One month of Sub Club has ended. YAY! How’d we do? More importantly, what can we do better? This is not some dynamic where we know everything and are perfect and geniuses and oh, you know. We’re just here doing our best. And we’re here to help. So, got a request? Send it. Send all of it.
Before we go anywhere, WOW. Let’s take a look at the finances from this past month.
We calculate our monthly income from this membership program based on monthly memberships and by averaging out the money that comes in via yearly memberships. We know that Substack takes a cut, and Stripe charges processing fees, but that’s math stuff and we suck at math stuff so we just stick to round numbers. Right now, we’re averaging $1,493 per month. This month we started paying the person who has graciously been helping us manage the business side of things for the past 8 months (for free!) so our costs have risen by $500 per month (which is still a wild discount). We also had to switch to a new email management system hosting service thing (Karina knows what it is called). So that kicked another $60 onto our expenses. That brings our total monthly expenses to $3,174. None of Chill Subs’ core team makes money until our monthly income surpasses our expenses.
Before getting into all the June goodness, a few people have asked where you can find all of the content we send out for Sub Club. Substack has a homepage that hosts everything on it. It is there that you can also find our Submission Help Hotline, Strategies Handbook, and more fun resources.
Here it is:
NEWS!
COMING SOON! - We are about to release some unbelievably cool stuff for Sub Club this month on the Chill Subs website. Can’t reveal anything yet, but we promise you’ll love it. It’s going to change everything in a good way. Everyone who has joined Sub Club early, you have our eternal gratitude for putting your faith in us while we bounce around between Substacks and website stuff.
NEW LISTS - We’re tweaking our Monday lists a bit to not JUST be closings but instead a variety of different fun lists. For example, we’ll do some indie press lists, a closing list (or 2), a recommendation thread, and something else fun.
CLUB SUB TIER FILLED - We are closing down our Club Sub Tier for a while. We want to make sure that the quality of our personalized lists, and the feedback from Pencilhouse stay high. We don’t want to be put in a position where we are too overwhelmed to provide the best service we can. We may open this up for one-time purchases for lists though. We’re discussing it. In the meantime, thank you to those who signed up! We’re here when you’re ready for us to help.
MAY ROUNDUP
Here’s what we published this month:
The Sub Club Newsletter
BLT: What the F*ck is Flash Fiction and where do you send it?
Last Chance to Submit: Fiction, Poetry, and CNF Opportunities for May 23rd-30th
Ham and Cheese with Yellow Mustard: New magazines who love new writers
Sub Club Snack-List: 3 Writing Contests Closing This Week (Thread Test)
Things We Do While Waiting to Die
MAY RAFFLE WINNERS
Only a Draft or Blank Page T-Shirt from Chill Subs + 3 Months of Sub Club comped: Nicole Tone
Custom list created by Chill Subs for a piece of writing of your choice: Rebecca Mandell
THREE one month of Sub Club:
River
Jonathan Blake
Patricia Gardner Adelizzi
AND Our Writer Spotlight:
Nina B Lichtenstein!
Nina is an author, editor, and translator with a lengthy list of published work. Her essay "Skin in the Game" excerpted from her memoir Body: My Life in Parts, won 3rd place in the 2023 Eunice Williams Nonfiction Prize.
Yay, Nina!!
She has blogged as The Viking Jewess since 2014, and her writing has appeared in Tablet, Brevity, Lilith, The Washington Post, Hippocampus, and more. According to her bio, she is currently editing a collection of personal essays by converts to Judaism.
Find her website here or follow her on Instagram!
We’ll be doing a full post about her and sharing some of her work this month!
Writer Spotlights are randomly selected from among our Sub Club Members using a randomized picker.
JUNE RAFFLE PRIZES
Writer Spotlight: Each month we randomly select one member to promote the hell out of.
Dark Mode Shirt: Choose between our ‘Poetric Reject’ Shirt or ‘Only a Draft’ Shirt
Fuck it. Submit Mug.
3 months of our Hoagie Membership
New resources added to our database:
The Writers’ Hour - Writers' Hour is a free virtual, hour-long writing sprint held each weekday.
