🔴 Rejecting the 'creator' label to build a sustainable career as a critical writer

Today’s guest is Alicia Kennedy, a food and culture writer who last worked full-time for a company in 2015. She rejects the creator label outright; I admire the reputation and living she’s built as a writer on her own terms. Her writing is rigorous and critical, using food and culture as lenses to prod at larger, systemic social trends.

In this issue:

• ✍️ How to be a writer-as-writer, not a writer-as-creator

• ↪️ Turning a Twitter following into a newsletter into a new type of publication

• 📘 The hardcover-book paid subscription model: $30/year or $10/month

• ‼️ Exclusive! Alicia shares plans for a new publication/education project

— Francis Zierer, Editor

P.S. We have a podcast! Listen to our full interview with Alicia or watch it on YouTube.

In our time of multi-hyphenates, it is a luxury to focus. For Alicia Kennedy, in the creator economy, it is a matter of principle to be a writer, not a creator.

Alicia left her last full-time job a decade ago. She joined New York Magazine as a copy editor in late 2009, at a starting annual salary of $45k. When she left in 2015, she’d only received one raise — her salary was $53k.

In the decade since, working as a freelancer, independent newsletter writer, and author, Alicia has found a way to make a good living on her own terms. I asked her if her material reality is better today than it was as a full-time employee:

Alicia writes about food and culture. She’s not a recipe writer, she’s not a restaurant reviewer — she can do those things but is a social critic who writes about systems more than anything else. In preparation for our podcast, I spent the bulk of my time poring over her collection of writing about writing, digital media, and content work; some of it is about food, but only as a way of illustrating larger social trends.

Her rejection of creator as a label is, to be clear, a rejection of the precarious, overburdened labor conditions of the creator economy. She described a moment in 2022, around the time of algorithm changes at Instagram to prioritize videos over photo content, when she felt particularly alienated and wrote her “On Selling a Lifestyle” essay.

As she writes in the essay, “I am loath to think of myself as an entrepreneur. Yet here I am.” Her product, though, is criticism — which is about friction, about hard-won ideas presented in a written form meant to generate friction with the reader, meant to provoke development of thought and drive conversation. So much of being a creator is about frictionlessness — fast-moving feeds and subscriber conversion funnels. To be a writer like Alicia is a writer is to produce positive friction.

How to choose being a writer over being a creator

Alicia’s newsletter has over 40,000 total subscribers, 25,000 of whom open every issue within 24 hours of receipt, and around 2,200 of whom pay for it.

A paid subscription costs $10/month or $30/year (more on how she thinks about pricing and benefits down in the Steal This Tactic section). Alicia didn’t share a precise number, but she said that if she “were charging everyone $50 a month,” this “would be a six-figure newsletter,” so we can assume her subscription revenue totals between $66,000 and $99,999 per year.

Where did this audience come from? Alicia was active on Twitter, where she had around 30,000 followers before leaving it behind in 2022 (I could find no traces of her account). She was a consistent presence on the 2010s version of the platform, where she built up an engaged audience. She’s also been on Substack for many years, which has generated thousands of free subscribers for her, but she dislikes the “growth padding” that happens on the app and says if she “could opt out of recommendations,” she would; the majority of her 25,000 hyper-engaged readers did not come from the recommendation system.

All this to say: can a writer-as-writer build a similarly sized and engaged audience today, now that X is a twisted, link-throttling echo chamber compared to the Twitter of yesteryear? I would say yes.

It’s possible to build content capital on any algorithm-distribution platform and convert that capital into an email list. It’s simply about the right ideas being shared on the right platform at the right time, driving demand for regular long-form writing. The Twitter Alicia built an audience on incentivized critical conversation and fostered journalists leading those conversations; Bluesky is becoming the same, and X still rewards certain ideas.

Is the independent writer life sustainable?

Alicia does not miss being a copy editor for New York Magazine; she enjoys her life as an independent writer. But she worries at demands on independent writers and creators — on people whose income relies on their ability to consistently present themselves. 

