Why I’ll Never Do Substack

(This post aged well...)

Last year I drafted a post on my website and it was called - because you must have a clickbait title to get anyone interested in anything these days - Why I’ll Never Do Substack. 

Thank God I didn’t ever publish the post - it would have aged terribly! To have so brashly stated my unwavering position on something and then, so soon afterwards, gone completely against my own word… Devastating. The humiliation would have been almost unbearable, especially for someone like me who can’t stand being wrong. I pretend to be one of those people who can graciously accept their own mistakes - who can “own” their failures - but quite honestly, even if I look suitably chastised and apologetic about things on the outside, inwardly I’m seething. 

And it’s not because I don’t like being caught out, or because I behave rashly and then regret it and resent the fact that it has been witnessed by another human; it’s almost the opposite. It’s because I rarely behave rashly, it’s because I give ridiculous amounts of overthought to everything I say and do before I say and do it; I hate being wrong because it just seems so unfair for it to happen when I put so much effort into trying to be right. When I do get something wrong - and it’s not often - I just want to look to the heavens, throw my hands up in despair and cry ‘Jesus! How much more due diligence did I need to do?’ 

Anyway, here I am writing my first piece on Substack and it’s a bloody good job nobody knows that I drafted a website post a year ago about why I would never write on Substack. Because I would never live it down. Just as I would never recover from the deep, deep shame if my post about the time I was nearly penetrated by a bath tap got out into public (it’s here, read approximately 75,000 times). Just as I would never survive the embarrassment if I published a post about the lack of feeling in my nipples and called it, hilariously, Topple, Tipple, Grab my Nipple. 

I know what you’re all wondering, if my clickbait title has worked its magic on you. You’re thinking, what an earth did this woman have against Substack? Who would declare war against something so vehemently, with such forceful conviction? You’re thinking, what, in the name of all that is holy, did Substack ever do to her?

Well I’ll tell you. Seeing as though we’re all friends here, or about to be. Because my reasons reveal quite a lot about me, both as a person and as an internet entity - a professional content creator, someone who essentially makes their living from being online. 

I have been knocking about on the World Wide Web for a fair while. In fact, when I started my blog and Youtube channel - A Model Recommends - way back in 2010, there were very few people making a living from what is now known as “content creation”. Instagram didn’t exist, TikTok wasn’t a thing - if we were to place social media on a sort of evolutionary timeline then that first wave of us, the bloggers and YouTubers, were maybe the vague equivalent of early man. Homo Erectus. 

None of us really knew what we were doing or where any of it was going. And so there we were, bashing our way around the  internet with our thick skulls and short arms, grunting excitedly and smashing boulders together to see what might come of it all. I was lighting my Youtube makeup videos with a plasterer’s lamp from Toolstation (highly recommend: cheap as chips and so powerful you have to make sure your eyebrows don’t set alight), teaching myself to build webpages late at night (man make fire!) and using the equivalent of a large, flat piece of flint to carve out a career in a social media industry that didn’t even exist yet. 

It was a strange and exciting time but the thing that made me happiest, the constant in my life, was my blog. My pride and joy. Onto this blog I wrote unbiased beauty reviews and passed on all of the (sometimes dubious, now quite laughably outdated) tips and tricks I’d picked up as a jobbing fashion model in the noughties. And I loved it. 

Still love it. Fourteen years later, over 3,600 posts and well over 50 million pageviews (my Google analytics disconnected years ago so I’m at a loss to the exact figure) and I still get a tiny buzz of a thrill when I open up the Wordpress admin dashboard and click to create a new post. My blog was my place of sanctuary in an industry that is fickle and ever-changing - it was a refuge, removed from the noise and the nonsense. I knew that if someone was there, reading, then they were fully engaged and listening to me in a way that I could never assume somebody was from an eight second video on Instagram. Writing posts allowed me the time and space to convince someone to get to know me, to know my voice - it gave me the time to convince them to stay. And it was calm and it was quiet and it was measured, there was no sense of the popularity contest that tends to rule the “short attention span” platforms - I didn’t have to think of something novel, something shouty, something that would STOP THEM SCROLLING! 

And so this is why I was hesitant to ever write away from my blog. Painstakingly created and built upon for fourteen years, with a solid, loyal readership, why would I ever need anything else? Why would I write on Substack when I had my own platform? A platform that’s hugely expensive to run, requires frequent maintenance and breaks completely once every four months usually due to my ineptitude with drag and drop website building software…oh.  

