Introducing Sub Club's Weekly Digest
No more messy inbox. No more tears.
Look at us! All grown up with over 23,000 readers. And yet, still not potty trained. We’ll get there. We’ve spent the past few months figuring out how to grow as a newsletter without annoying anyone (everyone). And I think we’ve got it. By George…I think. We’ve got it.
What have we got?
Decluttering your inbox.
New pricing model.
Exciting new series—serieses? Series, probably.
Events, accountability hours, and our new premium chat
Anyway, below are all the details and thank you for helping us get here.
Autonomy over your inbox with our new weekly digest (this thing)
What you’re reading now is our first “Sub Club Weekly Digest.” Here, every Saturday, you will get a roundup of everything we published during the week (plus a little extra).
We realized that different people have different needs and nobody likes a cluttered inbox. So in our weekly digests you will see everything at once and decide for yourself what to read. If there is anything you’d like sent straight to your inbox, you can add it. If you’d like to avoid certain bits, that’s easy too.
For example! This week, we published:
Over the next few month’s, we’ll be releasing new content like interviews with writers and editors, behind-the-guidelines deep dives, Sub Club special lists, essays, insights, audio, video, and more. This means, we’ll be starting to take submissions soon! (and paying well).
Our first three interviews will be with Kevin Wilson (Author of Nothing to See Here) on what it means to be a “good” writer these days, Tony Stubblebine (CEO of Medium) on the role of curators in the age? era? blip? of AI, and some really cool third person we haven’t confirmed yet.
We have two new interview series coming up hosted by David Mahaffey (The Sun) & Kailey DelloRusso (Write or Die) called Pubs & Chill and Subs & Chill. These will all be bundled into a series we haven’t come up with a name for but the current placeholder is Conversations, chats, & blah-blah-blah.
As each new series launches, only the first will be through email. After, you’ll have the choice to get them by email or wait for the weekly digest.
Here is what we have so far:
Where to Submit This Week - all of the opening and closing lit mags, contests, themed calls, and more opportunities you need to know about each week
Where to Query This Week - featured indie presses and literary agents to send you full-length work every week.
Where to Pitch This Week - a weekly round-up of nonfiction pitch calls from editors around the globe with Amber Petty.
Sub Club Specials - Hand-picked submission opportunities and why you’ll love them every other(ish) Thursday.
Sub Club Weekly Digest - Weekly round up of all the sub-clubby goodness we roll out every week so you can keep your inbox clear of us till you're ready.
If, at any point, you want more (or less) content coming directly to your inbox, you can manage that here:
Why are we doing this? Substack’s popularity has led to everyone launching a newsletter. This means your inbox is probably cluttered with all sorts of updates and essays regularly. That gets annoying. And we don’t want to be annoying. Well, not any more than we are by nature.
A new pricing model
Unlike some newsletters, our content can be picked up and put down all willy-nilly. This means we have a lot of people popping in, paying for a post, then ditching. In and out, in and out.
We played into this for a while by creating all sorts of enticing lists to get paid upgrades off a single post. But this sucked and was tiresome. We’ve adapted our strategy to create consistent, well-researched content. It’s not as flashy, but we think it serves our readers much better.
So, we have made our yearly membership significantly cheaper than the monthly. For monthly subscriptions, it will now be $10 per month. But for yearly, it will be almost 40% cheaper at $75. Yearly subscriptions make our finances more predictable, so we can afford to maintain consistent, reliable content. Of course, as always, we have our scholarship for those who need it.
(If you already have a membership at a cheaper price, that will never change for as long as you remain subscribed.)
Events, accountability hours, and our new premium chat
I mentioned this in our latest “Where to Submit.” We will be testing out some different community event ideas. First is our ‘Fuck It, Submit’ parties, where everyone is welcome to come hang out and submit in a casual format and have any questions or confusions cleared up (as best we can). Here are the next couple upcoming!
Thursday (October 3rd) 9:00 AM EST | REGISTER HERE
Tuesday (October 8th) 11:00 AM EST | REGISTER HERE
These events will be announced here in our weekly digests alongside whatever new ideas we scrounge up week-to-week for our chat. Thinking maybe live interviews? AMAs? Who knows. If you’d like to join our chat, we have it open for paid subscribers to post their submission questions whenever they’d like (and we will answer). Check it out:
And if you’re looking for some confirmation that your piece is working even if you’ve gotten loads of rejections, check out Shelby’s latest post for Chill Subs.
We put out feelers asking writers how many times their piece was rejected before finding a forever home in a magazine or press and everyone was so excited to share - holy shit this community is beautiful. »
Lastly, our digests are a place to get some feedback from you. What are you liking? What’s not doing it for you? What do you wish we had more of? Paid opportunities? Free submission calls? Pictures of feet? Comment below whatever you’re thinking (or just say hey).
Hey :-) No more feet please :-):-)
As a mom of five, you had me laughing from "we're still not potty trained." Super cute intro.
It's exciting to see the evolution of this page and your work, Ben and Shannan. I'm particularly interested in the community feedback surrounding submissions. This is the area I feel most intimidated by, since I keep wondering if my work will ever stand out enough to be accepted in a periodical.
Looking forward to the October 8th Fuck It and Submit virtual gathering.
Thanks for all you do!