Bye bye Substack, sort of

De-centering the rules of social media and re-centering the work itself

I went from 0 to Bestseller on the Substack platform within 6 months from joining.

I stayed there for 2 years and have now consciously stepped down and I feel relieved, aligned and excited to write again (and make more money with my writing…Yep, you read that right… Come along!)

Hej!
Welcome to Follow Your Gut, a newsletter about the artist life and business. Written from a decade’s experience living off my art as an independent visual artist, author, Swedish (expat) and mother of 2. The original of this essay can be found on my site: elinpetronella.com.

Don’t mistake this for reduced ambition. Quite the opposite.

One more thing before we dive in: de-centering means I’m taking off all the paywalls and will use Substack for what it’s best at: Distribution, traffic and network. Not as my main money site.

Some transitions take time.
Especially ones that involve de-centering platforms built to keep you hooked.

I launched paid subscriptions on Substack with confidence from ten years of running a creative business, eight of those with some form of subscription model. I genuinely thought I could shift whenever I wanted.
I was wrong.

Be careful before clicking buttons.

When I started writing publicly about leaving the Bestseller model last May with essays like “I don’t want a Bestseller badge anymore”, I discovered I was one wrong click away from losing thousands of euros in refund obligations. I panicked, hit pause instead and felt suspended mid-air for months (more like half a year…). If you’ve ever spent extended time in dispersion, you know the external noise gets louder the longer you stay there.

Eventually the paid newsletter became what I can only describe as a psychological and energetic debt that hovered over me like a drone who’s spotted a celebrity naked. And if you’ve read my work before, you know nothing kills my flow faster than an editorial calendar, yet somehow I’d set myself up in exactly that position without ever explicitly saying it out loud.

How silly of me. Shouldn’t I know better?

Probably.

But knowing something logically and embodying it are two different things. As artists, most of us need lived experience for things to settle. I’m a firm believer that there are no wasted experiments. If something doesn’t bring cash, recognition, better work or traffic, it always brings experience. And experience deepens the work.

Here’s what I actually know after a decade of doing this:

My career takes off whenever I do whatever I want, however I want it, and I have fun. Because fun is contagious. People want to be around people who enjoy sharing their art.

The hustle blueprint to be everywhere, post on schedule and optimising everything quickly equals suffocation for the artist soul.

For context: I’ve built an audience of nearly half a million across platforms (Instagram 195k, Youtube 40k, Pinterest 199k) by having fun. Stepped down when the suffocation set in (sometimes for years), readjusted and rejoined when it felt fun again.
WE MAKE THE RULES, NOT THE ALGORITHMS.

When marketing becomes a separate job title from your art, you make less art.

The only way artists thrive is when marketing and selling IS part of the artistic expression. Baked-in Calzone style.

For God’s sake, let’s not hand our artistic genius over to the algorithms. Use them. Don’t serve them.

The keyword is SHARE. Making the art is part one. Sharing it; the process, the hard, the beautiful, the ugly, is part two. That’s your marketing and that’s your selling. Nobody buys the finished thing from someone they’ve never watched make it.

What happened for me on Substack was classic paralysis by analysis.

I grew fast by writing whatever I wanted with zero filter except “do I like it?” Then I started asking “will they like it?” and the whole thing stalled. The audience came for the unfiltered version. When I gave them the filtered one and lost them both (or at least it felt like it).

Guilty as charged, I’m reclaiming the steering wheel.

The title was clickbait by the way… I’m not leaving Substack.

But I am leaving Substack as the money-centre of my writing world. No more paid newsletter. No more badge (by the time you read this it should be gone already). No more editorial debt.

From here Substack will serve as a live feed.
I write when something moves me.
You subscribe to read it for free
❤️ Eventually you choose to buy my books, collections or mentoring over on elinpetronella.com , alternatively sponsoring my non-profit survivetothrivemovement.org

NB: my next book Follow Your Gut Vol.1 is in the final stages before publication… You’ll be the first to know when it’s live.

This feels good.

What role does Substack play in your ecosystem, if you have an ecosystem?

Don’t miss to subscribe to the newsletter for real-time updates ❤️

Love, Elin

Heads up:

I’m jumping on a livestream with no other than the Social Media Escape Guy Seth Werkheiser on Tuesday next week (7th April) at 10am EST/4pm CET.

• Click here to add the chat to your calendar