A half-year milestone
We launched Brunette Gardens six months ago. What's next?
By Lisa Brunette
Anthony and I launched this Brunette Gardens Substack on August 16, 2022, with the express goal of professionalizing our hobby garden blog. What had previously been a random, somewhat haphazard practice of sharing tips and tales from our 1/4-acre suburban homestead turned into a committed pace of 2-3 posts per week, a much more intentional editorial calendar, and a set of distinct offerings for both free and paid subscribers.
Why do this?
I’m a professional writer by trade, having made a living with my words for 30 years. I’m passionate about gardening and homesteading and wanted an excuse to talk about these topics more. Creating blog content is a job, even if you enjoy it; it takes planning, time, and effort, and it’s not without its hassles. So in order to do it right, it must bring in an income. There’s no trust fund backing me and Anthony, no legacy of parental wealth support, and we’re both Gen Xers whose careers have spanned the worst wage stagnation in modern history, so there’s simply no slush fund from which to pay for a mere passion project.
But we’re realistic about this enterprise, and we certainly don’t see ourselves as charity cases. We’re not a non-profit. We believe that if readers perceive value here, they will invest in us. If not, then we will go quietly on our way.
How are we doing so far?
Brunette Gardens is read across 24 states and 6 countries (US, UK, Morocco, New Zealand, and Macedonia)
As of this writing, we’ve published 73 posts, 19 of which are recorded podcasts
We’ve kept to our committed pace of 2-3 times per week without fail (two regular posts on Mondays and Thursdays, with an occasional short bonus post on Saturdays)
Our email open rate averages around 30 percent, much better than the industry average of 20 percent and a sign of loyal readership (aw, we feel the love!)
4 other Substack publications recommend Brunette Gardens to their readers
We’re particularly proud of that last one. Thank you again to the fellow writers who’ve endorsed Brunette Gardens; we sincerely appreciate your vote of confidence.
All of the above we’ve accomplished with zero advertising budget.
We also engage in very little social media: We experimented with Pinterest over a three-month period but ultimately decided to close that account due to a) seeing poor results unless we purchase sponsorship visibility and b) Pinterest’s role in unfairly censoring users, per the Twitter Files investigation. Speaking of Elon Musk’s new company, we just launched an account over at the little bird as another experiment, but so far, it kinda seems like the only way you get noticed is to pay for sponsored posts or throw tweet bombs.
Despite the above measures of success, Brunette Gardens is still in the red. It’s costing, not making, money.
Here’s where we stand after six months:
554 subscribers
55 complimentary paid (family, friends, non-profit staff, readers experiencing economic hardship)
4 paid subscribers (thank you, thank you, thank you)
Only 0.72% of our subscribers actually pay for a subscription at this point. This is well below Substack’s reported average of 10 percent paid across all publications.
Maybe it’s too early to tell if this is a bad sign or not. Maybe this will change as we gain traction and continue to find our audience. We can hope.
But I do know there are serious obstacles standing in our way.
One is discoverability.
Substack uses categories to help readers find publications according to the topics that interest them. These categories are severely limited, and in my opinion, make little sense. For example, there’s a whole category for “Crypto,” but not “Lifestyle,” only the biggest category in the magazine world, covering all home, garden, and health/fitness content. There are no sub-categories just for garden or home, and you can forget something as specific as homesteading.
Thus we’re forced into categories that only marginally fit us:
Another problem is that most of the garden action online is dominated by the UK. I guess they’re more of a gardening culture than the US, but a majority of the other Substacks and Twitter accounts are British. They are fun to follow, but yeah, theirs is a radically different climate than ours. And does that mean most garden readers are British, too? Why don’t more Americans care about gardening? I have questions.
We also had one big hiccup about two months into this thing. When we made the leap from our previous blog to Substack, transferring over our subscribers from a Typepad site and Feedblitz email newsletter, we lost about 5 percent of our list, which was painful. These people promptly unsubscribed, and the reasons for that could vary.
I’d opted into Substack’s program for recommending readers follow other publications, and in my opinion readers received far too many of these marketing emails. Making it worse, through a Substack glitch, readers were sent duplicate emails multiple times, clogging their inboxes. Sigh. You can see the dip in the chart below.
Was that the only reason we lost 5 percent? Hard to say. It’s possible some folks were cool with our previous once-in-a-while blogging but unwilling to stick with us when it picked up frequency. The bulk of the list was legacy, from the days when I actively promoted my Dreamslippers novel series, so maybe these people finally decided they had only been interested in my fiction after all.
We’ve since made back that 5 percent and change, but frankly, if we grow by only another 5 percent over the next six months, that will not be enough to sustain the effort.
We were victims of a few other Substack glitches recently when a post I’d clearly scheduled for later publication was sent out to our entire list, out of context and on a day we’d already sent a chat announcement. Additionally, one of our podcasts was scheduled to send out to everyone but only went to paid subscribers. We lost a few subscribers that week, and it put our guest-author series out of sequence, which makes it tough to show potential other authors how we would conduct seasonal giveaways with their books. This is hard, sometimes disheartening work, people!
Still, we’ve had a few encouraging signs. First, our subscriber growth over the past 90 days is steady.
Second, at least one of our posts went mini-viral!
Brunette Gardens is also a fantastically fun, fulfilling facet of our lives, and we’re (cautiously) optimistic about the future. We’d love to hear from you, our gentle, patient readers. We already know which posts were your favorites, with these coming in as the top five (judging by email open rate %), though we’d love to get your thoughts on why:
Chaco, the indoor-only suburban farm cat (figures he’d steal the show)
Review and giveaway: ‘Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update’ (y’all must like free stuff, even if the subject is about, um, limits)
Charleston travelogue (this one surprised us… do you like our alt travel takes? do you want more?)
Podcast No. 8: Welcome to the slowpocalypse (again, I guess news that the end is slowly coming piqued your interest?)
The churches of Charleston (was it the pretty pictures? a hunger for anything positive about churches? again, the travel bug?)
Usually, posting privileges are reserved for paying subscribers, as this enables us to cut spam and manage the discussion amongst those with a vested interest, but this time we’re opening up the floor to everyone, so comment away!
What brings you to Brunette Gardens?
What would you like to see more of? Less of?
What can we do to improve?
What are we doing right?
The substack categories annoy me too. Definitely need to add ones for gardening, nature, etc. There is huge interest in gardening the US judging from social media, but it's very hard to break into, at least it has been for me. People seem to like slick YouTube videos and being told exactly what to do, which is the opposite of what I offer. You're doing great work and I think the trick is just plugging away with quality content consistently, which you're already doing.
As you know, I'm a newbie blogger, & Substack is my first blog site. But my perception is that Substack is going through some growing pains right now. Like they want to be true to their original mission but they also want to brag about their writers who are well-known or who have many paid subscribers (which is business, I get it), and they want to try out new toys/ gimmicks etc. I'll echo you & Lynn in the disappointing categories we have to choose from on Substack & in the general internet spotlight being on polished how-to vlogs for U.S. gardening.
Congrats on 6 months!! I'm impressed with your consistent posting schedule. I like reading a variety of subjects & essay formats from writers I subscribe to, but maybe that's just my ADHD talking and most people want predictability more? I'll keep reading whatever you all write-- travel stories, what you're planting, cat shenanigans... One more thought... it may be the timing rather than the subject that drove your most popular pieces, too... were more people off work around a holiday, were they stuck inside on their computer due to weather extremes? Just a thought, there's often randomness to people's likes and dislikes. Cheers!