for a while.
I’ll be working on a post about Hervé Le Tellier’s bizarre and compelling Goncourt-winning and internationally bestselling metaphysical thriller, The Anomaly. It’s also exactly the kind of novel that Tim Parks would call a global novel, written in French but full of American references. Some of you should get this in your mailboxes over the weekend. Also down the line, I’d like to see a couple of shows at the Shaw festival. More anon.