How to Make Money as a Writer — Letters From an American Heather Cox Richardson Has Broken the Money Code
American Historian Heather Richardson earns $1,000,000 from her Substack subscribers by influencing how Americans think about politics.
If you are thinking of buying a course on making money on Substack, hold your horses, and my advice is not to buy.
You are falling for some shiny object. May you find my story on how an American historian is winning on Substack, and like her, we can follow her lead and make money online with our own newsletter.
When Forbes released their year-end report on who made the most money on Youtube, and that the top earner is a 9-year-old child vlogger, Ryan Kaji, the young content creator still tops the list, the same as it was in 2019. I wonder if I am on the wrong platform.
Kidding aside, I am happy with my own journey as a writer, while this month is poised to be my best month, I will not make $100.
When The New York Times reported that;
Heather Cox Richardson Offers a Break From the Media Maelstrom. It’s Working.
She is the breakout star of the newsletter platform Substack, doing the opposite of most media as she calmly situates the news of the day in the long sweep of American history.
It made me think, what is Heather Cox Richardson doing right, but also what I can learn from her if I want to make money online as a writer.
I can’t help but cheer for her, while she is in academe, a full-time professor at Boston College, where Professor Richardson teaches nineteenth-century American history at both the undergraduate and the graduate level. She is also a book author, and like us, a writer.
While I advise fellow writers to Stop Writing Like You Are Panning for Gold, the get-rich-quick schemes will only break your writer’s heart.
I would love to get paid for my writing. While I would do it for free, it will be nice to pay my bills through writing.
We have our own writer’s journey, and so has Heather Cox Richardson.
Here is why I believe she is winning on Substack. She is authentic, and she has the credentials to back up her words.
She talks about politics. In a way, she curates the daily news and gives it a fresh perspective. She does it with a wisp of American history.
She is the calm voice in a vast sea of noise, from television to talk radio to social media, while never in any time in history that we have more platforms to choose from in how we consume news.
We are also in a time, when it is hard to tell truth from lies, from news to fake news, from a message to an agenda.
What Professor Heather Cox Richardson does is talk through the heart. She found her perfect audience, women of the same age, the ones who may have been left out as a demographic.
Liberal news media caters to democrats. Fox News caters to the predominantly uneducated white male. OK, I am mean. Fox News caters to the Republicans, to the Trump Republicans.
She shows us that there is another way of presenting the news, and it is a niche she can call her own.
Who would have thought politics and history will be a profitable venture and that it will find an audience, an audience willing to pay?
Her subscribers are not only paying; they are very much involved. If you check her Facebook page, they are anyone’s dream audience, and it’s an engaged audience.
Letters From An American — True 1,000 Fans
Suppose you are a writer or content creator and trying to make sense or finding a way to make money online from your content. You must read about the concept of “True 1,000 Fans.”
To be a successful creator you don’t need millions. You don’t need millions of dollars or millions of customers, millions of clients or millions of fans. To make a living as a craftsperson, photographer, musician, designer, author, animator, app maker, entrepreneur, or inventor you need only thousands of true fans.
A true fan is defined as a fan that will buy anything you produce.
Letters from an American — A Substack Publication by Professor Heather Cox Richardson
The only way to describe it; Letters from an American is a successful and profitable Substack publication. From the New York Times report, Prof. Heather Cox Richardson is estimated to make at least $1 million from her subscribers.
Here is a preview of Letters from an American;
What is Substack?
The New Yorker — The newsletter service is a software company that, by mimicking some of the functions of newsrooms, has made itself difficult to categorize.
To understand what Substack further, a good read comes from Digiday, calling Substack a newsletter entrepreneur platform.
The Business of Writing
If you start doing things for the money, they stop being authentic. — Heather Cox Richardson in her New York Times interview.
After the New York Times story, Professor Richardson shared her thoughts on her Facebook page, where she speaks about the community she helped built and where her fans are very much a part of it. (TEXT in full.)
This New York Times story came out today, and I really appreciate all the nice things you all have said about it (and me). But I’ve been thinking a lot about it, and this moment, and what we do here, and it seems to me we are doing something much bigger than simply figuring out today’s crazy news.
From my perspective, we are a community of ordinary Americans (and outside helpers!) who care deeply about our country, and are trying to figure out how to steer it back from the brink of the disaster that has been looming before us for the past few years. We want to figure out how to make this country live up to its promise of equality before the laws and equality of opportunity for all.
I am the person translating current events into normal language and showing some of the ways those events fit into our history. But I am absolutely not doing this on my own. People send me stories and ask questions and proofread my prose and police the chat so that there is room for respectful exchanges here. And all of you are giving your attention to this project, taking precious time away from other priorities to try to understand this country in this political moment.
This project feels to me different than media as I have ever understood it, and while my historical training is at the heart of it, it’s not really history, either. It’s more just… a community. To me, anyway. If anyone has thoughts about it, or about what you might like to see from me going forward after my self-imposed commitment to write every night until at least a hundred days into the Biden administration, I’d sure love to hear it.
Final Thoughts
Letters from an American can become our template as writers, as content creators, if we are looking at the business of writing. Professor Richardson's success means a lot for writers myself who are only starting, that this is the best time to write, that we don’t need to be struggling artists if you want to call your writing art as I do.
Heather Cox Richardson has one quote that I hope will inspire writers. Besides teaching us history and politics, she teaches us that success can come to authentic people, who put in the hours as she does, and who remains true to her strong points.
Like I say, history doesn’t repeat itself, but it sure rhymes.
As an American historian, she helps influence her audience to think, and America needs more like her.
And while every writer who is reading this may find it hard to repeat the history of her success, each of us can surely find something that rhymes with her success as a newsletter entrepreneur and writer.
