Some people are (book) authors professionally, some people are authors recreationally, some people are authors professionally exclusively, and some people are authors professionally but their primary monetization engine is elsewhere. If one believes that writing books generally isn't a sustainable occupation, I think that belief is likely under-nuanced.
(Ditto e-books or similar information products, by the way.)
Turning to the question of paid newsletters: I'm socially constrained from pointing at examples, both because in some cases I have non-public information and in some cases I would be perceived as having non-public information, and because there are heady professional considerations, but: there are definitely, definitely some people who sell information professionally who break the top end of the pay scale for people who are generally described as writers in more traditional media jobs.
Another way to put it is "I'm pretty sure I could sell 1,000 subscriptions at $20 a month within 6 weeks if I wanted that to be my job", which is not competitive with other things to do with my time but probably clears most reasonable bars for stable professional options. I think I'm very far from having the largest collection of people who'd pay to read my writing, the best writing, the most engaged userbase, the most lucrative decision points that users routinely apply my advice against, etc.
A big open question for the business model is whether one thinks there are hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of people who could hit that bar (and, I suppose, whether one could tempt them from other options). Hundreds feels clearly wrong to me as an upper bound.
Thanks for a more nuanced take on the model. The question in my mind is: How much time/energy gets eaten up in marketing a newsletter (or other paid subscription information product)?
I suspect that lack of interest or skill in marketing is much more the limiting factor that sets an upper bound on how many people can pull it off to derive a realistic income this way.
I'd imagine it is different for authors in different phases of the business, starting at very substantial while one does not have a lot of a personal platform and decreasing markedly when one does.
Someone, and I'm forgetting who it was, suggested that paid subscriptions is the natural monetization strategy for people who are a) public intellectuals and b) do a lot of their work on Twitter, and in that sense you're doing marketing with a sort of cycles which might not read as "intentionally doing marketing work." (I think as the community distributes the technology of running these businesses, like the technology of running e-book businesses has been distributed, this will get easier, too. One thing all newsletter authors should be doing ~constantly is hitting up podcasts in adjacent spaces, because it gets juices flowing for writing and because every time you talk to 10,000 people you'll sell N new subscriptions.)
(Ditto e-books or similar information products, by the way.)
Turning to the question of paid newsletters: I'm socially constrained from pointing at examples, both because in some cases I have non-public information and in some cases I would be perceived as having non-public information, and because there are heady professional considerations, but: there are definitely, definitely some people who sell information professionally who break the top end of the pay scale for people who are generally described as writers in more traditional media jobs.
Another way to put it is "I'm pretty sure I could sell 1,000 subscriptions at $20 a month within 6 weeks if I wanted that to be my job", which is not competitive with other things to do with my time but probably clears most reasonable bars for stable professional options. I think I'm very far from having the largest collection of people who'd pay to read my writing, the best writing, the most engaged userbase, the most lucrative decision points that users routinely apply my advice against, etc.
A big open question for the business model is whether one thinks there are hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of people who could hit that bar (and, I suppose, whether one could tempt them from other options). Hundreds feels clearly wrong to me as an upper bound.