Number 39th With a Very Slow, Precarious Bullet!

Nathan Rabin's Bad Ideas is one of the 40 most popular humor newsletters at Substack. Don't worry, I'm still struggling tremendously!

About a month or so ago, I got a message from Substack letting me know that Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas had cracked the top fifty in humor. It had hit thirty-nine. As someone who has devoted much of my career to writing about “Weird Al” Yankovic, who has the distinction of having scored a top forty hit in four consecutive decades, that meant a lot to me.

It’s rare that I am surprised by one of my professional endeavors doing better, rather than much worse, than expected. I’d been devoting more time, energy, and attention to Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas. Cracking the top 40 made me feel like that effort was paying off.

I recently vowed to write twice as many new movies for my Substack newsletter. That’s a considerable increase in work, but I hoped it would pay off in continued modest growth for Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas.

I go out of my way to give paid subscribers substantially more exclusive and exclusive(ish) content than free subscribers and monsters who read my work at Bad Ideas without even signing up for a free subscription, even though free subscriptions literally cost NO MONEY.

I give paid subscribers the God-like power to dictate what I write about, and when my upcoming book, The Fractured Mirror, comes out, they will receive multiple excerpts from it every week.

I live in fear that the newsletter’s modest momentum will hit a wall and go spiraling in the opposite direction. That’s happened more often than I can recall with me professionally.

Being a full-time professional small businessman for a solid decade now has really driven home that I am no kind of businessman at all, and have no idea what the public wants or how to give it to them. I’ve used polls extensively to help me figure out what people who don’t have the Triple Crown (autism, ADHD, and bipolar 2) of mental illnesses/neurological conditions want, and it’s helped, but I still need the kind of help I don’t know how to ask for effectively or accept.

So I was alarmed when I stopped getting new paid subscribers. Oh well, I thought. At least I wasn’t losing paid subscribers.

Then, I started losing paid subscribers. I went from 339 to 335. My concern is that this will just get worse and worse and worse, and somehow, one month from now, I will have negative thirty-seven paid subscribers. Instead of Stripe depositing a small amount of money into my Stripe account every day, they’ll join the long line of creditors calling me every day in poignantly pathetic, inherently doomed attempts to get money from me.

Incidentally, I make just under twenty thousand dollars a year through paid subscriptions via Substack, so being thirty-ninth in humor says more about the relatively modest amounts of money people make here than it does about Bad Ideas’ popularity or commercial success.

I do not know how to run a successful business. All I can do is try to publish quality content regularly and dependably and ask sincerely for y’all to take pity on a perpetually struggling 49-year-old for whom five dollars a month means more than is probably at all decent and reasonable.

37 places may be all that separates Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas and Garrison Keillor’s Substack, but money, fame, and success-wise, several dozen universes stand between the rich and famous accused sex pest and me, a wholesome married man.

I have low expectations. It would mean the world if I gained five paid subscribers over the next few days. It’s not much, but it would mean the difference between a gain and a loss.

That twenty-five dollars a month in increased income (minus Substack and Stripe’s cut) would be huge. I don't need my newsletter to explode in popularity; I just need it to get progressively more successful rather than less.

To put things in Jeb Bush terms, please become a paid subscriber. And please clap. I won’t hear it, but it’ll be a nice gesture.

If you pledge 500 pennies a month to this newsletter, less than the price of one of those expensive coffees with the crazy names they sell at Starbucks, I promise to make it worth your while.

It could even lead to a magical time when I don’t regularly write about struggling and failing and being perpetually frustrated because things are actually going kind of okay. That might seem like an impossible ambition, but I’d like to think that it is at least theoretically attainable.