In late March 2025, I dusted off my newsletter list and drafted an email called The Offline Report - Vol. 1. That “Vol. 1” itself was ambitious because a “1” implies there will be a “2.” It was a huge deal for me at the time because for the 15 months prior I had been happily offline and nervous to commit to anything resembling public creative work. Sending the initial newsletter felt great though. Shortly after it went out, I started a list for what I might want to talk about in April’s edition.

Over the next few months, my interest in writing for an audience grew and I started sending Postcards from the Art House which felt a tiny bit like sharing photos on Instagram without the endless scrolling part. The work started to feel really good. I had spent 19 years writing and sharing online and it was fun to be back at it, in a much slower format.

In early September, I re-branded my newsletter as Scattering Seeds, transferred to the Beehiiv platform and started offering a paid subscription. Many of you were here for that! 185 of you signed up that first day and offered your support of this new venture. It’s now been six months of Scattering Seeds and I want to pull back the curtain a bit and share how it’s going. As long as I have been online I have seen value in talking about the “behind the scenes” of running a small business because a) I think it’s interesting content and b) the more true information that’s out there, the better.

So welcome to the first State of the Newsletter. I got the idea for this from Becca @ The Book Enthusiast. Her first SOTN was the reason I upgraded to paid on her list! While most of my content goes only to paid subscribers, this letter will be going to everyone, both free and paid. Thank you for being here.

Let’s begin with the top line: how is it going?! What IS the state of this newsletter?

It’s good! The newsletter is healthy. When I transferred my list from Flodesk (for much more on the initial set up and branding, here’s a deep dive) I had 17,834 subscribers. My goal for the end of 2025 was to convert 900 people (or just over 5%) of that list to paid. On January 1st, I was at 881. Close, but not quite. Today I am at 1,019 paid out of 18,680 total active subscribers (or 5.45%).

As for me, I am good. This is deeply satisfying, joyful work.

What about the state of paid newsletters in general?

I agree with most the conventional wisdom that we are probably over-saturated with content. This goes for paid newsletters as well as for TV, podcasts, streaming services & scrolling apps. The only place where we could probably use more content is local news.

And yet, I threw my hat into the crowded ring. Why?

My one lukewarm take is that all corners of the Internet are about to be truly overwhelmed by AI-generated content. As everything becomes AI, my optimistic take is that there will be more desire for authentic, human-generated content. People will seek out work they know was created by a real person. This environment, I hope, is where newsletters like mine will thrive.

I also know that a lot of high-value paid newsletters are based on “news of the day” events. I am not a journalist, historian or analyst so, thankfully, no one is coming to me for my takes. I can write instead about what I do have some expertise in: crafts & creative living. It also means that a newsletter I sent in September is still green in March because it’s detached from the season and news cycle. This is a value add for anyone just finding my work who wants to spend an afternoon in the archives.

What are you doing to make the newsletter work?

I am putting nearly all my content behind the paywall.

This was an easy choice because I have nothing else to promote. There is no book coming down the pipe. I don’t write for other outlets. I have no product line to market. I sometimes use affiliate links, but certainly don’t rely on that income. I have no interest in working with sponsors. The content is the product. (So it’s behind a paywall.)

Paid subscribers get an email on Tuesday mornings that falls into one of nine categories. These emails are generally longer (about 800-2000 words) with photos or graphics to accompany the text. Then about three times a month (on either a Friday or Sunday) I send out a “Postcards from the Art House” newsletter which is much shorter.

As a publisher, I love both types of content. It’s exciting to push myself with the longer posts and it’s nice to have a more formulaic post that feels fun but doesn’t take as much bandwidth to create. I am happy to see that the open rate on both categories of posts is the same (around 88%). Paid subscribers also get the monthly Offline Report which is a round-up of things I enjoyed each month. Everything sent to paid subscribers goes into my growing archive.

Free newsletter subscribers generally get two emails a month. The monthly Offline Report and then an email mid-month which I call “Postcards from [insert month here].” The postcard newsletter always includes six photos at the top, a brief text update and then it serves as a trailer for the content I have put behind the paywall over the past 4-5 weeks. I include a link to each of the posts and a bit of promo text for what the post is about. You can see a sample of what it looks like below.

Sometimes conversion on these trailer emails (like when I shared that the daily goal tracker and other printables were behind the paywall) is over 100. Sometimes (like in February) it’s 21. As an newsletter reader, I would prefer the once-a-month trailer to multiple emails a month that stop at a paywall so that is why I am currently marketing in this way. (I do not know if it’s the most effective method for conversion though.)

Let’s talk a bit more about the numbers:

As mentioned, my open rate for paid subscribers is consistently about 88%. My open rate for free subscribers is between 59-65%.

My highest converting posts (meaning they generated the most free to paid upgrades) were my 2025 Book Report and my Day in the Life post.

51% of my paid audience is subscribing on a monthly basis (paying $5/m). 8.4% of my paid audience joined as a bouquet member (the highest tier where I send a piece of original art in the mail). The rest are annual members (paying $50/year). Six months from now I will have much stronger data about the sustainability of this venture when I see how many annual subscribers stick around for year two.

As of this writing, I have grossed nearly $40k from paid subscriptions over six months. (Hosting fees and credit card processing fees come out of that figure.) As you can see from the graph, $15k of that income came in September 2025 when I launched and subscribers joined as annual members. If I continue on the current trajectory (making about $4k/m), Scattering Seeds will gross about $64k in its first year.

Obviously the numbers matter. I am a serial entrepreneur who loves a spreadsheet. I want to make money from this work. If I want to make more money from this work, I have to do three things:

But, to be clear: I am not trying to hit a certain dollar amount to deem this project a success. 95% of my creative energy is focused on number 1 in that list above.

Let’s talk a bit more about the craft:

When I shared my first paid newsletter on September 9, I described the newsletter writing I had done so far as “the opposite of the defensive crouch. It’s dance break work. It’s face relaxed, fingers flying, heart open, exclamation points galore writing. It is absolutely what I am supposed to be doing in this life season.”

Six months in and that’s even more true. I love this. I do not believe that you need an audience to see your creative work for it to feel valuable (2024 proved that for me) but I do understand now that my personality type likes to share my craft adventures. After 19 years of making content on the Internet, I had to go through burnout and take time off to realize: I want to be here. I want to sit at my computer and make friends with the blinking cursor. I want to come up with an interesting way to share my sweater collection. I want to learn how to take film photos indoors at night in January so I can share what my weekdays look like. I want to experiment with natural dye and catalog the results. I want to give my garden a report card and spread the word every time I finish an amazing book.

When I started my blog in 2005, I named it “enJOY it.” Two decades later, “joy” remains the driving force behind my work.