After months of deliberation and research, I have decided to move Back Row off of Substack. Back Row is now hosted on beehiiv with a brand new URL, backrow.net.
First, some practical information about what this means for you, then, I’ll get into why I migrated.
As a free subscriber, you don’t need to do anything. Your email address transfers over to beehiiv and you’ll receive these emails as usual. If you are a free subscriber who did not want to pay because you were wary of giving a cut to Substack, which takes 10 percent of writers’ subscription earnings, I hope you’ll consider upgrading today. This publication remains an independent, shoestring operation, run full-time by me, Amy Odell, and paid subscriptions enable me to keep going.
I’m still learning about beehiiv’s features and tools and I’ll send another email in the coming months about how it’s going here, but I’m already so impressed with their team and responsiveness. Bill, my beehiiv migration angel, spent a good chunk of his weekend smoothing out the kinks. Bill: thank you for your hard work and I owe you a fashion week party.
Why am I leaving Substack? When I joined in 2021, it was really a newsletter platform. Writers had a direct relationship with their audience, which could be moved to other hosts, and the whole thing was designed around sending emails. Today, as many of you have surely noticed, a lot has changed. Substack functions increasingly like a social media app, like Instagram or X/Twitter. A big problem with those platforms is that users do not have ownership over their followings. I can’t move my Instagram or X followers anywhere, which ties my success to the whims of the platforms.
Substack also takes a ten percent cut of writer earnings. For me — thanks to the generous support of paid subscribers — that was really starting to add up. On beehiiv, I pay a lower monthly fee for using the platform, which includes writer support. Thanks to ad revenue and the savings I’m making by moving off Substack, I’ve been able to hire some freelance help, which goes a long, long way toward helping me not burn out. This in turn goes a long way toward me being able to do the best job for Back Row subscribers. (Between publishing Gwyneth: The Biography last year and running this newsletter without breaks, burnout has been a real concern.)
This newsletter is my livelihood, and this was not a decision I made lightly. In all honesty, I have been agonizing over it for months. But I did what I always do when making a big decision, and reported it out. I asked around and found people who had migrated. After talking to them, I decided on beehiiv because it allows a seamless transfer of subscriptions; it allows me to own my email list and have a direct relationship with readers; and it offers writer support and strategy help. Also, the beehiiv platform is all about newsletters — it includes tools like audience segmenting that I can leverage for growth and monetization. But most importantly, I believe beehiiv’s features will enable me to offer an even better product for subscribers like you.
If you are a brand who wants to learn about partnerships and what we can do together on beehiiv, you can reach out to me at amy (at) amyodell (dot) com.
If you are a fellow newsletter writer who may be thinking about moving off of Substack or another platform, or are wondering where to start, you can reach out to me at amy (at) amyodell (dot) com. I know how hard these decisions are and am happy to share what I’ve learned as soon as I make sure the migration is all smoothed out and subscribers who need help are taken care of.
It is a testament to beehiiv’s team and technology that migrating has only very slightly altered my publishing schedule. This week’s new free podcast episode is live in Apple, Spotify, and YouTube. I’ll send the Q&A version tomorrow, and the usual paid story this Thursday. And I’ll resume my usual publishing schedule next week.
Thank you again for your support and for being part of the Back Row community.
