> the secret benefits you offer certain writers to prevent them from leaving
Can you elaborate? I know some people were paid big $ up front to make the move, but it didn't seem very secret -- the ones I'm thinking of were pretty open about the deals they'd taken, so presumably Substack wasn't pressuring them to keep quiet. And as far as I know they were paid up front for the first year, before moving to an ordinary revenue split and being free to leave.
Yeah I'm not talking about the advances, although way more writers than people realise have been given advances. Basically Substack has been forced to offer pretty hefty benefits to (try) to stop writers from leaving, there's a ton of "special programs" with various kinds of disguised cash that they offer to writers they want to keep (To my knowledge they've never given discounts on the 10% fee, but they give in-kind benefits to skirt around that). Hamish knows exactly what I'm talking about, if he wants to chime in!
Can you elaborate? I know some people were paid big $ up front to make the move, but it didn't seem very secret -- the ones I'm thinking of were pretty open about the deals they'd taken, so presumably Substack wasn't pressuring them to keep quiet. And as far as I know they were paid up front for the first year, before moving to an ordinary revenue split and being free to leave.