An apology to all subscribers

I fell for marketing hype and made a mistake.

Dear readers,

When I started this Substack, I fell for the hype and set up payments using the absolute minimum that Substack would allow ($5 monthly and $30 annually). In the years following, I’ve never had a paying subscriber, and I completely forgot about the payment arrangement that I’d set up.

Then something unexpected happened this year, and I got a (one) paid subscriber. This person paid for a full year.

Gulp.

I have to admit that I wasn’t prepared for a paid subscription and I got a little nervous as a result. I considered canceling it at once and giving this person a full refund, but then I thought… well… maybe the universe is telling me something. Let’s go with it.

So I went with it.

I dropped everything I was doing, including work on my latest novel, and I wrote a short story. If you’ve written a short story, you know that it takes a bit of effort. I lost sleep over it. I sweated over it. Unfortunately, my attention was divided between my life, my next book, and the story, and I think it turned out OK, but it wasn’t the best I could do.

And then I realized my mistake…

I’m a no-name author. The only thing that keeps my work alive is with people reading, sharing, and reviewing it. And by people, I mean YOU. When I limit my MFS posts to paid subscribers, I block everyone else. I prevent everyone else from reading, commenting, offering your feedback and encouragement. I have so few subscribers that limiting my work to an even tinier subset of a tiny set of people is a really bad idea for someone like me, who needs readers more than I need to be paid.

My mistake was to offer a paid subscription.

So…. I was considering what to do about this situation when my one paid subscriber basically did the best course of action: They cancelled their subscription.

The first thing I did was reach out to Substack and start the process to give this person a 100% refund for their subscription.

I have absolutely no hard feelings for this person and I hope they have no hard feelings for MFS. They were brave enough to take a chance on MFS and it didn’t work out for them. I’m extremely grateful that they gave it a try and I completely understand their situation.

So what does this mean for you?

MFS is basically the marketing side of my writing, where I connect with readers, learn what you like and don’t like, and then take that information and write stories that make you happy, or distract you from your troubles. In return, I write posts and try to keep you engaged and aware of the fact that I’m writing books.

I tried the serialized story approach and it doesn’t work for me. I can, at best, crank out a chapter every month, and your feedback showed that a month is too long between chapters.

On top of that, as a writer, I feel most comfortable in the novel format. Short stories are very hard for me to write. And poetry? Ugh, don’t even bother.

For you: I am re-affirming my commitment to keep MFS free for my current and future readers (assuming I get any).

With one caveat:

I have raised my subscription prices, so that if someone is really determined to pay for a subscription, then I will once again drop everything and write a short story, or maybe more than one. And it will be the best short story I can write because the new prices will help me to focus on that story.

I feel that it’s important to mention that I lose $2-$4 on every book that I sell. That’s right: In my current situation, with only two novels on the market, it actually makes more financial sense for me to give my books away for free. That’s life in indie publishing, where the market rewards authors that publish as many books as possible. The table stakes appear to be about 20 books before one breaks even.

Readers, please accept my deepest apologies for making this mistake. I’m learning as I go. Thank you for your patience and for hanging in there.

Cheers, all.