A Timeline of Growth: Luck Needs a Place to Land

The change I made that preceded 800+ readers signing up to this newsletter

Early Days

I began my Substack writing journey with a substantial amount of skepticism. It seemed to me that anyone who “made it” as a writer was at the mercy of luck or had deep pockets—they either were picked for Oprah’s book club or had $5,000 a month for Google ad buys. 

To make matters more skeptical, I had worked in an agency setting and learned plenty of strategies around digital marketing. I was trained in this stuff and watched folks throw a couple grand a month (or much more) at content marketing and online ads … and it worked. The spend money to make money game is appealing because it feels concrete, absolute and exact. And if you spend enough, it does work, but once you start spending at that level, the only way forward is to up your ad buy. This is very hard to untangle from.

By my 30s I was not rich enough to buy ads or do much more than string together a website and try to organize, re-organize and re-brand (sad face). Things would lift for a little bit—for a while I hosted The Listening Room where we’d read our work aloud to one another but in more of an open-mic kind of setup where listeners could join in, too. There was a small group of the regulars, but what I wasn’t sharing with anyone is that after each session, I felt dizzy, disoriented and exhausted while also feeling elated and connected. (This can happen when you have an auditory processing disorder.) 

Things came together and fell apart quite often in my writing and editing work—a natural rhythm of life that I’m encouraged to offer an open posture to—but it happened so rapidly that it felt like more was at play. Then, at the intersection of some major grief and loss in 2019, I threw my hands up and didn’t write at all for a long while. I disavowed writing and marketing and trying to “be a writer” altogether. Most days I yelled at the trees around my house in the mountains. All I had ever done with my writing and editing felt worthless. 

With some time, somatic experiencing therapy, and a new autism spectrum disorder diagnosis, I surrendered to the fact that writing is the only way I will make it through my life. So whatever writing + Amanda looks like, I decided I could be OK with the unknowns, with forever being a small fish but perhaps a little powerful—as long as my days felt better, more connected and less chaotic... something only writing could achieve. 

Clearing a Space For Luck

Upon this surrendering, something dramatically shifted.

One night, after putting my daughter to bed, probably with a turkey sandwich hanging out of my mouth at the kitchen table, I was reluctantly watching a Substack strategy video when I heard a quiet internal voice say:

Luck needs a place to land.

My mind ran in a hundred directions trying to figure out what this meant. 

What if Luck is like … an invisible spaceship? And it’s just looking for a place to settle in for a pit stop?

If Luck is roaming the Earth with no particular aim, I realized that I had not done any of the work to offer it a place to land. All these years, I had been angry that Luck wasn’t landing in the field of my fitful writing habits and self doubts, when perhaps Luck was hovering, like, “Give me a landing spot, lady.”

This changed just about everything for me that night. I realized that my pessimism had encouraged me to cautiously tend to the garden of my writing, running for cover at any sign of a predator in the editorial wild. I forgot that while I am a realist, I also recognize the moments of cause-and-effect all around me. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. And I have some glimmer of confidence that the tiny actions I take, day in and day out, are a posture of other-worldly, maybe even spiritual, cooperation. 

And so I harnessed this energy and kept trying new things on Substack. New ways of sharing and commenting; I kept researching newsletter directories to submit my information to; and I kept sharing my writing even when it felt absurd, embarrassing, impossible. Because even if this meant my writing went nowhere, at least I was giving this writing energy somewhere to go besides my unstable GI system. 

Starting to write on Substack was an act of faith, a big leap for a Buddhisty-leaning person who doesn’t really hunker down into absolutes. And in some ways, showing up now is still an act of faith to see if I can offer my writing to the world and let it roam without expectations of grandeur or devastation.

A Hard Reset, Then Growth

Today I want to share some specifics about how I started with 12 readers and where I’m landing these days. The short version is: I did a hard reset on all my writing habits, perspectives and assumptions. Every day I was challenging myself to not assume the worst—this is very hard when you’re autistic and the world generally feels like one big bully fog horn. Instead of hunkering down, I practiced coming to the surface and being me.

Let’s dive in.

June 2022 - Jan 2023 | 12 readers

Testing, testing, testing

At one point my MailChimp list had been close to 98 emails, but I made it a rule that I would give readers three emails’ worth of chances to come with me once I had really set my stake in the ground about moving over to Substack. In the end, 12 readers made the leap with me.

Also in this time period—perhaps spurred on by “who the f*ck cares … it’s only 12 people!”—I started testing my courage a bit in my writing. Instead of trying to write with an arm’s length, “I’m a professional” perspective, I wrote about the memories that were surfacing in my mind organically in any given week. 

What goldfish taught me about the end of things

This is a story about the time I, at age 9, watched the sole surviving goldfish die in our aquarium tank. Might not seem impactful on the surface (no pun intended), but it had been poking at my waking memories and instead of pushing it down, I let it come to the top.

A gentle friend

Mostly a confession. I wrote it knowing my younger parts are begging to be known, even now that I am an adult at age 38. There’s something about honoring those smaller voices that brings profound creative permission and safety.

The Inner Critic Asks to Go

Another sort of dissociating, other-brain, writing that was pushing to the top. It wasn’t orderly at first but She found a way to say exactly what was needed.

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Jan 2023 | still 12 readers

Prioritizing my writing, tackling low-hanging fruit, and proceeding authentically

Working Tuesday and Thursday nights at the kitchen table, writing and researching Substack best practices. I told myself I wanted to come to this as a student—ready to learn, ready to forget the years of marketing mumbo jumbo that hadn’t ever helped anyways. A few things I started to do:

• I submitted my info to a handful of newsletter directories.