If you think I’ve just answered my own question then think again: I’m not actually leaving my blog behind and certainly not because it’s so labour intensive to run. But I am planning on entering a new era. Because what I’ve realised is that, as a relatively early adopter in content creation, I have been absolutely paralysed by fear at the idea of change. Possibly because I’ve already been through and seen so many iterations of the same career and it can be hard to keep up and feel as though you’re communicating through the relevant channels in a relevant way. But also because change requires such an enormous amount of energy and time and effort and there’s the temptation to sit back and see whether things will come around full circle. 

Maybe, I have been thinking, for the past couple of years, blogs will become cool again. But here’s the thing. Blogs have already become cool again. Or, at least, the content from them has. The informal posts and the comforting, say-it-as-you-think-it articles, they seem to be back. It’s just that the days of people searching Google for individual websites to click on and read have gone.

So where are people reading the lovely, engaging, stay-with-me-a-while blog posts of yore? Dedicated writers’ platforms. Like Substack. 

It’s undeniable. If you produce content, in this modern world, then you need a platform to post it on. If you have an amazing video of your cat playing the drums, where are you going to put it? On your own website, in the hope that someone happens upon it after searching the web for “cat playing drums”? Or would you place it on Instagram, where billions of people are already seated and waiting, ready to be entertained? 

It’s starting to feel the same when it comes to getting blog posts seen. I am lucky (and grateful!) that I still have a very large readership on my blog, but the truth of it is that the readership is very unlikely to grow or change; for who is going to stumble across my website by chance? Who in their right mind is Googling “what would a merman’s penis look like?” (Answer available here.) 

Having a standalone personal blog feels like owning a shop that’s half a mile away from the newly-opened shopping centre. You still get all of your regulars calling in, because they know that you stock the best produce and that you’re exceptional value for money (genuine customer review, five stars). But what if you moved with the times and opened a little unit in the new shopping centre? Then there’d be a whole new world of people to come ding-donging through your little shop door. You’d have footfall. 

The shopping centre gives people convenience (good God, where the hell am I going with this analogy?): they can park their car, they won’t get rained on and they can browse lots of different shops at once without having to walk miles and miles between them. 

Social media platforms, in effect, are like shopping centres. Content malls. They deliver everything you might want to see, right into your lap. Can my blog, charmingly situated down a no-through road just behind the old cinema, ever compete with that? No it cannot. Neither should it have to. 

To absolutely batter this analogy to death, I’ll finish by saying this: I’m not closing the shop that’s behind the cinema. (I mean my blog. Stay with me. I do not own a shop behind the old cinema.) Regulars will still be able to stop in and browse their old favourites. Videos will still be published there. It’s just that the brand spanking new A Model Recommends franchise, with more - and even better - produce, will be open in the mall. That’s Substack.

(Try to keep up. Even my head is hurting at this point.) 

You’ll see I’ve called this newsletter A Model Recommends. It’s a nod to the past and offers a small, pleasing bit of continuity. It does feel slightly disingenuous to keep calling myself a model when I retired my portfolio and hung up my high heels over twelve years ago, but I can’t very well call it An Ex-Model Recommends, can I? It sounds strange and also slightly sinister. Sticking ex in front of a word never seems to give it very positive connotations, does it? Ex-boyfriend. Ex-convict. 

At any rate my husband, who is a master of spin and can twist almost anything to suit his requirements, argues that I technically still am a model. 

‘You take pictures of yourself all day long and then get paid for it, don’t you?’ 

I mean a massive oversimplification of my work and one that isn’t entirely accurate, but ok. I’ll take it. Even though, strictly speaking, a model usually has someone else take the pictures. Whatever, the title is staying: A Model Recommends. I’ve always loved it. Even though my recommendations were almost exclusively beauty at the beginning, it left the door open to review and rate almost anything, from coatigans to Christmas trees. Here on Substack it’ll be a heady mix of things I’ve tested and loved scattered with life updates, fashion finds and whatever else bubbles forth from the quagmire of my churning, restless mind. 

I was supposed to start this post by sharing my personal story. Who I am, why I’m making this Substack - why now? There’s a guide on how to do it all and I’ve seemingly ignored every single piece of advice. 

Do you need to know that I’m Ruth Crilly? That I’m 43, a writer and content creator, ex-model with two smallish kids? That I have no work-life balance and no energy to sort one out, that I lunge from panicked state to panicked state with short periods of listlessness in between? That I am married to a celebrity portrait photographer who claims his worst ever client was me? 

I’m to finish, apparently, by telling people what to expect. I cannot do this, it’s a physical impossibility. I don’t even know what to expect. All I can tell you is that my posts will be weekly, of varying lengths and that they will never, ever be boring.