I Did Everything Wrong—and It Worked

How I Reached Six-Thousand Subscribers as a No-Name Writer (And a Thank You to Pens and Poison Readers)

Dear Reader,

When I first started Pens and Poison in the fall of 2024, I was a no-name writer with literary ambitions that always seemed out of reach. I wasn’t social media savvy, I was too awkward to network, and I didn’t hold the right viewpoints to be an automatic “yes” for the publishing industry. My full-time job was in a completely unrelated industry, and I had almost come to terms with the fact that writing would have to be a solely personal, cathartic project—that my words would never leave the many folders on my laptop or see life beyond the scribbles in my various physical notebooks. I wrote poetry and novels, and aside from the occasional failed early blog post, I had never written an essay outside of an academic capacity. Sure, I had completed 20-page term papers on eyes in Pride and Prejudice or desire in Hamlet, but I had no formal training in essay writing, and I didn’t even know where to start.

In my early Substack days, I wrote book lists and poetry analysis posts because that’s all I’d ever known—I didn’t yet have the intuition for the sort of work that would be widely read, and I didn’t know if I would ever develop it. My friends always called my writing “too weird” or “too niche,” and writing for a broad audience seemed completely out of reach. The only piece of expository writing I’d ever been proud of was my original personal statement for grad school, which a trusted professor had advised me not to submit to university English departments on the ground that it might have been too “controversial.” Thus it sat on my laptop, completely unread and discarded for almost five years, before I decided to post it on a whim to my new Substack publication. Launching an attack on the practices of university English departments, it was bound to offend, but in those days, I only had about forty subscribers—most of them friends, family, and acquaintances—and I knew that no one read my writing anyway.

What happened next would change my life forever.

Practically overnight, my graduate school personal statement, repurposed into my most popular essay “Leave Literature Alone,” went viral on Substack, bringing in a thousand subscribers, many of them names I recognized and deeply admired, and capturing the attention of established publications such as Persuasion and The Boston Globe. Suddenly, I had an audience, and I would need to learn how to retain it. And to me, the best way to learn how to write anything was through reading, so I got to it.

I read far and wide, skimming through op-eds and perusing other popular Substack posts until I gained an intuition for what “worked” in an essay. I became more comfortable sharing my controversial opinions and learned to shut out the haters that inevitably came with them. I watched my Substack slowly grow as I made both writer friends and enemies, and by the end of the next year, I brought in enough paid support to even become a Substack bestseller.

Today, a little over a year after the launch of Pens and Poison, I am humbled and elated to have reached six thousand subscribers—six thousand people who resonated in some way with words and ideas I once thought would never exit the confines of my brain. It’s been a long year, but every single Pens and Poison reader means the world to me, and I’d like to thank each and every one of you for your support of my small publication. Whether you’ve been here from the start or are a most recent subscriber, I cannot thank you enough for joining me in the fight to preserve the literary tradition, uphold the tenets of humanistic inquiry, and promote the importance of arts and culture. I’m so glad that you’ve found Pens and Poison and have helped to make my dreams come true.

Lots of love,