1:05:03
How do you manage writing daily and building a subscription content strategy?
working my ass off for 30 years, I'm an overnight success. Exactly. And but there is some I won't
call it strategy. There's some tactical discipline here. My understanding is you put out about a thousand words a day.
You have No, it's at least 1,200. I'm sorry. At least 1,200 words. That's that matters. It's a lot.
Yeah. A lot. I I put out 1500 words a week in my newsletter and come Thursday
morning at 3:00 a.m. I am hating myself every week. I think to write to put out something fact checked and credible is
really difficult. And the fact that you do that every day one just because I do
want to extract something a little bit more tactical from you trying to put out 1,200 words a day. Do you have any hacks
in terms of timing or how you go about it? And also my understanding is professor is that you are making an
exceptional living on Substack that you have extraordinary amount of subscribers who
see your content as so valuable they're willing to do what few will do and that is pull out their credit card.
1:06:03
specifically when do you write? How how do you how do you manage to put out 1,200 words? I I don't think that's easy
for anybody. I don't care how prolific you are and and any thoughts on building
um a content strategy, a subscription content strategy. Yeah. Okay. So, first of all, um it's
very difficult to write as much as I do. And one of the ways you get there is by habit. Like like even the nights when I
don't write, I actually write because it's like being an athlete. you you got to get in the habit. And if you look
back at my early stuff, it was not like it is now. Now, it is incredibly carefully fact checked. And that's what
takes the longest amount of time to find out. And I made a big mistake the other day. I said that um a grand jury had
indicted um uh Bolton, John Bolton, and it wasn't. It was the prosecutors. And I
had checked that, but I'd taken it from a legacy media post, and that was incorrect. Um but, you know, just
chasing that crap down. That's what takes all the time. When I write about history, often that's pretty quick
1:07:05
because I know it really well. But there too that it's the factchecking that really does me in. So at this point,
I've written more than 3 million words and that means I'm a pretty good writer. And that that helps a lot because in
your head you could hear it. You can hear it sing. So partly it's put your sorry put your ass in the chair and
work. Now there's a difference between that and writing a book. I'm supposed to be writing a book right now and I have all the habits of bookw writers like I
sit down to write the book and I'm like, you know, I haven't cleaned the refrigerator in a while, you know, and and that's a really different thing. So,
if you have several million people waiting to see you write, you do it because, you know, you can't go to bed
without doing it because you're not going to be able to sleep if you have, you know, millions of people waiting for you to write. So, partly it's habit and
I would say if you're trying to build a following, you must post every day. I don't like a lot of things. So, I I only
post once a day. Some people have a different um method. But if you think about the the people like um Liza
1:08:04
Donnelly who posts every day and Joyce White Vance who posts every day, you you expect it. You don't you don't
necessarily read it, but you like that it's there. So, one of the things for me, I write every day because I need to
understand. You can't miss a day because then you're like, who was that? What really happened there? Um, you can tell
I've already read about the bouquet issue in MS13, even though that happened yesterday and I wrote something
different yesterday. So, be there every day. Now, in terms of strategy and the financing, that's really interesting
because everything I do is free. I would do what I do for nothing. You do not
have to pay me for anything that I do. And yet, people choose to pay. And what I love about that is that that I have a
much lower, by the way, conversion of subscribers to paid subscribers. That
average is about 10%. Mine's significantly lower than that, which is fine. I don't care. As I say, I'm not here for the money. But what it has
enabled me to do is something that we don't really talk about a lot. and that's that I'm actually running these
1:09:06
history videos as well and building out that side of the teaching stuff which
again all free um you have to take money on YouTube which we've just started to do um because otherwise they put their
own ads on and you can change what you you have control over it if you say you'll take it. We've just started to do
that but we're building that out as well. So, I see it in a really funny way as being about sort of crowdsourcing our
country's politics and history. And again, it's never been a strategy. And not only do I not ask for money, I tell
people I will not ask for money because that's not the point. It's really missiondriven. I don't know how
replicable that is. But I do think that I was extremely lucky in
that at a time when everybody was saying, 'Look here. Look here. Look here. Look here. My take has always
been, hey, listen. I'm here if you're interested. But you don't have to look here. I don't dress well. I don't I
1:10:06
don't, you know, say glitzy stuff. I don't ever do clickbait. I'm just really
interested in the world. And what that has enabled people to do is build a community of people like us who are just
interested in the world. So again, I'm not sure it's a strategy, but um but
it's really for me just about understanding myself, and that's, you know, understanding the world, and that
seems to have an audience. Heather Cox Richardson is a professor of history at Boston College and an expert
on American political and economic history. She's the author of seven award-winning books, including her
latest, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America. Her widely read newsletter, Letters from an American,
synthesizes history and modern political issues. She joins us from the coast of Maine where she continues to write the
story of America in real time. Professor, love our conversations. Thanks so much for your time.
It's always a pleasure. Thanks for having me. [Music]
Peter Burgess COMMENTARY
Peter Burgess
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