Creating a writing platform - Concept development

There's been quite a long gap since my last post so I wouldn't blame you for forgetting about this - I pretty much did.

I started this series to outline my journey in creating my own literary publication, The Abandoned Dreams Collective. With each post in this series I aim to shed some light on an aspect of this journey, the reasons behind the decisions I made and the impact of these. To recap, in the previous two articles in this series, I examined why my previous blogging endeavours failed and then analysed what the market landscape looks like for creative nonfiction writing today. In this piece I'm going to describe how I used the learnings from my previous failures as well as the insights that I gained about the market while I was pitching essays to external publications to build my next space on the internet.

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Learning 1: Take factors such as fit, functionality, media trends (creation and consumption)into consideration while choosing your platform

One of the mistakes I’d made while starting a food blog in 2015 was entering the space at a time when creators and audiences were moving from blogging sites, where long form writing was the norm, to social media platforms, which focused more on images and video. I knew I wanted to be in a place where writing was prioritized so I started by looking at platforms which did just that.

The two names that kept coming up in my search were Medium and Substack. I’d already tried out Medium in parallel with Wordpress for my food blog and I decided that it was too similar to a traditional blog which I’d tried out previously unsuccessfully. The fast growing, buzzy Substack caught my attention. A number of top journalists were leaving jobs at traditional media houses to start their own substack. The advantages were numerous:

• Captive audience: As opposed to a regular blog wherein you’d require readers to open the app/blog site, with an email newsletter I would have the ability to reach readers in their email inbox directly, reducing the barrier to entry for each piece to be read. Additionally, while the primary channel of distribution is email, every article also exists in the form of a webpage, making it easier for new readers to read previous articles.
• Focus on the written word: One of the greatest strengths of Substack in my opinion is the fact that it was a platform for readers and thrived on unique ideas. I spent enough time looking at newsletters to find writing across categories - fiction, creative non fiction, topical non fiction, recipes and many more. Some of my finds include a real time retelling of the novel Dracula, an online magazine focusing on underrepresented aspects of food culture, and a newsletter created from google alert results about heiresses.
• Tools to grow: As a growth stage startup with a mission to shake up the creator economy, Substack has been constantly innovating its product and developing tools to improve the experience of the creators using the platform. In addition to providing reader statistics and tools to customize individual newsletters, Substack offers recommendation tools, incubation programs and courses to grow publications which I would be able to access to reach a wider audience
• Ability to monetize: Substack offers the ability to set up a paid tier with customizable plans to allow me to monetize my platform if I ever wished to.

Learning 2: Have a clearly defined purpose

With my initial blogs, there had been a palpable lack of a unifying theme for it and as a result there was no clear goal driving people towards me and no real incentive to keep coming back.

This time around I had a purpose.

I'd spent a lot of time during the periods of isolation during the pandemic writing stories of what could have been and the more I shared my writing with my circle, the more I realized that this was a theme that unified people. I had the name already.

The Abandoned Dreams Collective

I'd come up with it over a year previously and saved it to my notes app without knowing what it could be used for and it would be perfect for this project. (sidenote: I do this a lot and maybe someday I'll build businesses for atleast half of the concepts I come up with during my through spirals).

My hypothesis was that this name was abstract enough to serve as a creative writing prompt that drive an outpouring of ideas across various themes while still rooting them together with a universal set of emotions.

Learning 3: Leverage the power of community for building an audience

One of the challenges I'd faced in my early blogging attempts had been growing my audience beyond the few friends and family I had who read. This time around, I looked to two main sources of inspiration to solve this:

One of the things I'd inadvertently gotten right during my first foray into blogging was having a platform where each writer would benefit from the readers that the other members brought to the table. I remembered receiving likes on my pieces from the other authors' friends and the sense of validation that brought.

Separately, my experience submitting my own writing to indie zines, small scale publications serving a particular niche had driven home the significance of this medium for budding writers to try their writing out on an audience outside of their immediate circle, get feedback and connect with readers from across the world.

My hypothesis based on these experiences was that any budding writer that would have their writing published on a platform would share this achievement widely within their circle, driving more traffic into the platform and organic growth in terms of an audience of avid readers.

Learning 4: Set up a structure

In my previous attempts at blogging I didn't have any structure for posting in terms of timelines or themes or any decision making mechanism. This time around I set parameters and a structure to ensure accountability towards posting. This included the following activities:

• Development of a description for the platform and a writing prompt for contributors that would also serve as a checklist for me to assess submissions
• Setting a goal of sending out one newsletter each week for a year
• Creating templates for communication with contributors
• Developing a flow for each post for the newsletter
• Creating a template for social media posting
• Setting a deadline for contributions

Having these structural elements in place before I started helped frame the project for myself and let me make decisions on the go without getting bogged down by these parts later.

All of these learnings set me up for creating a publication that I describe as part newsletter, part indie zine. Below I've summarized the key features of this publication that I developed based on the above:

• Name: The Abandoned Dreams Collective
• Platform: Email newsletters hosted on Substack
• Format: Each newsletter to comprise a non fiction piece (essay/poem/story) written by a different contributor accompanied by an image of their choosing and an introductory piece of writing by me.
• Frequency: Weekly
• Description: Home to stories of what almost was, what could have been and what was left behind
• Target audience: Writers of creative non-fiction, network of readers around each contributor

I hope this post was able to draw a line from my past experiences to the development of this concept. In the upcoming posts I will describe the process and principles I used to develop the brand, the experience of running the newsletter, challenges I encountered and ways I iterated and improvised when things did not go as planned. If you're interested in writing for the newsletter, check out the prompt for Season 3 here.

Meanwhile, in the comments please let me know what more you'd like to know about this process.