💌Hanlon’s Reader #5: December Newsletter

😎 "Kaneda! What do you see?!" 🌞

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^📅 Monthly Update: December 2023

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Hello and a very warm welcome to all my new readers! 👋

This past 2 weeks has been wild! I’ve sort of been hunkered down since August focused on work and writing. I came to Substack mainly to post fiction, and besides wandering around looking for other fiction publications to read and learn from, I hadn’t participated too much.

Well, since August 2023 when I started this project, I have posted a short story that I’d started many years ago and only recently finished, plus an entire second short of similar length, and created new covers with the help of 🐑DALL-E🐑 and Canva:

📗Strange Harvest

📗Larval Haze

My book The Star Pirate’s Folly is being posted piece by piece, two chapters per week. Since that’s already finished, I’ve taken my foot off the gas in terms of fiction writing and thought I would get more of a lay of the land on Substack and plan for how I’m going to move forward. I had planned to launch Paid Subscriptions soon, and I wanted to get some ideas from others who are successful.

💀 RIP to my Substack plan 💀

To see what other people were doing, I dove in and started expanding my comfort zone. I have over 120 Reads now across a range of topics, and found a ton of new content. Some people Subscribed back after I added them, which was neat.

At the end of November, I had 23 wonderful Free Subscribers. 💚

Curious, I checked out Notes. It’s not really my thing, I never used Twitter so I was a little off-put. But eventually, I came across a random Note that piqued my interest because it started with a sort of heartfelt, earnest plea from a friend to a friend over something potentially spicy. Substack still feels like a small community, and it had sort of a “gentle call-out” tone… but it was about Nazis.

That’s when the wormhole opened beneath my feet. I did a lot of research, pulled links together to support my thoughts, and wrote about my experience as a small fiction writer here in “Dang It, I Didn’t See the Nazis at First”:

📙Dang It, I Didn't See the Nazis at First

And then something insane happened when several people outside my cozy little fiction-writer circle read, liked, and shared my essay:

• Jonathan M. Katz of The Racket, the guy who wrote the original “Substack Has A Nazi Problem” article in the Atlantic which pretty much spearheaded this whole endeavor

• Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket, one of the main organizers of the dissent letter

From there it really took off! At least compared to my previous traffic.

🍾🎉 107 new Free Subs in 11 days! 🎉🍾
💚 Thank you all for your support 🧡

💚📗💚 🦾🤖 🧡📙🧡

So far this is the most successful thing I’ve written on Substack. Mostly, I think it’s due to timing—I wrote the whole thing almost immediately after reading The Elysian’s “Substack shouldn’t decide what we read” co-signed letter which was published on Dec 13. I published my essay on Dec 15. I also went around on Notes posting all over the place inviting people to read it, even the free speech absolutists.

Since then, this essay has continued to generate new Free Subs daily. I wrote a followup essay on Dec 22nd as well after

Hamish McKenzie

finally responded to all the criticism over platforming Nazis via Notes and told everyone the Nazis were very much welcome to stay. He even went so far as to defend, rehabilitate, and basically plug the new book of the guy he faced the most direct outcry about amplifying, extremist right-wing racist Richard Hanania. WTF, man?

I tried to tag Hamish on his willfully ignorant response pretending that platforming, monetizing, and amplifying hate speech is the only option besides blanket censorship.

Many others also spoke out in the comments to this Note—it’s a small thing, but if you feel like spending 5 minutes to thumb your nose at Hamish you should scroll down through and ♥Like posts in support of our message. Add your thoughts too, and consider 🔃Restacking powerful messages to further boost them.

It’s like getting ratio’d on Twitter—if we can show popular support, particularly support outweighing those in favor of platforming Nazis, it can help give us a foundation in Substack’s algorithm. And maybe it will even piss off leadership. Plus a lot of the time after I give a ♥Like, someone will come check out my page.

I have yet to receive any sort of response myself from anyone at Substack. I’ve tried emailing tos@substackinc.com after reporting many anti-Semitic hate speech comments, including the Nazi poster who came to my comments, and gotten no support ticket, confirmation, or reply.

I’m a small publication asking directly for help but they don’t care. Due to Substack's refusal to address open hate speech on their platform, I am unable to justify pursuing Paid Subscriptions here. Instead, Readers can donate to me via Ko-Fi (one-time or monthly) to support my work directly. 💚

Here’s how I plan to approach payments, since it’s going to be a little less elegant having to split things between Substack and Ko-Fi instead of just turning on Paid:

📗Short Stories: fully free, or a portion free and full length on Ko-Fi & Amazon

📗Books: a portion free on Substack and full length on Ko-Fi & Amazon

📙Non-Fiction: posts will be a mixture of free and paid

If you enjoy my work and can afford to throw a tip in the jar for me, that’s what Ko-Fi / buy me a coffee is about. I appreciate it so much. For the time being, whatever income I make from this is going to be invested in marketing my work. Every dollar dropped in the jar is going toward building my career as an author.

You can also sign up for a monthly donation, if you’re really invested in my work. That would, for me, be a true sign of my value as an author—I am an entirely independent creator, and if you see $1 / $3 / $5 per month in value from my content that’s all I’m asking for.

During the early months of the new year, I’ll be working on compiling and transferring my previously published work here on Substack over to my Ko-Fi donation page at https://ko-fi.com/jhanlon where you can buy my work in full.

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🔃 In Progress: 

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I’m working on another 📙Non-Fi piece related to this whole extremism fiasco, keep an eye out for that. I’ve been pretty active in Notes still trying to spread my essay around, regardless of whether people agree or not. So many great people have dropped in to let me know their thoughts and I very much appreciate the positive support.

However, there’s been a decided… theme among the free speech absolutists. You can read in the comments if you’ve got the stomach. More details to come.

The Star Pirate’s Folly

In 2024 instead of posting 2 chapters every Thursday, I’m going to space it out a little and do one Tuesday, one Thursday. And keep an eye out for sporadic short story Parts from my conclusion to the Strange Harvest series, Broken Dome…

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❗❗ Upcoming:

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Part 3 concluding Strange Harvest short series

Part 2 of the Surface Trilogy novels

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🎁 Bonus Content:

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Thank you all for reading, especially my new supporters! Just in the time I’ve written this post today, I have gained 6 more Free Subs from my 📙Non-Fiction work. 🎉

PS - has anyone noticed the Easter eggs I’ve been leaving in my Newsletter’s subtitles? Tell me if you know the quotes without looking them up! 😎

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Voting isn’t everything, but it’s the largest impact for the smallest investment. US voters, make sure you’re registered & bookmark ⭐Ballotpedia to research candidates.

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🦅 Check vote.org to see if you’re registered

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🗳 Use Ballotpedia to research candidates and check your sample ballot

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Be well,

James Hanlon

12/27/23

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