Six Months of Pandemonium
Happy (Half) Birthday to Whatever This Is!
Time is a flat circle.
The first post on Ars Pandemonium went live 14 March 2024. The channel is half-a-year old this week!1
Please cue all the expected clichés: I can’t believe how fast time flies, it feels like just yesterday but also like a lifetime ago, et al.
Launching this channel has been one of the most terrifying things I’ve done in my career. But it’s also been surprisingly fulfilling. I’ve got lots more in me and I’m going strong, looking forward to the next six months and beyond!
Still, this semi-anniversary seems like as good a moment as any to reflect on where Ars Pandemonium has been, and where it’s going. (As if the whole project isn’t self-indulgent enough, here comes some self-self-indulgence (meta-indulgence!)).
But First!
But first, I’ve got one fun new announcement: the merch store is live!
The current selection is simple black tees featuring some pithy bon mots from the site. They’re available in two different cuts — I’m not going to wade into the gender politics of it, but the garment industry refers to these as “unisex” and “women’s” cuts. Sigh. Anyway, plenty of sizes are available in each. Get a couple!2
And with the shameless commerce portion of the proceedings over, let’s take a snapshot of the state of Ars Pandemonium.
Ars Pandemonium subscribers are in 11 US states and 7 countries around the world.
First, some numbers.
According to Substack’s analytics, as of this writing Ars Pandemonium has 59 subscribers in 11 US states and 7 countries around the world. Hi, everybody!
This essay marks the 27th post to the channel, so right on about one-per-week since it started.3 I don’t have any easy way to count cumulative words or pages or anything, but it’s a fair amount — I’m a wordy nerd, and a little back-of-the-envelope figuring suggests it’s very roughly something like 58k words. That would be a book over 200 pages long!
The biggest engagement days see about 80 views, the most-read posts are a bit over 100 views each, the running last-30-day-total hovers around 250 views, and the cumulative total views are about 2800.
Are those good numbers? I don’t know! But they’re higher than zero, which is what they would be if I didn’t get off my ass and publish, so I’m taking the win.
Substack offers some analytics-over-time graphs, but they’re designed to show trends over the “last 25 posts that are at least a week old.” I’ve only had a “last 25 posts” for a week now. Hopefully over the coming months I’ll be able to get clearer engagement signal from these reports.
The most-viewed posts on the site are “The Sunken Devil Brung Ya,” “The Watercooler Conundrum,” and “It’s You. You’re the Scapegoat.” What do they have in common? I honestly don’t know! It’s not article length: “Scapegoat” is twice as many words as “Sunken Devil,” and “Watercooler” is fully a third longer than that. Are those titles particularly evocative, or is the subject matter more compelling? I just don’t have enough data yet to know, but I’d love to hear if you have ideas (or a favorite of your own). Let me know!
Meeting Expectations
I had a few goals kicking off this channel,4 but no particular metrics for success beyond just fucking doing it. And I’m doing it.
When I left Meta in 2022, I knew that one of the things I wanted to do with my semi-retirement was write. What would that look like? A book? A blog? Posting on LinkedIn or Facebook? Scribbling in a notebook to be found and published posthumously? I didn’t know! I poked at a lot of things before discovering Substack and choosing that as my platform. I wrote about that process in the pinned welcome post.
All of which is just to say, I’m not chasing scale or anything. I’m happy to have the platform to just get some of these thoughts and ideas out into the world. Meets expectations.
Obviously more people are reading than subscribe. That’s cool. I don’t provide any particular advantage or incentive to subscribe other than the promise to clutter your inbox, and since I don’t charge for it, it nets out fine for me one way or the other.
Still, not very many people click a reaction, post a comment, share, or “re-stack” the articles either (thanks to those who do!). Look, I don’t usually participate when I read other people’s stuff, so I’m certainly passing no judgment, simply noting the phenomenon. I’m just happy anyone is reading.
Nonetheless, it has been growing steadily (if slowly!) and I’d like to continue that. Substack suggests a number of ways to engage with their platform to improve discoverability.5 I may do some of those things in the coming weeks. I wouldn’t expect to see videos from me anytime soon, but I can probably write some notes and recommend some other authors, that sort of thing.
The Future
So, what do the next six months look like?
I have a long backlog of subjects I want to write about, but I’ve intentionally not tried to maintain a strict editorial calendar. I’m just not a good enough writer to discipline myself through Subject X if, for whatever reason, Subject Y is calling my name that day. An essay about Subject Y it shall be! X will be around when I’m ready.
Also! On the matter of my limitations as a writer: I have a few issues I want to tackle that I feel my skills are a bit underdeveloped to do justice. But the only way to be a better writer is to write!6 So I’ll dig into some of that harder-to-realize material as I feel more confident.
I’m thinking about adding some additional voices. What might that look like? Some other writers participating? Interviews and/or conversations? Relaying other people’s stories (with their permission, of course)? I don’t know! For sure, though, I’m not a journalist and this won’t ever be journalism.
And I’m not a scholar, either, and don’t plan on going “academic” here. I do read a lot, though, and maybe I’ll look at evolving the “Bookshelf” approach in some way; those essays don’t get much engagement anyway.7 We’ll see.
In any event, it should be an adventure! Thank you so much for reading, I really appreciate being able to share my thoughts here — it’s a true privilege.
On we go. Buy a shirt!
I actually registered the Substack in November 2022…just took me a minute to actually publish.
I’m trying to offer high-quality products — I’m not interested in adding to the world’s piles of useless crap. I’ve ordered a couple of test units and they seem pretty good! Also, this isn’t intended to be a money-making endeavor. But I can’t exactly afford to lose money on it either, thus the made-to-order, drop-ship setup. The flat price of $35 is kind of spendy for a plain t-shirt, but it was the lowest round number I could figure out that would mean no combination of cut and size would end up upside down. And even still, I’m not entirely sure about the tax implications and so forth…I expect the whole thing to net even at best. But that’s okay! It’s mostly just fun!
This, of course, is cheating a little. I missed some weeks for health reasons this summer…but I launched with several posts on day one, so it pencils out. Also, counting this post feels a little cheat-y too. But whatever.
Is that what we call a Substack? “Channel?” I guess it’s a “newsletter,” but somehow I think of it more like a “blog,” but do we even say “blog” anymore? Get off my lawn.
It’s literally (figuratively) like blackmail: we won’t push your stuff into anyone’s feed unless you also write “Notes” or make videos or share to social or whatever. I’m sure they’ve got data about how this drives revenue for them, and frankly I’m using their free service so I’m not mad. I just don’t love all the options.
Obviously an absurd statement. Writing is necessary — but insufficient — to become a better writer. There are lots of other things to do, too, in addition to writing. But this bit is about the writing.
FWIW, the two least-viewed posts are the Bookshelf entries on The Good Boss and Level Up. They have half the views of the next-least viewed, and like 1/10 the views of the popular posts. I don’t know — I thought they were interesting? Go figure.