DEAR READERS: I LOVE YOU

Thank You!

Esteemed, honorable, and cherished readers,

Look what you did:

The Claire Berlinski Happiness Index

More than a hundred of you came through for me. Overnight. I have a notification on my email that tells me when someone subscribed—I had to turn it off so I could sleep.

When I saw that graph this morning, I seriously thought at first that it must be a Substack glitch, because I’ve never seen anything remotely like that before. That just doesn’t happen—ever. On our very best days, we get five or six new subscriptions. Not “more than a hundred.”

And here’s the kicker: Many of you subscribed at full price.

Two of you bought many subscriptions. These generous donors told me to use them as I see fit. So I’ll give them away, over the coming months, as prizes for our contests, and to worthy people around the world who don’t have the means to subscribe at the regular price.¹

Many of you also sent the loveliest, kindest notes. I’ll reply personally to all of them, because they really meant a lot to me. But it will take me a bit of time, because first, I have to live up to this astounding vote of confidence and make sure this week’s CG is the best in its history.

As I’ve already said to some of you, the thing about writing for a living that’s different from almost any other job is that because you work alone, you never know for sure whether what you’re writing is actually interesting to anyone but yourself. The communication is all one-way. I often work on an essay for days—laboring over every sentence, writing and rewriting, trying to decide if what I’ve written is original or obvious, hilarious or utterly offensive—before I press “send.” Then: silence. Maybe a few “likes” or a complaint in the comments.

And that’s normal. That’s what it means to be a writer. I signed up for it and I’m not complaining about it. I write; readers read; that’s the way it works. But the reason writers are infamous for insanity, adultery, and alcoholism is that inherently, we just don’t know if we’re communicating all day with other members of our species or if we’re spending our days talking to ourselves.

I don’t know and can’t know if you’re fascinated by the stories I send you, or if you think, “Claire, this is obvious. I knew this already.” I can’t see if you laughed at the jokes. I have no way of knowing whether my arguments persuaded you. I just don’t see the social cues that tell people, when they speak to someone else, what their interlocutor is thinking.

Now, my parents gave me lots of love and affection when I was a little kid, so I don’t require incessant, exorbitant praise all day long. (No one who does would go into this line of work in the first place.) But I confess that receiving those lovely messages from you was one of the nicest things that’s ever happened to me.² If my mom were still alive, I’d have wondered if she secretly wrote them—except that I think creating multiple email accounts would have been beyond her, technically.³

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What did it mean?

I’m not only extremely gratified, but confused. What conclusions should I draw from this experiment? The obvious one is that the demand for Substack newsletters—or for mine, at least—is massively elastic. Perhaps the price of CG is just far too high for the average reader.

If I lowered it permanently, would people keep subscribing at this pace? Because if so, that’s obviously what I should do—I’d make so much more money. The cost of producing an additional unit of CG is exactly zero, so clearly I benefit even if the price is low, so long as enough people buy it.

But does under-valuing it send the wrong signal about its quality and prestige? And if I lower the price permanently, would people keep subscribing at this pace, or is there something about a sale—a very rare and exciting sale—that makes people want to splurge?

Or was it the sales pitch? Do I need to tell my readers, often, that I’m not independently wealthy (or wealthy at all), and that writing and editing CG is a lot of work—work for which I need to be paid if I’m to be able to keep doing it? I hate asking people for money, so I hope this isn’t the answer, but I suspect most of you will tell me, “Yes. And selling your work is part of the job. So you have to do it.”

But wouldn’t people who’ve already subscribed be annoyed if I kept asking for money over and over? Would they cancel because of that? (I just blocked Vivek Ramaswamy because he asked me for money one too many times. And I don’t block easily.)

I’m confused by all of this. I’ve never run a business before. I guess it shows. So may I ask your advice? Should I keep the price as it is and every so often run a sale? Should I raise the price and every so often run a sale? Should I lower the price? If so, by how much? Should I send out sales pitches more often? Would you mind?

If your answer is “some combination,” please specify the combination in the comments. And please suggest what you think the lower or higher price should be.