What’s it good for? Meeting other writers. Getting your write on.
VIBE: OMFG Friends!
Twine - an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories.
What’s it good for? Creating windy narratives and keeping track of your story’s progress.
VIBE: Well hello there, learning curve.
New Strategies added to our handbook:
Three-Step Suggestion by Erika Dreifus. It is amazing how much these simple steps can help get those submissions out there -
1. Every time you find a call-with-a-deadline that interests you, make a note of it within your calendar.
2. Include the URL to the call/guidelines.
3. Check the calendar regularly.
Erika Dreifus, who publishes the popular newsletter THE PRACTICING WRITER 2.0, enjoys that old standby, PB & J.
New questions and answers for our submissions hotline.
How should you title a multi-poem submission?
Should you always note a simultaneous submission in a cover letter?
JUNE CALENDAR
June 3rd: The Sub Club List - Middle Eastern Vegan Sandwich: Sci-Fi Mags Are Fucking Killing It (The Sub Club Newsletter)
June 5th: Recommendation Post (Comment your cover letter, we’ll recommend a magazine/press)
June 6th: Hit Submit Party! (On Google Meets from 1-2 PM EST): It’s an accountability week! Set aside this time to submit to the places you have on your list. Treat it like an appointment you have to make. We will submit live and then chat about how it went.
June 7th: Guest Post by Caitlin from Authors Publish
June 8th: Publishers Publishing Previously Published Poems
June 10th: The Sub Club List - Rainbow Veggie Sandwich: Celebrating Pride with Poetry (The Sub Club Newsletter)
June 12th: Themed Calls to Make You Feel Something
June 13th: Hit Submit Party! (On Google Meets from 8-9 PM EST) Join us to meet other writers, chat about where you are submitting, share resources, find beta reader, and complain about how long that one mag is taking to reject you.
June 14th: Learning to Sell Our Soul to Shopify
June 15th: The Fuck Genre List: Where to Submit Work That Defies Categorization
June 17th: The Sub Club List - Buffalo Chicken Wrap: Magazines Looking for Interviews (The Sub Club Newsletter)
June 19th: Closing List
June 20th: Hit Submit Party! (On Google Meets from 1-2 PM EST) Join us to meet other writers, chat about where you are submitting, share resources, find beta reader, and complain about how long that one mag is taking to reject you.
June 21st: Chill Subs Behind the Scenes (On Merch or Developing Tools)
June 22nd: Eco/Environmental Lit Mags
June 24th: The Sub Club List - Croque Monsieur: The Hard as Fuck List (The Sub Club Newsletter)
June 26th: Indie Presses Publishing Novellas
June 27th: Hit Submit Party! (On Google Meets from 8-9 PM EST) It’s an accountability week! Set aside this time to submit to the places you have on your list. Treat it like an appointment you have to make. We will submit live and then chat about how it went.
June 28th: TBD
June 29th: Magazines with Beautiful Websites [or fairy tale publishers, haven’t decided)
Housekeeping:
This whole Substack, Sub Club, emails/online thing is janky. We know. Thank you all for having patience and putting your faith in us. We are in the process of melding it all together onto our website. In the meantime, if you’ve accidentally signed up in two places, need emails aligned, or are missing your badge on your Chill Subs Profile page, please email us. Or any other problems. We are keeping organized but this is all manual so things can fall through the cracks. If we fuck up, we’ll fix it. If for any reason you’re overcharged, we’ll reimburse you.
Several people claimed ‘Free Month’ promotions when we started all of this. Those free periods will be coming to an end on June 7th. If you’d like to keep receiving Sub Club’s paid content, please sign up here:
Or upgrade right through Substack:
Speak of, for Club Sub Tier Members, we have a new link for your Pencilhouse feedback this month:
And, as always, for your Club Sub Tailored Lists, you can fill out this form.
Thank you all so much for your continued support of Chill Subs through this membership. We are so-so-so excited to share with you all what we’ve got cooking up to be released soon. You won’t be disappointed.
Appreciatively,
Ben, Kailey, Karina, and all of the Chill Subs team.