Turning on Paid Subscriptions
Give me money? <3
My post earlier today was about fundraising to save and expand the mathematics olympiad in Ireland. This post is about fundraising for an equally noble cause: My own selfishness.
That is to say, I have just turned on paid subscriptions for Sam Enright’s Newsletter. You can click to subscribe here. If you are already a free subscriber, please click here to upgrade. You can save by subscribing on an annual, instead of a monthly, basis.
I have no plans to put anything behind a paywall. You should subscribe if, and only if, you have extra disposable income, and find what I do to be valuable. Having an income stream associated with this blog will benefit all of my projects. For example, the maths olympiad is not something I could have foreseen that I would be involved in three months ago, but I had time to explore and help with it in my spare time, largely because I had some financial runway.
I also moved to central Dublin recently, which has saved me a ton of time in commuting and made me noticeably much more productive. It has also hurt my finances a lot. If only someone were to start a think tank to develop pragmatic policies to respond to Ireland’s crushing housing crisis…
The Fitzwilliam still has only the free subscription tier. If you have pledged to the Fitzwilliam or otherwise want to support it financially, I would recommend starting a paid subscription to this newsletter instead.
What are the benefits of subscribing? For one, insofar as I’m running events for which attendance is inherently limited, I will prioritise paying subscribers. For example, paying subscribers will get a free ticket to see my forthcoming public conversation with Seemay Chou about scientific philanthropy and publishing models. I think that willingness to pay is a reasonably good signal that people are actually valuing what I’m doing. If I owned one of those loathsome American lawn signs, it would say that in this house, we believe in the allocative efficiency of the price system.
I may come up with other subscriber benefits as time goes on, but many of the most common ones are things I try to do for everyone already (like respond to your emails in a timely fashion). I am looking into starting a system in which paying subscribers can leave comments on the drafts during the writing process, which I would also find helpful.
Over the years, a few people have used the ‘pledge’ feature to indicate that they would start paying, if I ever turned on paid subscriptions. For this, I am very grateful.
There is also a higher ‘Founding Member’ tier of subscriptions, which you can either pay for at the suggested level or type in a custom amount. Founding Members will get higher priority than regular paying subscribers for events. Depending on how many we get, the feedback option might only be available to the Founding Members.
You might reasonably wonder whether this is essentially a donation to support my incredibly niche link roundups. But note that I have written longer and more substantial essays for this blog. If I earn more income associated with it, I will make it more of a priority to finish and publish them sooner. The three closest to completion are:
My detailed review of the Daylight Computer, about how I’ve used it as part of my workflows, and to manage my attention span better.
An explainer of my spaced repetition system, and how I have used active recall to improve my retention (inspired by Andy Matuschak).
My reflections on what I’ve learned about running successful reading groups and why most of them fail.
Why am I turning on subscriptions here, instead of on The Fitzwilliam, which has a much larger audience? For one thing, The Fitzwilliam is supported by an Emergent Ventures grant, and asking for payment is antithetical to wanting the essays to be as widely read and influential as possible. Also, my personal Substack has always felt closer to what Kevin Kelly would call my 1,000 true fans.
(While I am on this topic, it does help with the dreaded algorithm when people are bothered to click through and hit ‘like’ on the posts.1 As it does when you share it in your groupchats, on social media, and so on.)
As always, I feel I am in infinite debt for the level of support I’ve received in my writing and other projects. My American friends tell me I need to stop berating myself about how unworthy I am of all the good things that have happened in my life. There is something about the guilt-laden Irish psyche that they will never understand. But in the spirit of the unreasonable effectiveness of just asking for things, this blog is now open to your support. Thank you all!
I am a hypocrite, and almost never remember to do this myself.
Love this!
LFG!