no. 67: a year or four
About a year ago, I launched a paid subscription plan for let them eat cake. There are currently 96 paying subscribers to let them eat cake (and over 2300 in total) – if you’re #100, I’ll send you a cake.1
This newsletter explicitly functions on a patronage model, but I started the paid subscriptions intending to send an extra issue to paid subscribers each month. In the last year, I’ve managed only 8 such issues, though this is also probably the only newsletter on Substack where a subscription also gets you pâté-croûte.
On the other hand I’ve sent 31 newsletters since “going paid” (as Substack likes to call it), which is better than one every fortnight, and more than I’ve managed in any 12-month span since I started working again. In addition, a Singaporean publisher liked this newsletter enough to ask me for a book proposal.
It’s both delightful and ironic to be pitching a book on the strength of this Substack, because I actually started it in order to try and get a book in print. My first issue here was just over 4 years ago, in February 2019 (I still think that was a decent essay, and its relevance has outlived the restaurant which inspired it).
At the time, I’d just written a memoir that I couldn’t get an agent to look at. Eventually, a kindly one – who has since left the agency business – took me aside and said, “Look, your chapters are brilliant, but until you can show a publisher that you can bring them an audience, no one will give you time of day.”
“How do I demonstrate that?” I asked.
“Well, you could build a social media following, or you could start another restaurant…”
Starting another restaurant seemed like the easy option, so I launched this Substack instead, along with companion accounts on twitter and instagram. We all know what happened to twitter, and I don’t think I got a single subscriber from instagram, so I stopped posting to both platforms around the middle last year. By that point, I was only really using them to announce pop-ups.
Sometime during the last four years, I realized that much of my original memoir didn’t matter that much to me any more. I’m glad I wrote it, but the kind of pieces I’m publishing here feel more important. Many of the worst bogs in that manuscript were attempts to cram some of the ideas in these essays into chapters in a memoir, and here they feel much more at home.
Next week, I’ll be sending the opening chapter of my old memoir to paying subscribers. I don’t intend to serialize the whole book here, because I don’t want to put in the amount of editing that would require, but it might be worth posting the good bits.
As ever, I’m grateful and delighted that you’re reading.
Desktop talismans, and unforgiving supervisor.
Yes, an actual physical cake that you can and should eat. I can’t promise I’ll make it myself, because the logistics of shipping you a cake from Cambridge, MA, may be prohibitive, so I may order it from a bakery closer to you – but it will be an actual cake.
Congratulations on the gains in your writing. I also enjoy writing on food, restaurants, and cooking. The candor in your style is refreshing and appreciated by this paying fan. Feel free to deliver food of any sort to Dragon Pizza in Somerville, my restaurant, for in person discussions on all our favorite topics. Your writing is inspiring to me. I used to write a blog on my restaurant website and plan to continue in a similar way as you. Check my past posts at reddsinrozzie.com , click Rants and Ruminations. Im proud of it and hope you like it. Finally, keep up the good work.
Congratulations! You are as gracious a writer as you are a host. Looking forward to seeing where this Substack wanders!
PS I’m only slightly bummed I was probably 5 subscribers short of a cake.