Not long after the 2020 election, I read an article in The New York Times about a historian, Heather Cox Richardson, who was the “breakout star” of a growing newsletter platform called Substack. As an academic considering a career shift to full-time writing, I found my attention arrested by this sentence: “By my conservative estimate based on public and private Substack figures, the $5 monthly subscriptions to participate in her comments section are on track to bring in more than a million dollars a year.”
I read and reread that sentence multiple times, trying to make sense of a figure that seemed like a mistake. Here was an academic earning big bucks by offering her expert take on American politics in a daily newsletter for hundreds of thousands of followers. I made immediate plans to launch a Substack that would pay for the college tuitions of my five children and for a house in the south of France.
It has been three years since I made that still-unfilled resolution, and the landscape of newsletters supporting the careers of academics (along with writers, artists, and thinkers of every stripe) has expanded dramatically. The success of Substack has spawned multiple competitors. And they all seem to have benefited from the upheaval at the social-media platform X, which used to be such a lively space for academics to connect, share ideas, and debate. As many of us scrambled to find the right portal to replace “academic Twitter,” newsletters have become a popular option.
I see the clear potential that newsletters offer an academic to expand the reach of your ideas. But I also see the difficulties, much like the ones that have plagued me for many years as a regular columnist for this publication — the pressure to find new ideas each week or month, and the time needed to put words on the page when the obligations of your day job (all that pesky teaching, research, and service) are calling your name.
Once again, I’m contemplating whether to start a regular newsletter. My goal: to keep my writing and thinking muscles limber by taking a monthly peek, through an interdisciplinary lens, at the problems plaguing higher education. So I thought I would gather advice from academics who already have their own newsletters, and share it here.
I had plenty of options for brains to pick. I subscribe to multiple newsletters, including ones that focus on writing (by John Warner and Helen Sword); one on Stoic philosophy; and several on teaching and learning (such as Grading for Growth and Once More, With Feeling). But instead of trying to cover the sprawling landscape of academic newsletters, in what follows I dive into a single field as a way to highlight the reasons you might start — or not — your own newsletter, whether you choose Substack, Medium, or more traditional options such as an email subscription service or a blog.
My Ph.D. is in English. I have been writing about teaching and learning for a long time, but I have no formal training in cognitive psychology. I do my best to keep up with new developments but, over time, I have learned to trust several cognitive psychologists who seem to have a gift for translating the essentials of their field to interested teachers and writers like me. I reached out to three whose newsletters have become my guides: Michelle D. Miller, Pooja K. Agarwal, and the Learning Scientists.
Their responses confirmed some of my suspicions about the challenges of staying on top of a newsletter, yet the benefits they cited were enough to revive my own interest in the genre.
What Should Your Newsletter Offer, and How?
Based on my own reading of a wide range of academic newsletters, I can see that their objectives vary widely. Some authors of successful books seem to use their newsletter mostly for self-promotion, with updates about their publications, speaking engagements, or media appearances. Other writers use their newsletters as a tool to work through new ideas, just as some of us used to do on Twitter/X threads. And some academics are more outward focused in their newsletters: They write about new developments in their field, share resources, and elevate the works and ideas of others.
It’s that last aim that drives the three writers I interviewed. “I find and report on new research that touches on some combination of learning science, neuroscience, and technology that I think can help inform teaching practice,” said Miller, a professor of psychological sciences at Northern Arizona University, of her Substack newsletter. “I occasionally pass along resources, review full-length books, and offer my take on issues in higher education.” Each post offers a deep dive into a particular scholarly article that she dissects to reveal its implications for college teaching.
Instead of Substack, the Learning Scientists house their material on their own blog, and subscribers get email updates. Althea Need Kaminske, one of its contributors and the senior director of student academic achievement and success at Indiana University’s medical school, explained: “Our blog and podcast are completely free and provide resources about the science of learning — explanations of recent and relevant research, guest posts from experts and practitioners, and discussions about the application of research to classroom and real-world practice. Email subscribers get notifications and previews of our posts.”
Agarwal, an associate professor at the Berklee College of Music, runs her newsletter via her website, Retrieval Practice. She announces new content through MailChimp. She also offers subscribers free information and resources, including a series of downloadable PDF guides that present easily digestible research summaries and application tips for the classroom. Subscribers can track her ongoing contributions to the field (she co-authored a popular guide, Powerful Teaching, and offers workshops and consulting to institutions and school districts), and attend her (occasional) virtual office hours, where she builds community among readers.
