The End of The End of Safety?

Returning my focus to Liberal Currents

I launched this Substack on May 13th of 2021, with a few free posts already in place to give people a flavor of what I intended to do here. Originally the idea was simply an experiment, almost on a lark; I wanted to see if I could write once a week the way professional columnists are forced to do to make their living. It then occurred to me that this could be a means to raise some money for Liberal Currents, so I put the things I wrote behind a paywall and made it accessible to either paid subscribers or (manually comped) Patreon patrons.

After two years, I am ready to move on. It has given us a decent boost in revenue to spend on Liberal Currents’ writers, but at the expense of soaking up a lot of the time I would have otherwise devoted to Liberal Currents itself. I think writing weekly for two years is long enough to establish (for myself) that I am capable of it. For both this bit of self-satisfaction and for the amount of revenue generated, it has reached the point where the juice is not worth the squeeze.

I am very grateful, and humbled, that anyone would actually pay to read what I wrote, especially at $5/month or $55/year for what was often just one short post a week. I have refunded all of you but Substack’s mechanism for doing this is not very informative about how that played out for each of you individually. If you have any problems at all with your refunds please reach out to me at adam@liberalcurrents.com.

There was a webcomic artist who said, back in the era before Patreon and Kickstarter, that making a living in webcomics was like being a plumber who came in and fixed a sink for free, then attempted to make money by selling a sandwich separately. I am again grateful for the boost to our ability to pay our writers at Liberal Currents for their excellent work, but it was a bit odd at times to reward support for that enterprise with my personal writing. Ending the paid component of this Substack, I will now focus more on winning over support for Liberal Currents directly.

I’ll still write here occasionally for things that aren’t appropriate for Liberal Currents but it will be much more infrequent, as it was on my personal blog before I moved here. And it will be free.

Thank you all again for your interest in my writing. I hope some of you will consider joining the Liberal Currents community yourselves, as patrons or as writers.