The state of The Half Marathoner
And where we go from here
Every once in a while, you feel like shaking things up, don’t you? Even if it’s something as simple as taking a different route on your way to work in the morning, to see some different scenery, or having dinner at a restaurant you’ve never tried before?
I’ve been writing The Half Marathoner for just over ten years now — a number I have a hard time believing! — and lately I’ve begun to feel the itch to do something different with it, to try something new.
It’s like living in a house or an apartment. After you’ve lived there for a number of years, you might feel the urge to freshen it up with a renovation, give the walls a new coat of paint, or spruce up the yard with new landscaping.
But before I get to that, I want to share with you how things have been going with the newsletter as a business, as an enterprise. (My friend
, who publishes the wonderful newsletter The Food Section, gave me the inspiration for this with her illustrative — and illuminating — annual report.)After all, if you’re a paid subscriber to The Half Marathoner, in a very real way you’re a partner in helping me produce it each week — your support makes it possible, in more ways than you know.
Which means, I owe you an accounting of the progress we’ve made, and where we’re likely headed. So here goes…
For our first few years of publishing, everything came up roses. Starting in mid-2018 through the next year and even into the pandemic year of 2020, the line on the chart of our growth went up and to the right, as shown in this chart of paid subscriber growth:
Which, of course, was thrilling! “It’s really working,” I thought to myself, as both the number of free and paid subscribers climbed ever upward. Throughout 2019 and 2020, the number of paid subscribers climbed from a few dozen to just over 8201, and I couldn’t have been more pleased.
As we started to come out of the pandemic, however, I changed the focus of the newsletter to broaden the subject matter I wrote about — to cover topics that were sometimes about running, sometimes adjacent to running, and sometimes far afield. (Sometimes really far afield.)
On a personal level, I’ve loved making this change. It’s been hugely creatively fulfilling, and I know a number of you have loved the essays that have come out of it. But — there’s always a “but,” isn’t there? — from time to time, we need to measure how we’d like things to be going against how they’re actually going.
And the results are clear: from a business standpoint, this simply hasn’t worked, as this graph going back a year shows:
To be honest, I think I understand why. My newsletter’s title, history and most of the content I publish creates expectations in readers about what they’re going to receive.
And when it doesn’t meet those expectations, I imagine it can be kinda confusing — a little like tuning in to Saturday Night Live, and instead of comedy sketches, the performers are doing one-act plays. The kind of thing that would make me go 🤔 too.
Knowing all this, the question now is: how to go forward from here? The answer, I believe, is to focus again on who’s most important in this — and that’s you, the reader.
Starting tomorrow, I’m going to try an experiment through the month of May in which I’ll send out a daily email with a race I think you’ll love running plus a thought or an inspiration that I hope gets you lacing up your shoes and out the door, that puts a bounce in your step and gives you a feeling of liftoff, even if just for a moment.
Paid subscribers will get the complete experience — essays and interviews on Sundays, plus access to everything else, and a week-by-week plan with miles as we train together this summer and fall.
Don’t worry, I’ll still be writing plenty about running and life — those are the heart of the newsletter, and they’re not going anywhere. I just want to make sure I’m delivering what subscribers sign up for, and I’ll look for other ways to scratch creative itches that fall outside that.
In the meantime, I hope you’ve had a great week and have gotten some great runs in — I’ll see you in the morning ☀️
Your friend,
— Terrell
That number today is 584 — so, quite a drop!
To everyone who's reading, thanks for letting me think out loud with this tonight. This whole thing can be really hard to figure out, especially when you write pieces that connect, and get great feedback, and still the numbers go down. It's a little hard on the psyche!
Don't think it's lost on me that this is a privileged problem to have, to be sure. It's just sometimes doing this is a real mystery to figure out. I really do appreciate all the comments.
I've enjoyed the running off-shoots and am happy to read what you're interested in sharing. Running is a part of my life and so it's interesting to read how it fits in to your life and your interests, what you're balancing it with, and how it has shifted over time.