The Brunette signs off?

Thank you for two beautiful and instructive years.

I’m sorry to let you know Brunette Gardens’ weekly posts will cease after this one. I’m shifting it to “hobby” status, which means I’ll now only post occasionally, if at all? Maybe more of a “when the mood strikes” rather than the consistent, once-weekly posts you’re used to… for a while there, we were even churning out posts twice a week. But not anymore.

Photo by Jan Tinneberg on Unsplash

I’ve been a writer long enough (thirty years!) to know that not everything immediately succeeds in the marketplace. There comes a time in any project when it’s clear whether it has legs or not.

This Substack newsletter and its lovely readership base have grown at a steady pace over the two years since my first post, but it’s slooow growth, at least by today’s frenetic standards. That’s fitting, considering I launched this whole endeavor on the idea that we’re in one heckuva slowpocalypse.

Welcome to the slowpocalypse

I see two big obstacles to success:

1. Not enough new subscribers

2. Not a high enough conversion of free subscribers to paid

First, on the subject of attracting new readers. It’s become clear to me that the effort required to double our growth rate—and that’s what it would take to make this Substack viable for the long term—is beyond what I can manage.

We have more than doubled our total subscriber count since the August 2022 kickoff. We brought 500 readers to Substack from a previous garden blog, and now our total subscribers number 1,223. But it would take much more than that to turn this into work that pays, rather than costs, in both resources and time.

I’ll admit that “reader acquisition,” as they call it in the biz, is a serious weak point for me. I participate in no other social media besides Substack’s own Notes. I tried both X and Gab, to little satisfaction. I’ve never been particularly good at the online soft brag; outside of a few isolated viral moments, the trick of this kind of thing totally eludes me. I also don’t enjoy it, very much question its value in our lives, and have never once regretted my decision to ditch Facebook and Instagram prior to the pandemic, back in 2018.

So even if I had time to devote to social-media efforts, which I don’t, I’m not convinced I have what it takes to excel at it. In fact, the evidence argues otherwise!

Now about getting y’all to upgrade. At the time of this writing, we have only 15 active paid subscribers. As I’ve been told by people who know about such things, 1.2 percent is a pretty dismal “conversion rate.”

I could dig into the weeds on this, speculating all day about why we’ve failed to convince you to pay for access to our juiciest posts. While I can see the need right now to convert your urban and suburban grass lawns or even apartment balconies into vegetable patches, herb mounds, and fruit orchards, with a flock of chickens to boot, the vast majority of people don’t see it that way. We could discuss why they should or try to predict when they finally will, but remember we’re in the midst of a slowpocalypse, so forgive them if it’s not immediately clear.

And maybe that’s not even why we’ve failed to convince enough people to read and enough of you readers to pay for the privilege. It’s a tall ask, after all, in today’s economy. I have always granted more complimentary paid subscriptions than I’ve had people actually pay for. I’m sure there are a multitude of other reasons for this miss, some out of our control and some not.

Please know that I wouldn’t take back the past two years for anything; I’ve learned a lot and gained advanced practice writing in a completely different vein than my bread-and-butter work calls for, since that’s fiction for mobile games. It’s been rewarding to find my own voice in my head again, and to work hard to get it to the screen for you.

There’s value in acknowledging a failed project, gathering lessons from it, and moving on. I try a lot of things, and not all of them work. Most don’t. And many successful people will tell you the same thing; you see only their pretty end result, that tip-of-the-iceberg fame they accrued, but you might not see the years of hard work and failed projects that got them to the pinnacle.

So… where do we go from here?

I’ve issued prorated refunds to all current paid subscribers. Thank you from the bottom of my sad heart for your generous vote of confidence, and I’m sorry we couldn’t keep going like we were, me and you, together against the odds.

Other than that, I’ll keep the Substack live for everyone, and you’re welcome to peruse the past two years of posts at your leisure. Paid subscriptions will remain turned-on as well: Pausing them glitches reader’s ability to bypass paywalls in archive posts using their unlock privileges. Besides, I’m not going to say no to anyone who still wants to support what’s here!

Now that my garden writing has been relegated to hobby status, I just want to say this:

While it’s been my job since 2022 to fill your screens with my words,

you’ve all filled my heart with yours.

What’s next for me?

I’m still actively working on recovering from a neuroimmune condition. It requires a huge, more permanent shift than my previous six-week hiatus could provide, and that’s partly behind this decision as well. I’m busy with Brunette Games, which has made it challenging to clear space for Brunette Gardens in the work week, and putting in evening and weekend time isn’t sustainable, at least not for me at this stage and circumstance in life.

You might see part of Brunette Games move to Substack, and let me know if you’re interested in being added to the mailing list for that. There’s very little overlap with the writing I’ve done here, unless you count all the dialogue I’ve written for farmers and gardeners in games you can play on your phone! That newsletter would mainly serve as a way to communicate with clients—an extension of the studio blog my former team and I kept for years—but I do have some wannabe game writers and designers on the list.

There’s also a side project I’ve been called to focus on, one I can’t talk about yet… and maybe it won’t ever be made public. Maybe it’s just for me, for the first time in forever.

Beyond that… I’d like to take a vacation! I haven’t had one longer than a few days since my week-and-a-half-long honeymoon ten years ago. “What’s a weekend?” …I’ve always loved that quote from Downton Abbey, but for me it has the inverse meaning than it did for the dowager, as she didn’t understand the need for “days off” to punctuate a work week, having basically her whole life off as a member of elite society. I just haven’t taken enough weekends actually off.

As has always been the case, I own my mailing list, not Substack. So you might hear from me again. I have only a hundred or so ideas for other newsletters I haven’t yet launched. Maybe I’ll stop holding back on one of those sometime, and drop you a line.

Or maybe I’ll just sit here, with my eyes closed, breathing in and out… just being, instead of always always doing.