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By the way, there’s a school solution to this problem, which I just looked up. Here’s the formula for calculating the Price Elasticity of Demand:

Q1 and Q2 are the original and new quantities, and P1 and P2 are the original and new prices. Substituting my results, Q1=2, Q2=100; P1=8, P2=2. (Roughly.) And that means PED equals −1.6, which is highly elastic.

To maximize revenue, you use the formula for optimal price change:

Using my PED, we get 0.385. (This indicates the proportional change in price that will maximize revenue.)

If we use the formula 8−(8×0.385) to apply this proportional reduction to the original price of US$8, my new revenue-maximizing price would be US$4.92. If we apply it to the US$2 price point, we subtract 0.385 of US$2, or US$0.77, to yield a new price of US$1.23.

So, based on this model, my optimal price for maximizing revenue would be somewhere between US$1.23 and US$4.92, assuming other factors remain constant.

That said, this assumes the demand curve will stay the same over this price range and the calculated elasticity will hold true for these price changes. Big assumptions. No idea if they’re right. In reality, demand curves are often nonlinear (and I suspect mine is probably highly nonlinear). Also, elasticity can vary at different price levels. So the US$1.23—US$4.92 range is, alas, merely a theoretical optima.

(Do please check my math, because I’ve never done this before. I’d hate to screw up my career owing to an arithmetic mistake.)

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Before we return to the news …

I have great stories in the hopper for you this week. (And now I’m so motivated to write them that I can’t wait to begin.) But first, a few more admin questions:

A. Cross-posts: My brother says our cross-posts are driving him nuts and he only wants to read emails from me. But you (some of you) say you really appreciate them. Here are the options:

1. My brother is right. No cross-posts at all.

2. I’ll cross-post whatever interests me, but I won’t e-mail them; I’ll just put them on the website. Then, once a week, I’ll send out a summary of what I’ve cross-posted. (The downside to this is that some of these items are really topical, so unless you check the site daily, you might miss them.)

3. Keep doing what you’re doing, we love the cross-posts.

B. Site organization: Naturally, I completely underestimated how long it would take me to create a guide to our archives and properly catalogue all of our best essays so that you can readily see what you might want to read. Is this something you’d like me to prioritize? For new subscribers, it might be really helpful—there’s so much good stuff in the archives, but you’ll never find it because it’s not well organized at all. So I’d like to do that, but it would mean I’d have to take maybe two or three days off of writing and editing.

My instinct is to do it—I’ve started, and I don’t want to leave it half done, and I also really want all that good stuff to be easy to find—but I don’t want to just disappear right after so many of you subscribed. What’s your preference?

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Podcasts and YouTubers

One of our readers had a suggestion for me. He thought I could make up for the loss of Twitter as a promotional tool by going on lots podcasts and YouTube sites to promote CG. It’s a terrific idea. We’ve picked up a lot of new readers every time I’ve done that.

Do any of you want to have me on your podcast or your YouTube channel? If we’ve written about it at CG, I’ll talk about it. (I’ll talk about anything, actually. Just give me the first sentence, and off I go.)

Do you know any podcasters or YouTubers who might want to have me on their shows? Put us in touch: If it works out, you get three leaderboard points.

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The China Trade Debate

For those of you who missed it, you can read it here. But there were many points I didn’t get a chance to make because no one made the arguments I intended to rebut.

So I’m going to write an essay about this. Stay tuned.

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Finally …

Thank you again.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

And welcome, new readers. I love you with all my heart and soul. Please, never leave.

1. That means if you missed the sale and you’re kicking yourself, send me a note telling me where you’re from and why you’d like the subscription. All hope is not lost.

2. That and those pink roses, Monique.

3. It was the kind of thing she would have done. There was a time in the fourth grade when I came home from school bereft, on Valentine’s Day, because no one had sent me a Valentine. (Now that I think about it, why were fourth-graders celebrating Valentine’s Day in school? That’s ridiculous—in so many ways.) But it turned out, as I discovered the next day, that I was mistaken: They’d just put my valentines in the wrong cubby hole! I got hundreds of them. Far more than anyone else! In retrospect, I think Mom had something to do with that. Or maybe you, Pop.

Mom, wherever you are—you didn’t figure out some way to send me all those lovely messages about CG from the Great Chamber Music Festival in the Sky, did you? If it wasn’t you, I really wish I could show them to you.