• I started treating my writing as important as caring for my daughter (who was 11 months at the time and my full-time day job).

• I stopped trying to make myself rigidly follow a content calendar. Instead I call it The Dump. And all my story ideas go there.

• I tried to publish about once a week.

Feb 2023 | 24 readers

Finding true joy in discovering other writers, slowly building a community through comment sections

It was probably around here that I began discovering some great writing on Substack. Like, the kind that changes your mind about belonging in the world. And I began taking leaps in the comments section—sharing my thoughts and practicing how to show I read what the author said, even if my comment was way out in left field. My takeaways whenever I read something have always felt like they were completely off topic, and for my whole life I took this as a sign that I hadn’t read thoroughly enough. Now, I trust myself a little more and practice letting my organic response to a writer’s work come to the surface instead of, perhaps, hiding or censoring myself.

March 2023 | 47 readers

Staying strong

Doing much of the same things. Questioning my sanity and probably discovering some of my favorite writers on Substack. 

April 2023 | 71 readers

Getting my first shout-out from a writer whose work I love and had been commenting on

I think somewhere in here

Alex Dobrenko`

re-shared something I wrote, and I saw a “spike” in readers—like 12 in one day, maybe? I read all your names that day (and every day). This is also the month I started prompting my images in DALL-E. I felt pretty torn at first about using AI for creating art. But for me, an autistic person whose hand-eye coordination is abysmal but whose imaginary worlds are unlimited, AI art has allowed a whole new section of my brain and creativity to come forward.

May 2023 | 119 readers

Hiring help and getting my Substack offerings in order

Began working one-on-one with an editor. My main goal was to first get help with polishing what I offered. She created an immensely helpful container for me to polish my first impressions. For other writers, I’ve written these things ten times while wearing a blindfold, but I could not do this work for myself. No matter how much I tried, my neuroses got the better of me and I would tweak something in one spot and then it would contradict or put another detail out of balance. Working with an editor every week on my writing plan created such a supportive container for my work, especially as I was in a critical wayfinding point in my Substack journey.

June 2023 | 168 readers

Tag-teaming pieces to get them across the finish line

Once my “Substack garden” was ready for visitors, my editor and I began finding a good rhythm for touching base and publishing on a weekly basis. A lot of what I realized I needed was someone to ask, “Is this crazy? Can I say that?” And of course an editor is so helpful when I am editorially dehydrated and can’t pull a piece across the finish line.

July 2023 | 250 readers

Getting noticed on Notes, plus a feature by Substack

It’s very important for me to say that I was THRILLED with having 250 readers. I even said to myself at one point, “Gosh, I just love all 250 of us. I’m not sure I need more readers…” I also was not making any behind-the-scenes connections with any big writers. I was just doing my thing each week. Resting when I needed; writing what I wanted; filling The Dump with ideas; and generally staying in the lane of heart-centered guidance from an editor. 

On July 11, I wrote this Note, which is as close to “viral” as anything has ever gone in all my little writerly life. It was about going from 12 to 292 readers. The Substack community lifted up this Note, and in the 7 days after writing it, I saw 94 new readers join my list. I was flabbergasted. Just utterly over the moon with all these beautiful readers coming into my Substack garden. 

And then I was a featured Substack publication from July 24 to July 28. During that time, my list grew by another 443 readers in those four days. It was mind-boggling, but also not: I’ve been a damn good editor and storyteller for a long time. And I know my writing is a veritable buffet of good rhythms, insights and questions. This was just the first time in my life that an actual spotlight shone on my garden. And when people landed here, it seems they found something they were ready to keep reading.

Aug 2023 | 895 readers

Publishing work to a new audience

I felt pretty nervous publishing my first post after being a Substack featured publication. I had planned a piece about the accumulation of power (breezy stuff, really) and my main concern was the usual: the fear of being too muchness. 

My one comfort was knowing that I hadn’t propped myself up with any marketing lingo or Ivy League associations. All y’all knew what you were signing up for (heart-centered guidance from an editor and writer). Much to my surprise, the open rate on that first essay to 850+ people only dropped from 42% to 33%, which would still garner a gasp of awe in a roomful of marketers. This tells me that the right folks are signing up to read and hopefully join in the discussions I love to have in the comments and in Ask an Editor. Being a Substack featured publication didn’t bump up my paid readership, which isn’t surprising. I have a lot of trust to earn and storytelling yet to offer.

How This Helps Your Own Writing

I hesitated quite a bit about writing down something as prescriptive as a month-by-month examination, if only because I know how this kind of analysis can get us all stuck. Pieces about growth and success can make it seem like there’s just one thing missing to help our writing take off. Or that if you just do it my way, then you’ll finally see more people reading your writing. And that is the very root of human suffering that I don’t want to feed. Because it’s not true. Being more like me is not the answer. I invite you to take everything I say and test it against your own knowledge and intuition and guidance.

I hope that if you take something from my experience and apply it to your own writing, it’s to try trusting your instincts just 1% more each day. No one has a monopoly on good ideas, good writing, the kind of writing that goes viral or otherwise. We all have good guesses, and we all have experiments. That’s how this works. And somewhere in the great sea of writing alchemy, we learn how to row our boats.

In the coming weeks, I’ll be writing from my seat as an editor, a writer and even as a meditation instructor and weaving it into something I’m crafting called Writing Seasons. These seasons are the best way I know how to earnestly pursue better, brighter and more captivating writing, while still belonging deeply to yourself. Make sure you subscribe to get these newsletters.

If this piece was helpful, encouraging or even discouraging, I welcome your thoughts in the comments below!

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