Overthinking Overthinkers'

Behind-the-scenes of your fave sex and relationships newsletter

Hello and welcome back to The Overthinker’s Guide To Sex, a sex and relationships newsletter by journalist Franki Cookney.

If you’re enjoying the newsletter, please consider upgrading your subscription to help keep it running. It costs £4/month or £40/year. Paid subscribers also have access to the entire back catalogue of paywalled articles.

---

Overthinking Overthinkers'

It has been six months since I revived the newsletter and I wanted to do a bit of a review, look over the stats, the money, and ask what you make of it so far. As anyone who donated to my podcast crowdfunder, or signed up to my

BAD SEX

newsletter knows, I do love a little behind-the-scenes review. But I also think it’s an important part of self-publishing. When you’re asking people to give you money directly, it’s only right to offer them transparency on how the thing is made, how it’s performing, and what your plans for it are.

It’s also a chance to account for the work that’s gone into it. Once the finished project is out in the world, it’s easy to forget the blood, sweat, and tears that went into making it. This was something I definitely appreciated when I was writing the “How I Made It” newsletters for BAD SEX. At the time I was smarting a little bit from not having secured a nomination at the British Podcast Awards, and I found that documenting everything I’d done to make that series was a really powerful way of honouring how hard I’d worked and what I’d achieved.

So, yes. Big fan of a review. And, of course, the main thing I wanted to share with you is how much money I’ve made. Substack loves to shout about the fact that it has writers earning over six figures but it’s important to contextualise that. Emma Gannon, one of Substack UK’s big stars, has over 1000 paying subscribers, but it’s pertinent that she was already a best-selling author, Sunday Times columnist, and award-winning podcast host whose show had over 13 million downloads (for reference, mine has around 16k). Farrah Storr shared on Instagram last year that she was making almost $100,000 a year from her Substack newsletter, claiming that “it shows if you plug away, figure out what your readers want, lean on the audiences you have spent years building on other platforms and write or create for the sheer love of it, you WILL find your audience.” Which is probably true if you are the former editor of Elle, Cosmopolitan, and Women’s Health who now works for Substack. What about the rest of us though?

I’m not sharing either of these examples out of bitterness, only because I think it’s really important to distinguish the people who have created a successful newsletter off the back of an existing platform from the people who are starting from scratch. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you I’m the latter.

I have one and a half thousand followers on Instagram (Emma Gannon has 69k). I’m very good at my job and I have a perfectly decent time scrapping about in my little corner of the internet, interacting with the handful of people who appreciate my rather singular cocktail of sincerity and deep irreverence but I am not a Big Name. So when I began my strategy for the newsletter I was realistic. I currently work four days a week and I calculated I would want to spend, on average, around a day a week working on the newsletter—including planning, researching, interviewing, writing, doing the layout and visual treatment (such as it is) and creating social media content around it. Consequently, I needed to aim for the newsletter to make a quarter of my income. So, if my goal income for 2024 was £40k, I needed to be on track to make £10k of that from paid subscriptions.

I’d say that the time estimate has worked out about right. I don’t spend an entire day every week on the newsletter but obviously some letters take longer than others and there are weeks (for example when I’m writing a Big Think) when I end up spending two days on it, so I think calling it a day a week is a good shout. However… I am a very, very long way from making £10k. 

Now, this isn’t a disaster. I didn’t expect to be making £10k within the first year. This was a two-year plan, based on what I’d read and heard from other writers on Substack. Actually what I’m aiming for in this first year is £5k. It doesn’t sound like very much, does it? It works out as about 125 paying subscribers which sounds totally doable. It’s only 2-3 new subscribers a week. I definitely thought this was achievable for me. But you have probably guessed where this is going…

We’re now six months in and I was hoping to be about halfway there, with around 60 paying subscribers and about £2,500 coming in. But unfortunately I’m not. As you can see from this pic of my Substack dashboard, I currently have 36 paying subscribers and a total annual income of $2,000 (£1,550). This is not nothing! Please know I am super grateful and delighted to have you here and to be making any money at all from this space is really exciting. But it does raise questions about where I go from here.

And that’s not all. Because there are also fees to pay.  Substack takes a 10% commission and Stripe, the payment processor, charges a 2.9% credit card fee plus $0.30 per transaction. Stripe also charges a billing fee of 0.5% for recurring payments (which is what subscriptions are, even if you pay annually) so that’s also taken off before the money lands in my account. With all this in mind, would you like to see my spreadsheet? Of course you would, you filthy thing.

A few notes to help you make sense of this. A monthly subscription costs £4, an annual one is £40. Founding members can choose what they want to pay (over £40). When I very first started up the newsletter again, I offered a discount of 20% on new subscriptions for a limited time. As you can see, I’ve got one comped subscriber because someone signed up with the wrong email address and then asked if I could switch it so they got the newsletter to a different address. Substack doesn’t let you do that so instead what I did was just add the correct email to the list, with a “complimentary” subscription. I include that on the spreadsheet to make sense of the fact that I have 36 subscribers but only 35 of them are paying.

Likewise, the free trials category is there to keep track of the subscribers who were adding to my numbers but not bringing in any money. I’ve actually turned free trials off now because it wasn’t converting people to subscribers and it was difficult to keep track of because anyone who signed up for a free trial got added to the subscriber figures but then I wouldn’t get any update after that, meaning that I’d then have to keep checking back to see if they’d stayed on or dropped off (they always dropped off).

The grand total I am projected* to make this year from The Overthinker’s Guide To Sex is...

£1,343.73

[*And it is a projected figure because it includes the next six months of monthly subscription payments.]

So it’s still quite a long way off my goal. I’m not sharing this to be doom-mongering, or to make anyone feel bad, I’m just being honest. I don’t know how sustainable this is for me. I’m prepared to keep going for now, partly because I have a content plan in place for the next six months, but I also have to be realistic and I think unless I see a drastic pick up over the spring and summer, I’m going to struggle to justify continuing for a second year.

I’ve thought about how to handle that potential disappointment, and I think the only reasonable answer is to make this next six months really fucking good. That way, no matter what happens, when I come to do my next review, my next behind-the-scenes breakdown, it will feel like a celebration of the work.

---

Help me make the next six months really good! Let me know which newsletters you’ve enjoyed the most this year, what subjects you’d like to see more (or less) of, and which formats you look forward to most.

Obviously bear in mind I might just ignore you (see above re. being an irreverent bitch) but hopefully that attitude is also part of why you’re here.

If you don’t like leaving public comments, you can also reply to this email and it’ll come directly to my inbox.

---