This is not a new idea — creator burnout is a well-covered concept.

One way Alicia is fighting against this in her practice: for Q1, while working on edits for her second book, she took a break from “looking at stats.” She has a reliable, engaged audience; spending too much time digging into the specifics of their engagement each week would be a net negative, particularly while undergoing the more in-depth work of book edits.

Positive friction

Another way Alicia is acting to remove the burden of her work from her self — loath as she is to be an entrepreneur, she’s now setting weekly revenue goals for herself.

In March, she plans to paywall the majority of her content. Some 25,000 people open every newsletter she sends within 24 hours of receipt, but only around 9% of that highly-engaged audience segment pay for her content; she’s betting stronger paywalling will commit more paid subscribers.

She’s also tinkering with plans for a new literary nonprofit, which she spoke about publicly for the first time on our podcast. It will be focused on “academic food studies and food policy,” and include a publication, classes, and workshops.

She’s inspired by art magazines like Frieze and Spike — publications that try to "wrestle with things in a real way.” It will combine “literary food writing, restaurant stuff, humor,” and all the expected lifestyle forms, but will be “set in the real world and not in the world of luxury goods.”

Alicia created content capital on Twitter and Instagram, consolidated it into an owned email list in her newsletter, and now seeks to use that foundation to build a business larger than herself, a business that incentivizes critical engagement — a site for positive friction. A principled approach can take you far — even better, it can take you exactly where you want to go.

Read and subscribe to From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy.

Editor’s note: We always appreciate thoughtful notes and discussion. Reply to this email or leave a comment on the web post!

🎙️ This was an excellent conversation. It was impossible to fit every topic we touched on in this newsletter — here’s some of what we touched on in the podcast:

• 📚️ A crisis of analytical media literacy and a boom in media production literacy

• ❓️ Do we have public intellectuals anymore? Is Alicia one?

• 🪴 A deeper discussion of Alicia’s plans for a new publication

Listen on your preferred podcast platform or watch on YouTube.

Pricing annual subscriptions like books

Alicia is paywalling the majority of her content this March to make her work more sustainable; to convert more of her 25,000 most-engaged subscribers into a paid subscription. One reason I think this will work: a hard-to-pass-up pricing model.

• Monthly subscription: $10 (x12)

• Annual subscription: $30 (x1)

That’s 75% savings! You’re losing money if you go monthly! (Unless you just want to dip in the archive for a month, as I did when researching for our podcast).

She once trialed a $50 yearly but “felt bad about it.” I’m reminded of folks who charge $5/month and position it as just the cost of one beer or coffee per month. With the hardcover book framing it’s additive rather than replacing. Alicia doesn’t explicitly say this on her subscription page, but you could: You’re just buying one more book this year!

A salon model for community

I’m impressed by the way Alicia does community here — the salons paid subscribers can participate in. Every Monday at 3pm EST, there’s a live chat, a hangout, “a space to build camaraderie.” It’s a casual chat, like a neighborhood bar open one afternoon per week.

What works well here?

• Reciprocity: “This Monday, someone made a whole meal because they were inspired by the conversation in the salon. Like, so that inspired what they made for dinner. Last week, someone picked up a book in their local library because someone else had mentioned it in the salon.”

• Digital community in the classic sense: “Depending on where you live and what your life is like on a day-to-day basis, you might be someone who's really into literature and food and thinking about all these issues, but you might not have people around you in your day-to-day life to talk about those things with.”

• Informal, scheduled structure: “It might not be every week you come on and chat but, it might be a week where you feel like you need someone to talk to.”

Listen to the latest episode of Tasteland, the weekly podcast about media, tech, and business hosted by Spotlight editor Francis Zierer and Dirt Media CEO Daisy Alioto.

This week, we’re joined by internet culture writer and historian Katherine Dee (aka Default Friend) to chat e-girl etymology, anti-woke entertainment, treating AI chatbots like you treat people, dolphin accelerationism, internet history is oral history, and more.