I’ve always found that a somewhat strange thing to aim for. I understand there are several thousand people worldwide working to build a loyal subscriber base (“building loyal subscribers” makes one sound like Dr. Frankenstein). And whatever their reasons are, I’m sure at least one of them is “to build community” or “to make money”. Those are perfectly legitimate things to do. But insofar as the question of a loyal subscriber base is raised with regards to writing, I don’t have an answer. Before I became a journalist in 2012, I’d been a blogger for four years, writing about physics and an intellectual life centered on that topic. After I became a journalist, I began to write on science, health, environment, spaceflight, higher education, science policy and administration, research fraud, and many other things that caught my fancy. And I continued blogging. Over time, I realised a few things:
(i) I write because I have something to say, rather than because someone wanted something specific to read or even because someone might find what I say useful.
Follow-up: I’ve found that by making of myself a better person every day, in as many of the infinite ways in which a life can be lived as possible, in steps marginally small or revolutionarily big, I can still ensure the number of people who find what I have to say engaging, entertaining or even useful is non-zero. That is, I believe good people have good things to say. I’m not there yet but I hope to be. As a corollary, my writing at various times has only mirrored me at various times, opening windows into my own psyche that might otherwise have taken me years of mental probing.
(ii) I attach a great deal of importance to writing something just because one needs to say it, or more broadly to communicate per se, rather than keep it to oneself. No self-censoring (with reasonable limits).
Follow-up: Writing has its own merits. The more you write, the better you write and the clearer you think. Importantly, these relationships are entirely independent of whether someone is reading your words. (To be sure, audiences are not redundant. Having one will also train you in the peculiarities of public sensibilities, social norms, satire, the virtues of dialogue, and what a difference writing when you’re angry makes, among other things.)
(iii) The internet has increased by leaps and bounds a person’s ability to seek out, find, and consistently access new information. This includes both loitering over the internet, jumping from one website (or Wikipedia page) to the next, and staying in ‘touch’ using bookmarks, RSS feeds, email subscriptions, and other forms of notifications.
(iv) Frankly, I care little for a loyal subscriber base. I care much more for having a place to write, for more people to write, and for you to find whatever kind of writing you’re looking for. (This is why my fondness for WordPress.com persists: the cost of getting started is just a little time, and not even any money.)
(v) If there is something you won’t say because your subscribers might disagree and/or unsubscribe — I’ll be disappointed but not surprised. Such is the world. But if you won’t say something because your subscribers won’t be interested, you should drop the subscribers and keep the writing habit. If you can’t, you should admit that you’re being dishonest.
Follow-up: Point (v) might do a good job of tempting you into believing that I’m really repudiating my readers (such as they are) before they can repudiate me, but in my defence… I don’t care.
Granted in the first instance: applying these same ideas over and over while maintaining a fixed presence online — e.g. at the same domain name or the same account on a platform — is what leads to loyal subscribers. However, these days, you’ll agree such a base also demands that the writer, or content-producer more broadly, focus on a fixed set of themes, ideas, peeves or what-have-you. I don’t think I could ever promise such a thing. All I can promise is that I will think about the contents of a post to the best of my ability on that particular day before publishing it. This together with point no. (iv) means that if I write about bananas one day, I expect banana-reader to be able to discover it, and if I write about chillies the next day, I expect chilli-reader to be able to discover it.
Granted in the second: my professional identity as a journalist is bound up with this kind of thinking. I’ve always only worked for publications that had a daily readership of at least a million. Each of my articles has been read by at least a few thousand people, but often by many more, and on some rare occasions by more people than the number that reads my blog in a whole year. You’ll have to trust me when I say I don’t take this readership for granted, and in return I will admit that it also allows me to adopt that laid-back but sincere policy towards my blog. If you won’t do something even when you’re suitably privileged, you suck.