I am drawn to those three newsletters because they curate and present resources on cognitive psychology for the nonexpert — exactly what I am looking for. But people come to newsletters for all sorts of reasons. Readers might prefer to follow the personal journeys of their favorite authors, or grapple with ideas and questions in their areas of expertise. In his Substack newsletter, The Biblioracle Recommends, for example, the writer John Warner does an exemplary job of posing a question every week that’s puzzling him. I often find myself wanting to discuss his posts or even argue with them, which — as far as I’m concerned — repays my investment of time in reading his newsletter.
For those readers mulling this growing genre of scholarly exchange, you might start by clarifying what your newsletter would offer: Would it provide information, resources, reviews? Would it seek to provoke debate or create common ground? Consider designing your newsletter as you would a college course:
- Do you want to present basic information from your discipline to nonexperts, like an introductory course?
- Or are you offering a senior seminar, in which you raise difficult questions and hope for dialogue with peers?
- Imagine describing your newsletter with the language of learning objectives: How will your readers be changed by the experience of opening up your emails and engaging with your ideas?
What Can You Expect in Return?
Money is not always the object or the outcome of newsletters. But if you decide to create one, at some point in the setup process you will be confronted with a question: Do you want to get paid? While earning income from your writing seems like a great idea — houses in France don’t pay for themselves — this question isn’t so simple to answer.
Most Substack writers begin with a free version of their newsletter. That’s what the platform recommends, suggesting that you build up a following and then convert to a paid model. Once you start charging your subscribers, they pay a recurrent fee (which can be as low as $5 a month), for access to everything you post. You can also use a hybrid model, which means you have some free content but offer additional material (podcasts, videos, extra posts) to your paid subscribers. If you choose a paid model, Substack will take a 10 percent cut of your earnings (writers pay no fees for creating a free newsletter). Other platforms offer opportunities to earn revenue from subscriptions, too.
None of the cognitive scientists I interviewed charge fees for their newsletters and so are making little to no money from their subscribers. The Learning Scientists invite their readers to become voluntary patrons. Because I have learned so much from them, I’ve donated — but accessing their posts and podcasts doesn’t require a paid subscription.
Given the time and energy that a newsletter demands, I was curious to learn what sustained their interest in the format if it wasn’t subscription revenue. Sometimes, all three creators said, their newsletters lead to speaking and consulting opportunities, and thus, the potential for financial rewards.
But other rewards are intellectual, perhaps less tangible.
For Agarwal, her newsletter has created a scholarly community that didn’t exist before. While she has built up a large subscriber base of teachers, the work of creating the newsletter has also introduced her to other researches in her field. “I have found new energy in an unanticipated form, the fostering of a community of 40 diverse and underrecognized women, LGBTQ, and Bipoc scientists who conduct research on retrieval practice. On a near-daily basis, we support and encourage each other in our collective teaching, research, and science communication efforts.”
Miller, too, said she valued the intellectual stimulation that her newsletter prompts. “It helps me read [scholarship] with purpose,” she said, “and motivates me to always be looking for the newest and most useful research out there.” Likewise, Kaminske said she and her collaborators “gain a lot of practice writing, and a reason to stay on top of relevant literature.”
All three have written books aimed at college faculty members, which raises a question about which type of work — the books or the newsletters — actually leads to potential speaking and consulting offers for an academic. Would a newsletter, on its own, create such opportunities? Or did it, instead, just raise awareness about the published books, which establish the level of credibility that leads to speaking, writing, and consulting work?
That chicken-or-egg question can’t be definitively answered. But I drew a more important conclusion from my interviewees: Regularly producing a newsletter had benefits that spoke to their vocations as writers, thinkers, and teachers. Their newsletters demanded that they stay current in order to share the latest research with their subscribers. The process of analyzing the work of others shaped and inspired their thinking. Writing for a broader audience tested and sharpened their writing skills.
Such benefits seem like they would appeal to almost any academic, especially those of us who relish the prospect of educating others. A newsletter, it turns out, is akin to a discussion seminar, a research lecture, or a creative-writing workshop. Good newsletters put effective teaching on the page and help people learn and think.
I’m energized to take another crack at a potential newsletter of my own. But good intentions, either in the classroom or on the page, don’t necessarily translate into good practice. In next month’s column, I will detail what I learned both from the process of attempting to begin a newsletter and some recommendations from experts on enticing and retaining readers in a crowded market.
