(2020-11-22) Walk Why A Paid Newsletter Wont Be Enough Money For Most Writersand Thats Fine

Hunter Walk: Why a Paid Newsletter Won’t Be Enough Money for Most Writers (And That’s Fine): The Multi-SKU Creator.

A number of reporters and columnists these days are “going indie,” detaching from their previous employer and signing up with a site like Substack, Patreon or Medium.

It’s my belief that very few “Substack writers” will make 100% of their income from their newsletter and this won’t be a failure of the platforms but instead related to the nature of creation itself. Enter, the Multi-SKU Creator.

There could be a podcast SKU. A speaking fee SKU. A book deal SKU. A consulting SKU. A guest columnist SKU. And so on. And if he does several of these over the next few years, it won’t be about the success or failure of Substack (for him) but a mix of creative, economic and lifestyle goals. (Multiple Income Streams)

I’m such a believer in the Multi-SKU Creator that we backed a startup company called Stir.

Stir is kinda of like Square, if Square was built for digital creators instead of coffee shops. Their first products include a dashboard which allows you to combine your multiple sources of income into a single view, tools to support automatic revenue sharing among creative collaborators and an experiment to let you charge Twitter followers for access to a separate private feed.